Me Included
The story of Adam and Eve in the Bible irritates the hell out of me. What humankind, me included, has had to endure as a result of their disobedience is unfair to say the least. Let me explain.
As the story goes, God provided a perfect life for those two in the Garden of Eden with the condition that they were forbidden to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge. Each time Eve passed the tree, Satan in the form of a serpent tempted her to eat and enjoy the forbidden fruit. Eve resisted the temptation, but not for long. Here is the way it might have happened, given the popular assumption that apples were the forbidden fruit.
One day, she and Adam went for a jog around the Garden. Not long into the jog, Eve needed to stop and catch her breath, and it just happened to be in front of the tree of knowledge. Again, Satan tempted her to eat and enjoy one of the luscious apples on the tree. She could resist no longer. Without hesitation, she plucked one of the apples from the tree and took a couple of quick bites out of it.
Adam’s face turned pale. “Wha-What are you doing? That’s forbidden,” he said.
Eve offered the apple to Adam. “Just try it. It’s delicious,” she said with a gleam in her eyes.
“No!” Adam shouted. “God has forbidden it!”
“Oh, come on. Don’t be such a wimp. He won’t find out. It’ll just be our secret. Besides, I don’t like eating alone. It upsets me, and you know what happens when I get upset.”
Adam thought for a moment. Although afraid God would find out, he didn’t want to upset Eve. She was created so that he wouldn’t be lonely, but if he upset her, he would end up being lonely again because she would make him sleep on the couch. After weighing the risk of upsetting Eve against the risk of God finding out, Adam grabbed the apple from Eve’s hand and took a bite out of it.
“Hey, you’re right. It’s delicious,” he said as he devoured the rest of the apple down to the core.
Although not mentioned in the Bible, my guess is that afterward, the two of them pick a bunch of apples from the tree of knowledge and pigged out on them during a wild sex romp that night in their bedroom. Once people sin and find out how much fun it is, they tend to expand on it.
But be that as it may, God found out what they had actually done, and he was pissed. In fact, he was so pissed that he kicked them out of the Garden of Eden and made them suffer all kinds of things, including the constant struggle to survive and support themselves for the rest of their lives.
They screwed up, so God punished them. I get that. But the problem I have with it is that the punishment didn’t end with them. God extended it to all of humankind that came after them, me included. And that’s grossly unfair.
Mind you, I’m concerned about the unfairness to all of humankind that came after Adam and Eve, but it’s the “me included” that makes it personal and irritates the hell out of me. Those two may have deserved punishment, but I don’t, at least not for what they did. I never eat apples of any kind—forbidden or otherwise! I don’t even like the God damned things! So, why me, God? Why me?
Copyright © 2020 Frank Zahn