The Sin Story: A Layer on an Older Tale

The sin aspect of that story is really just in the top layer. It is in the retelling

of an Elohim story that the sin story has been layered on top. The story of the

snake and Yahweh and the man and the woman and the fruit in the garden in Genesis 3 is

really a retelling of the story of the struggle between Enlil and Enki in the Babylonian story

of origins. They were the original players who conflicted over how intelligent human beings should

be, how healthy, how long-lived, how many of them there should be,

all the punishments of struggling to get enough food to eat and then struggling in childbirth.

They are all there in the Babylonian story. And when we go to the original,