There is one other symbolic parallel. While we are innocent, as babies are, we are also immortal. Children are unaware of mortality, even after they reach the age where they KNOW right and wrong. It is only after learning something about life, after learning that we should try to do what is right yet will often fail, only after failing itself, that we realize that death actually is both a possibility and a reality.
I think this too is part of the reason that both tales were included. In the younger tale, the creation myth in Genesis 1, there is no mention of death. It is, as I said, a picture of a transcendent GOD, one separate from that which is created. It is a view of the whole, of creation, of the universe, of life. But it is impersonal.
The earlier tales, those that pick up in Genesis 2 and continue, are far more personal. They look at life relationships, things that are missing from the Genesis 1 story. In Genesis 2 & 3 we see the beginnings of awareness, and of limitations that were not found in the other creation myth. While the story in Genesis 1 is perhaps more sophisticated, it is also apart from life as life is lived.
The story is not just of rejection and punishment though. After the passages described as a curse, there is an interesting verse.
21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
This from the God who had just said:
16 To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
In that line we see concern, forgiveness, again a personal relationship.
"21
The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them."
GOD makes garments and GOD clothes them.
GOD does that not for His needs, but to satisfy their needs.
Why then the concern about immortality and how is that related to the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
I believe that it is directly related to knowing right and wrong. Mankind now knew right from wrong, was charged to try to do right, but still also has freewill. Mankind can now choose to do what is wrong. It is this capability, the capability to do wrong that must be limited. How within the constraints of the story can it be limited.
The story tellers had several possibilities, GOD could, one assumes, simply take away free will and make man always do right. GOD could make man simply an automaton. Another possibility for the story teller was to limit the scope, to say that we all will someday die, and the worst we can do is limited.
Aslan is not a
Tame Lion
™ Version 4.2
