I never read it that way. The genesis myth was simply a retelling of earlier myths. The serpent was the old gods, and setting that serpent as the villain was a conversion tactic. The old god is evil and the cause of your suffering. Worship our new god.
Reading this as allegory for the emergence of sentience (how I read it for years) the serpent becomes negligible. By this reading there was pain and death before the fall, but as a base animal man could not know or understand. When man ate of the fruit he became aware of good and evil. He became able to perceive suffering and injustice. And by this he became fully human.
However if you read genesis literally it becomes very odd indeed. God is possessive, vindictive, and childlike. God loses some of his divinity and becomes very human. Remember that it is not the sin of eating the fruit of knowledge that gets them thrown out, but that they would eat of the tree of everlasting life and become gods themselves. God is reduced to an immortal human, a gardener who creates a lavish garden to enjoy then when finding something that displeases him simply throws out the weeds.
Reading this as allegory for the emergence of sentience (how I read it for years) the serpent becomes negligible. By this reading there was pain and death before the fall, but as a base animal man could not know or understand. When man ate of the fruit he became aware of good and evil. He became able to perceive suffering and injustice. And by this he became fully human.
However if you read genesis literally it becomes very odd indeed. God is possessive, vindictive, and childlike. God loses some of his divinity and becomes very human. Remember that it is not the sin of eating the fruit of knowledge that gets them thrown out, but that they would eat of the tree of everlasting life and become gods themselves. God is reduced to an immortal human, a gardener who creates a lavish garden to enjoy then when finding something that displeases him simply throws out the weeds.
