They say God made man from the dirt – not stardust, not glory – but mud. Wet, dumb earth, and shaped him like a child making a mud pie with googly eyes.
Before breath, before sin, before ribs and regret – there was light. Not just metaphorical light, or even like a big bang of light splitting atoms and screaming creation into the silence. But light as distinction. – The first thing you can notice, the first difference, the moment something separates from everything else.
Genesis opens like a lullaby told to a child, but maybe that’s the point – if you were trying to explain the birth of the universe to people who thought thunder was a god stubbing his toe on furniture, you wouldn’t drop a physics lecture, you’d use a story, with generalised transitions structured like IKEA instructions. Carbon and cells become dirt, a shared genetic code becomes a rib, and the cognitive revolution becomes an apple.
Light before life, order before chaos, boxes drawn before contents added.
Naked humans unashamed – that detail in particular is doing a lot of work. Animals are naked too, but they don’t know it. Animals don’t suffer existential dread, they don’t question their purpose or wage wars for ideologies. They eat, sleep, and die, blissfully stupid, nude, no shame, no name.
They simply are. That’s the state Eden describes – life without reflective awareness.
But then, one bite later, and suddenly, we saw ourselves naked in the eyes of eternity. Nothing visibly changes, no transformation, no glowing eyes, no mutation. What changes is perception, “their eyes were opened.” They notice themselves, they recognise their bodies, temporary, imperfect, mortal. They feel exposed, they anticipate judgement, they hide, and we’ve been paying in anxiety ever since.
Self-awareness – as I’m sure you know, is the ability to turn attention inward, to see yourself as an object in the world, to evaluate and compare. Cognitive science still treats this as a major threshold, not just intelligence, but meta-cognition, – knowing that you know.
And once you have that, everything else follows. So, the apple (or whatever the apple represents) didn’t curse us – it revealed us. The glittery horror of introspection. The ability to ask, “What is my purpose?” and not like the answer.
Even the serpent is more interesting than later tradition allows. He doesn’t threaten, he doesn’t coerce, he said we’d be like gods, and in a way, he wasn’t wrong. We became creators, destroyers, inventors, tyrants. We invented names for things, language, stories, nuclear fission, art, and grief.
Funny how the serpent doesn’t get much airtime after that, – the one-hit wonder just vanishes, slithers stage left, no monologue, no punishment montage. Just a quick flash of jazz hands and a Biblical mic drop.
The rest – centuries of sermons, paintings, legends were added later. Culture coloured him in beyond the lines like a child with a crayon. But if you scratch off the misplaced wax, he looks less like Satan and more like Prometheus. – A thief of fire, a giver of perspective.
And if we say, for argument’s sake, that the story is true in essence, then who was the villain? The one who told us to stay ignorant, or the one who helped us see?
Because any story that has a “bad guy”, is always half the story.
But to keep our feet on the ground, and not below it, perhaps he’s not a devil at all, but a narrative device – the voice that introduces perspective, curiosity, and the dangerous gift of insight.
The Bible isn’t one book, it’s the literary equivalent of a group project where no one spoke to each other but still insisted on writing in the same notebook. It’s a patchwork, a Frankenstein of scribbled philosophies and incompatible moral systems all pretending they agree on wearing the same trousers without knowing what trousers are. And if you strip Genesis of doctrine and read it purely as literature, it is kind of tragic. Not in the story itself, but in the fact that the mind behind it is anonymous. Someone – or a small group – had real literary and philosophical talent, and history swallowed their name, leaving only the doctrine that both protected and obscured it behind.
:: REFERENCES ::
- The Bible – King James
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