Preview and Intro

I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked so I hid. That I relate to. I’ve never been someone that wants to go into men’s change rooms; it’s just because I’m insecure. Like, I don’t want to be seen naked, like in an intimate situation—cool, you know—where somebody is pretending like they’re into me.

Welcome to Joel Reads Bible. We are reading through the whole entire Bible, and every episode is a chapter and I make little remarks throughout. So far, we’ve had quite an interesting story. It feels a bit like a—I don’t want to say fairy tale. So far nothing is all that revelatory, but we’ll see what happens. I’ve got high hopes.

Genesis 3

Verse 1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.

I haven’t heard about the serpent, and I don’t know if the serpent was one of the options to be Adam’s helper, because I feel like you’d want a crafty helper. I mean, it depends what you’re doing. If you’re doing crafts, for sure. Serpents, of course, typically have no arms, but they can do a lot with their tail. I mean, some of them are just good musicians; they have a rattle.

He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Wait a second, this is interesting. Serpents talk now. Not the ones that you and I know—I’ve never heard a serpent talk—but this serpent allegedly talked. This is also a long time ago, in which things were maybe more evolved. Serpents may have had voice boxes. Christians have one issue with evolution: that there can’t be new information through mutation. Things can’t become more complicated; they become less complicated. And that may have happened here. You know, we may have had a more complicated serpent and then over time, and mutation, and evolution, serpents evolved to not be able to speak.

The serpent also is aware of what God said to Adam and now he is asking Eve about it. You want to assume that Adam let the woman know, and then the woman probably was just chatting with the serpent, like, “Yeah, we were told we can’t eat from this one tree.” And he’s like, “Did God really say you weren’t allowed to eat from any tree in the garden?”

Verse 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,

Verse 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

So she obviously—this is a game of telephone because she didn’t get it right. You can touch it. I mean, God never said don’t touch it, unless there’s like part of the quote that’s missing from earlier. “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” It is quoting itself in the next chapter and in that quote it adds you can’t even touch it. Maybe Adam was like, “Don’t even touch it. Okay? Don’t eat from it, but don’t even touch it, woman.” I don’t know why she’s my helper; she’s daft.

Verse 4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.

Verse 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

It is assumed at this point that Eve doesn’t know good and evil. She doesn’t get the concepts. That’s a perfect world, not knowing. Like, ignorance is bliss. You don’t know good, but you’re kind of like neutral. That’s great. Or do we really want extremes? I mean, they’re still naked; that must be nice. And they don’t feel shame; they probably enjoy looking at each other and probably the fruit does taste pretty good. But morally speaking, I guess that’s what they mean by good and evil. It’s morals. They don’t have a concept of morality. Great.

And this is also interesting that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened. So I guess right when you eat it your eyes will be opened. But it says here that when you eat of it you will surely die. So right when you eat it you will surely die? I mean, it’s similar wording so I think we can assume that right when you eat of it, your eyes open and you understand good and evil.

Verse 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom,

So interesting that we look at the knowledge of good and evil as wisdom. Those concepts are moral questions, but knowing what is constructive and what is destructive, or what will cause suffering and what won’t cause suffering—those are actually sometimes more difficult questions than you might imagine.

Sometimes I’m going to go on little rants and I apologize, by the way. If you like my little jokes or you like my little rants, leave a note in the comments to say, “Hey, we like that,” or, “Why don’t you just read the thing and shut up?”

When the woman saw the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Who was with her. Sometimes you hear that, you know, it was Eve—it was the woman—she took it and then she brought it to him. She didn’t bring it to him; he was standing right there. You know, the serpent’s like, “Hey, you know, by the way, Eve, let me talk to the woman. Let me talk to the woman, she’s the dumb one.” (And by the way, I’m not saying all women are dumb; the character of the serpent in this little skit I’m doing thinks she’s the dumb one.) He’s like, “Let me talk to her; stay out of this.” And Adam’s like, “Okay, just let me know when you’re done.” He’s like, “Ah, you’re actually going to be like God. You’ll know good and evil, which you are a child, you don’t know that right now.” What’s she going to do? She’s just like, “Okay, that sounds fine.” She doesn’t know if it’s good or evil. They don’t have a concept of that.

I don’t know if she’s going to be held accountable in any serious way for this. I don’t think she should be. She could still be basically a newborn. We don’t have a timeline, but if the woman was made as a baby, Adam would have been an adult and he had to wait till she grew up to be at least probably 9 or 11 or something like that. I don’t know what—biblical doesn’t really have an age cutoff. I don’t think we’ll find out because one thing that I’m looking forward to is reading where the age range is for consensual sex, because that’s got to be in there because I know there’s a lot of rules about sex.

Eve goes, “All right, I guess I’ll eat this.” Adam’s like, “Huh.” Like, he’s there the whole time but then he’s like, “Huh? Oh, I just ate some of this. You want some?” And he’s like, “I guess so. Is everything fine with it?”

Verse 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

What? They’re by themselves. They have privacy. For good—I mean, the serpent’s there.

Verse 8 Then the man and his wife…

That’s his wife? When did they get married? We’re just in chapter 3. They got married, by the way, at some point. They were wed. They got married and didn’t like seeing each other naked. I guess that’s what married couples are like. I’ve never been married; I still enjoy seeing women naked. But maybe when you are married you’re like, “Ah, cover that up,” you know what I mean? “Put on a fig leaf.” What’s going on here? Why did we eat that fruit? Put on a fig leaf, you’re disgusting.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day,

God back in the day, I guess, went for walks but didn’t like too much heat because he does experience temperature like a human being, and he does get tired. He’s actually walking around. Well, they heard him walking and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

Verse 9 But the Lord God called the man, “Where are you?”

Verse 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

That I relate to. I’ve never been someone that wants to go into men’s change rooms; it’s just because I’m insecure. Like, I don’t want to be seen naked, like in an intimate situation—cool—but like, you know, where somebody is pretending like they’re into me. Like in just a room of dudes or something like that and we’re all like showering—I would feel very uncomfortable with that. So yeah, I would hide.

Verse 11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

So this is a leading question, probably, unless God doesn’t know. It’s like, “Who told you you were naked?” What are my options? The woman? God? Does God know about the serpent? Are there other talking things that could have told Adam that he was naked? What is that question there for? God is just like so mad. You know how like you get effervescent with rage and you go, “What? What? What are you talking about?” You don’t really want them to answer. It’s sort of like a placeholder for when you want to ask the real question. It’s like a rhetorical: “You’re naked? Who told you you were naked? Wait, have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

Verse 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

You were standing right there! You saw the interaction with the serpent and you let it happen, essentially.

Verse 13 Then the Lord said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate it.”

Well, the serpent deceived me. Now what I don’t get is that they do know about the knowledge of good and evil but they haven’t died yet, even though when you eat it you will surely die. So I don’t know if that part is coming true, or if when they say, “When you eat it you will have the knowledge of good and evil but when you eat it you will surely die,” maybe it isn’t like right when you eat it. Maybe they should have said, “Right when you eat it you’ll have the knowledge of good and evil, but when you eat it eventually you might die, or eventually you will physically die.”

Verse 14 So the Lord said to the serpent, “Because you have done this…”

He’s mad at the serpent. I would hate to be the serpent right now.

“Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.”

I’m gonna assume serpents had legs back in the day, which would have helped them be more crafty. They probably did origami or whatever. Now God cut off their legs, and I wonder if it’ll say this: and of course, remove their vocal cords.

Verse 15 “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

I know that has—that’s got to have significance. I’m sure that’s going to come back at some point. Remember that; someone remember that for me.

Verse 16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;”

So I don’t know if she had had a child at that point.

“With pain you will give birth to children.”

He’s increasing the pain, so there was pain already going on but he’s increasing it.

“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”

Oh man. They probably were equals, but because she screwed up so badly in listening to the serpent—who told her something and she had no idea what was good or evil, so she couldn’t really make a rational decision because she didn’t have the frame of reference because she wasn’t made that way by the sounds of it—she now… “You are going to be ruled by your husband. A man is your boss.” There’s nowhere yet that we’ve read that the Bible is claiming to be an objective moral standard or infallible, so this might just be a fun, interesting story that we don’t need to take seriously.

Verse 17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife…”

Big mistake, man.

“…also because you listened to your wife and you were standing right beside her, and you didn’t stop her, and you heard the serpent, and you heard what I said, and you heard her misquote me… but just because you listened to her—big mistake—and ate from the tree from which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”

So now gardening’s hard because Adam was way too aloof when he was standing beside Eve in the middle of the garden.

Verse 18 “It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.”

This is the whole deal, like, men have to go to work, women stay home and they’re in pain bearing the child, they’re in pain giving birth. The man is the worker to bring home the bacon. You know, it’s setting us up for traditional family values.

Verse 19 “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and dust you shall return.”

He wasn’t going to return to dust, but because he did that, now he’s cursed. I’m going to assume that’s what that is. When is that going to happen? It’s not that clear.

Verse 20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

That makes sense. There’s just the two of them. Just the two of them. If they could bear to be naked together, she will be the mother of all. You know, if they can just—that’s going to be a lot of work for her. The mother of all the living, and it’s going to be painful. Oh Eve, why did you eat the pomegranate?

Verse 21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

It sounds like that guy from Silence of the Lambs. I’m going to assume it means like leather from animals.

Verse 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us…”

Us? Now, I know that there’s a concept of a Trinity, so I don’t know if this is a hint towards that or if God is talking about angels.

“…knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever.”

See, this is what happens when you don’t really read the Bible. If there’s a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that Eve can stand by in the middle of the garden, then there must be a literal Tree of Life that they could have eaten from and lived forever. And maybe that Tree of Life was like—they had access to that and they would have lived forever. Maybe that’s why they maybe were immortal? I don’t know, I’m just like anyone else, I’m making it up as I go along.

But then God said no, they can’t have it because they’re like us. God is powerful; he does get tired; he does not like too much heat, so he likes to walk in the cool of the evening; and he knows about good and evil. He also is pretty powerful because he can create the heavens and the earth and he can make people, and he also is a seamstress—I shouldn’t say seamstress, a seamster. He’s a leatherhead. He’s a bit of a fashion designer. This is as much as we know about God at this point.

Verse 23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

Verse 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

Why don’t they just go to the west side? Get in the garden there. Like, is there more than one entrance? Can he climb up a wall?

Closing Thoughts

That’s chapter 3. That’s pretty wild. It does seem a lot like a fairy tale. It doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true, but it does reflect what we know to be true. We know that serpents do crawl on their belly, so that does ring true. And we know that women do have pain in childbirth. And we know that we do have to work the soil; we have to work hard to get food. And we also know that we will die and we will become dust. These are taking into account truths about our existence and interjecting them into a story. Kind of like a child’s story. Very, very silly and, you know, talking serpent.

I don’t know if that serpent is going to be defined more in the future. At this point, I am seeing it literally as a serpent that had legs at a time and did talk and for no apparent reason deceived the woman. We may learn why, and these are good questions to have in the back of our heads. I think I know why because I’ve been told why, but where is it? So I’m looking forward to learning why, but we’re going to have to see what happens in chapter 4.

I’m having fun reading these. Please subscribe, like the video, ring the bell—all the stuff that people say at the end of these videos—and we’ll see you in the next one.