© Peter Watson 2017 Some parts of this story are easier to understand/decipher than others. The expulsion itself, for instance, would seem to represent the end of horticulture, or the end of humankind’s hunter- gatherer lifestyle and its transfer to agriculture, and the recognition that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was easier, more enjoyable, more harmonious, than farming. The bible is not alone in making this observation. In more or less contemporary traditions (Elysian Fields, Isles of the Blessed, in Hesiod or Plato), human beings are understood to have hitherto lived free from toil, in a fruitful Earth, ‘without help from agriculture’ and ‘untouched by hoe or ploughshare.’ The central drama of Genesis, however, is of course that Eve acts on the serpent’s advice and induces Adam so that they both eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, after which they discover that they are naked. This is incomprehensible unless we acknowledge that both ‘knowledge’ and nakedness here refer to sexuality, or sexual awareness in some form. And indeed, as the biblical scholar Elaine Pagels tells us, the Hebrew verb ‘to know’ (‘yada) ‘connotes sexual intercourse’. (As in: ‘He knew his wife.’) Once Adam and Eve have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they discover they are naked. What can this mean other than that they become aware of their bodies, how they differ, how and why that difference matters, and that the knowledge they now have is how sexual reproduction works? This knowledge of good and evil is shocking and moving because it shows that reproduction is ‘natural’; humans are not made by some miraculous divine force (good) but by sexual intercourse (evil). This is why it is felt as a Fall. There are other clues to this change once we look for them. As Potts and Short again observe, hunter-gatherers are polygynous, but it is now, Elaine Pagels says, that marriage becomes monogamous and ‘indissoluble’. People understood the nature of paternity for the first time and it became important to them. It also becomes relevant, as again Elaine Pagels points out, that in Genesis III: 16, the text reads: ‘To the woman he [God] said: ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.’ Then again, Adam and Eve are given ‘dominion’ over the animals. Their naming of the animals was clear proof of the dominion God had given them over other creatures. Are we not seeing here a mythical account of the transition from hunter-gathering to farming and some of its associated implications? More than that, is it not accompanied by an attitude that is not entirely at variance with modern scholarship: that the transition was not wholly good, that harmony with nature had been lost and that even childbirth had become more painful and dangerous?