Tristan Hughes

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.

Is there anything else we should then mention on divinity itself in the story of Adam and Eve and how God is portrayed?

How do you think this would then align with figures like Moses, you know, the big prophets who also then seem to be a bit more special in the fact that they are communicating with God and always have a divine element to them?

I'm always going to ask a big question to summarize all those themes that we've talked about there, Dylan.

So how would you argue someone who heard the Adam and Eve story in the first millennium BC, how do you think, and I appreciate it would differ depending on whether they were a priest or a king and so on, or a scholar, a scribe and so on.

How do you think they would have primarily interpreted the narrative of the story of Adam and Eve if they're not going away thinking straight away, oh, this is about original sin entering the world?

Well, let's explore a few other key parts of the story and the amazing links they do have, because I've got a few more that I really want to ask about.

The first one is this whole setting of a garden.

So, Dylan, the Garden of Eden, how clear an influence is there from the gardens of ancient Mesopotamia, of the Assyrian rulers, of the Babylonians?

I might think of the hanging gardens of Babylon and so on.

Very much so.

I think of those we'll release from Nineveh and so on of Ashurbanipal.

The underground river as well.