Was reproduction the reason Adam & Eve were kicked out of Eden? | Dr. Robert Price

[00:00:00]thank you to all who've become a patreon of myth vision podcast and dr robert m price's patreon i really appreciate it you guys are making this possible there are hundreds of videos that have not been released to the public here on youtube that you gain access to by becoming one so thank you for your support let's get to dr price [Music] dr price we have another question from diogenes of ephrata greetings dr price i don't agree with your interpretation of adam and eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge as the origin of the knowledge of sexual reproduction but consider it to allegorize the origin of consciousness in the bike bicameral mind however i see the utility of your interpretation in a bipolar structural analysis of genesis an allegory of c-h-t-h-o-n-i-c sonic sonic versus uh pneumonic pneumatic creation as forthwith adam and eve are created out of the earth and the opposite arises with their eating the truth the fruit of the knowledge the origin of human society they are then sent out to earn their living from the earth and simultaneously multiply their species next cain who represents the earth with his offspring of fruits and vegetables slays abel who represents animal reproduction as a herdsmen parathan para aesthetically parenthetically i think this last mythine is a metaphor for the triumph of sedentary agriculturalism over nomadic pastoralism but it can have multiple meanings not much later the sons of god mate with the daughters of man a hyper sexuality creating monsters at the same time they teach man the arts of civilization a further alienation from the earth god then resolves the situation by flooding the earth restoring it to its pristine condition purifying it with water so to speak but at the same time allows for a new generation of mankind to create human society anew i can't be the first to come up with this uh structural analysis and would appreciate hearing who has set this forth thank you for being a patron diogenes i appreciate it my friend dr price well uh with the uh the sexuality argument i really uh can't see myself budging from that partly because it it fits in so well with contemporaneous stuff like the gilgamesh epic where exactly the same thing happens with enkadu a man made from the dirt of the ground and uh he is introduced to a female who she has sex with him and from there on in the animals who were once his friends like tarzan in the jungle they flee away in terror and he said what the heck happened is it my breath and uh uh and and the the the woman the temple prostitute of the the goddess who created in ketu she says behold and kedu you are wise like unto a god now what do we got there a man created from the the soil of the ground a woman who initiates him into sex he's now alienated from the animals because he has the wisdom that is paralleled with sexual awakening i think that's it's got to be the same thing in the eden story but there's also the the dimension of structuralism as he says now i've written about this a bunch of times edmund leach was a great anthropologist who was a disciple of uh claude levy strauss the the uh as far as i know the inventor of uh cultural anthropology or structural anthropology and uh leech tried and now see levy strauss set up this whole opposition using the the oedipus cycle those plays by sophocles and is showing that there is this tension between uh the the options of being born from one born from the same namely the earth uh mother nature and all that uh versus born from two or born from another uh and uh you're the offspring of of the same kind of beings as you are and the this dealt with again as an attested ancient concern because uh early peoples wondered now where do we come from uh were we carved out of the ground uh juvenile the the satirist wrote about this way back in the days when men were born from the earth and and and the adam's story and so on uh that so some believe that and uh others said no no we're born from parents who are like us now again it seems like how could this have been an issue for anybody well probably it goes way back to before people understood the connection between sex and and offspring because it's not obvious right i mean you don't have a baby every time you have sex etc and so this goes way back and way down into the human nature and uh and when people felt forced to acknowledge that uh sex is the origin of offspring they felt like they were leaving the old time religion behind and that that was a transgression that was sort of blasphemy and so these stories like the oedipus cycle it has a bunch of symbols that it leads to the hearer of the myth to organize to group them thematically and forget the plot but what is implied in this menu that results one from column a one from column b well in the oedipus story we hear that well and what they're driving at is that you can deny your origin in uh in mother nature in the earth but at the cost of uh of tragedy uh you can triumph over the earth but you're gonna pay for it so uh what do we have we've got oedipus whose name means club foot someone who stumbles as he walks over the earth and uh oh let's see uh the sphinx he defeats the sphinx eventually which is an earth elemental and uh [Music] his daughter eventually his son gets killed his daughter electro wants to have him buried but it's illegal but she sacrifices her own life to get him buried in the ground now on the other hand you've got uh i think elias his father the the king and that has some connection with the earth i forget what it is now but so what happens oedipus defeats the earth monster the sphinx but uh has difficulty walking on the earth because he has trodden the earth under foot you might say and he now has children but that comes to a bad end too and and so forth well leach didn't see that in the story i remember re i found what levy strauss said very convincing but then i read leach's analysis i said how can you miss what your mentor would have said because in eden what do we got we have a man created from the ground and then to create a a companion fit for him various animal species are created from the ground but none of them are satisfactory and it's not a question of bestiality or anything it's just like tarzan cheetah and so on i i think the assumption is since they can't speak they're not fit companions for but it doesn't work and so god says everything i make from the ground is different and there are two different maybe if i make another one of him out of him that'll be fit well he does and it is this at last is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones and it says now this is why a man leaves his father's house and unites with his wife there's no command he ought to do it right it's just a little interpretive hint to the reader it's the other creation story where it says be fruitful and multiply that's not in this one in the eden story so he then is told by the serpent who is an earth elemental that he should well he and she are told they should eat of this tree and they will become wise and so the very companion made from a fellow human has led to disaster because now they're kicked out of the garden and all of that and they have a child too that's cain who murders his brother and like you said they they divide up able herds animals who reproduce from their own kind cane raises vegetables from the ground and so what happens after adam and eve's transgression uh they're they're kicked out of the garden of eden so they're going to get their sustenance by br back breaking toil from the ground uh and then uh after uh kane murders abel uh he's exiled uh and he he can't uh you've cast me forth from the ground and so yeah i think he's exactly right about that i'm i feel sure somebody must have said it before me but but that's the way it uh occurred to me as i read claude levy strauss and edmund leach so i think that's definitely going on in fact i have a section on that in uh evolving out of eden christian responses to evolution and uh make sure you get that book yeah it's if i say so myself i and ed swoeman and wrote this a few years ago it deals with the biblical business and science in a way no other book does and it's uh i think you're going to really enjoy it thank you dr price [Music] this you