There are no answers in Genesis

[Belacqua]

Stop bullshitting and start explaining to the uneducated plebs, what the figurative meaning of Genesis is.

I can give one. It's an allagory for why we want to do good but so often fall into bad behavior. It doesn't really explain why we're morally flawed, but it does hammer home the fact that we're morally flawed, and that it's part of human nature. And women's fault.

I think the interpretation you give here makes perfect sense. I suspect this is how a great many people read it. 

I'd also like to suggest that there is no single correct reading. To ask what "the figurative meaning" [emphasis added] is, as if it there were only one and it can be correctly decoded by those in the know, is too simple. 

When we talk about this maybe we have a tendency to say that a story is either literal or allegorical. But allegory tends to be a narrative in which there is a one-to-one correspondence between a symbol -- a character, say, or a building -- and a particular correct figurative meaning. The obvious example is The Pilgrim's Progress, in which a main character named Christian goes on a journey and meets people named Ignorance and Sloth, and Hopeful and Faithful. Bunyan clearly didn't want any ambiguity in our interpretations, so he just makes it as obvious as he can. 

There are some clear allegories in the Bible, including some of the Psalms and some parables in the New Testament. But I don't think that the various stories in Genesis are quite this way. 

A symbol doesn't necessarily have to have only one decodable meaning. In fact the value of a symbol may come from its richness, in which it serves many purposes in many different contexts. In this way it is more like a painting - a kind of mental image which can be put into service whenever it proves useful. A non-Bible example would be Saturn eating his children. If Hesiod had any particular coded meaning in mind when he wrote about that, it isn't obvious to us now. And particularly since Goya's painting made it famous, the story may be put to any number of uses. It provides a kind of mental tool or useful concretization that can help us organize and express very different situations. (When Goya painted it, it may have been a reference to the Napoleonic wars, and the waste of life that came with those. But we needn't read it that way for us to make our own use of it.) 

So I think that the Book of Genesis is best thought of as a kind of catalog of powerful images. The cherub with the flaming sword at the gate of Eden, for example. Or Jacob wrestling with the angel, and the strange way that story plays out. Or Nimrod the Hunter, or the Tower of Babel, or Cain and Able and what happened to them. If we think about the use that, for example, Brueghel made of the Babel story, I think it shows that culture has been enriched by this story. Or there is the passage in Nerval's strange book Voyage to the Orient, where he writes a kind of extended bizarre biblical fan fiction, in which the descendent of Cain, Tubal-Cain, is the founder of the first cities and a master of technology. This too becomes a not-quite allegory of the double-sided sword of technology, and how it is a blessing and a curse. 

It's just completely misguided to expect a mythological book of powerful, lasting images to give scientific answers. And the idea that only scientific information is necessary for culture is far too narrow. 

Likewise, it is too simple to expect any part of Genesis to be decoded into a single, correct message.