Adam And Eve Rhetorical Analysis

Although rational thought can sufficiently account for many of the seemingly illogical elements of the Adam and Eve narrative, it is ultimately limited in its ability to reconcile every irregularity found in the text. For example, in Genesis 3:22, God expresses his fear of man’s potential immortality in the following statement: “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” In this passage, God’s desire to maintain a stringent hierarchical distinction between Himself and man is made explicitly clear. Why, then, does God create man with the capacity and potential to become more like Him? Ultimately, all attempts to reach a compelling answer to this question via

Although this detail is generally accepted without objection, it makes very little sense that Adam and Eve would notice their nakedness before anything else. How is an awareness of physical nakedness contingent upon knowledge of good and evil? Although many commentators explain this discernment of nakedness as a metaphorical representation of mankind’s first exposure to sin or awareness of death, it fails to account for Adam and Eve’s immediate inclination to physically clothe themselves by “[Sewing] fig leaves together and [making] loincloths” (3:7). If God made man in his image and acknowledged him as good, why would shame be the primary emotion elicited from an awareness of nakedness? Furthermore, many people groups live in a state of perpetual nakedness without feelings of shame or embarrassment. In truth, the feeling of humiliation incurred from public nudity is socially constructed and thus not an innate feature of human psychology. Thus, all attempts to employ rational thought as a means of solving this textual mystery prove categorically