Tristan Hughes

I'm sure there are many different meanings to it, but the central purpose when people are relaying this story is to explain how this idea of original sin entered the world.

Well, let's go through those three one by one then, and then we'll explore many of the other topics and parts of the story, and we can look at parallels with other societies and cultures in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age.

But let's start with wisdom then, because this is a central part of the story, this whole idea of wisdom and the gaining of wisdom.

And how does it align with Mesopotamian literature at the time, and in particular the thing called wisdom literature?

And so is that one of the overarching themes?

And it's the humans gaining wisdom, but being forced out of the Garden of Eden, which makes this creation story so unique in that wisdom plays such a big part of it and is one of the main purposes that people now interpret being one of the main messages of this whole story.

And they are both named, in both examples, they are named as the Euphrates and the Tigris.

And in Adam and Eve, it's the giving of the fruit to the man.

So interesting.

But with the Adam and Eve story, it's just the narrative is changed in its own unique way, but the overarching themes are still there.

Well, with that knowledge, I always used to think that Adam and Eve, before the

their fruit, eating the fruit, that they were therefore initially immortal, like the primordial humans, that they were immortal.

But it sounds like the gaining of immortality is linked to another fruit and with the context of these other stories.

Is it actually the case that now people believe that in the story of Adam and Eve, how people would have interpreted it, that Adam and Eve were never immortal?

That God could have given them permission to eat from the tree of immortality if he wished, but that was only possible if they never ate from the tree of knowledge.

About wisdom, about mortality, and about the nature of divinity.

Yeah.

And the nature of being human.

And the nature of being human and how they contrast with each other.

Exactly.