Why is life so difficult? Why is the ground cursed with thorns, thistles, and snakes? Why do I have to work by the sweat of my brow just to survive? Why does my wife have to suffer so merely to have babies?
Serves her right though, because she is to blame. My life would be so much better if I didn't listen to her. She is to blame. She holds me back.
Such seems to have been the perspective of the originator of the myth of the Garden of Eden as recorded in Genesis 3. He appears to have been a man who toiled strenuously to survive, yet never seemed to get ahead. Though he doubtlessly loved his wife, like so many men he felt that she was holding him back, and was surely the reason that his life was so damned difficult.
This disheartened man who felt trapped and downtrodden envisioned the plight of the human predicament as being due to independent women and weak men. Perhaps he even resented himself as a pushover because he actually listened to his wife.
Regardless, the myth of the Garden of Eden is an early effort to address the existential circumstances of humanity as envisioned and expressed by a frustrated dude living the domestic life back in the day.
Hard labor for man and woman alike. And then we die.
(Commentary based upon Genesis 3)
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