Was Eve in the book of Genesis lying to herself or Adam?

She was gullible and Adam was trusting. Eve was made to be with Adam and wanted to share her life with him. The serpent (evil) convinced her that not only would she not die if she ate the fruit (as God had told Adam), but that it would make them closer to God and would give them great wisdom. Sounded good, eh? So she ate the fruit of the tree and wanted to share her ascendancy with Adam. He trusted her and was dragged down by that trust. That wouldn’t be the last time a guy did something stupid for the love of a woman.

The story is an allegory. It’s myth. It’s not meant to be taken literally. The fruit is the knowledge of mortality and its ramifications. The story of how humans obtained fire in Greece serves a similar purpose. The result is that humans are granted knowledge once reserved for the gods.

Typically scholarly discourse can take on analysis of fictional situations.

Was she lying? Was the “serpent” even lying?
I say, certainly not. It was god who lied. He told them that they would die if they ate the fruit.
The serpent told them, they would not, but gain knowledge of good and evil.
So she ate the fruit, and did not die, but gained knowledge of good and evil.
Clearly the serpent, then, told the truth.
And when Eva told Adam the same, she told the truth as well.

And before you try to retort that they had immortality before eating the fruit, and became mortal thereafter: The original statement of “you will die” clearly implies an immediacy of death.
To say god told the truth, is just Obi Wan Kenobi saying “What I told you was true, from a certain point of view”, when he told Luke that Darth Vader killed Luke’s father.
No, proffering metaphor or an incomplete picture of facts is not truth.
As Captain Picard wisely said: “You told the truth up to a point. But a lie of omission is still a lie.”

And that is before we get to the issue of threatening someone with death, when that person has no concept of death. And expecting them to obey a command, to prevent them to gain knowledge of good and evil, when they actually had to eat the fruit to obtain knowledge of good and evil, to know that disobeying god is evil.
What this reveals is an elaborate scheme of deception and subterfuge by a malicious trickster god.
That or it shows that god is a fucking idiot.

I believe the whole story was fabricated. Although I do believe in some stories in the bible I do not believe in Adam and Eve.

I think humans evolved and if there was an Adam and Eve there was no serpent and no apple tree. I think with time humans evolved and learned. With learning comes good and evil. It was a story created to tell how man became evil and of course, the one to lead man down this road is women.

So men never need to listen to what their wife says ever again because she the cause of evil thoughts. The temptress. It has long been the excuse for women not to control anything or have power, or be educated or even enjoy sex. Men needed a scapegoat for all their failures and evil and women were easy to blame.
My point this story is bull and was only created to subjugate women for hundreds of years.

@Pandora , One question that I have is whether Adam knew that the fruit that Eve offered him was from the forbidden tree. If he knew then he was equally as culpable as Eve.

In the text there is not even any dialogue. She just gave it to him and he ate it, no questions asked. And from the way it is written, it seems he was there when she ate it, and did not object.

Really, I was interested in the dynamic of interpersonal credibility when one party is suspected of accepting an untruth, and the other party adopts the lie also.

Eve, we can posit, was not deceiving Adam in an attempt to watch what happens to someone that breaks the rule. Adam, we assume, witnesses her eat the fruit, and it emboldens him to go along with the known mistake.

It’s just a creation myth from a time where those in power were becoming so entrenched they thought they deserved it. The story is mostly about “know your place” and “do not defy your king, even if what he’s saying is bullshit, because only he really understands how the world works, you stupid shit.”

That it doesn’t make much sense is just poor literary form. You’re getting lost in the details. The point is to be a bitch and like it.

A tangential issue, but the Bible says that the serpent originally had limbs, and as punishment they were taken away. Snakes are descended from lizards but eventually lost their legs.
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