An atheist riffs on the Bible (New International Version): Genesis 3

Regular paragraphs are the verses as written in the Bible.
Indented italicized paragraphs feature my comments on the previous paragraph.
Note that I might appear especially nitpicky and I know that some of these verses are not taken literally by everybody; I'm just having some fun basically.
Why the New International Version or NIV? Why not? The Bible has already been translated countless times before and I can't read or speak the original languages in which it was written, which is why it is stupid in the first place to assume that a divine being would communicate with us through a book.

New International Version

Genesis 3

The Fall of Man

¹ Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"

So serpents talk and they're craftier than any other wild animal? Bible authors, please tell me what you were smoking, I want some right now!

² The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "

All we know is that God said this to Adam: "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." Now there's nothing about touching it and dying, but I'll accept that they skipped some parts of the story, it's already repetitive enough. Hey, but now that I think about it, why are we assuming that Eve is talking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil specifically, she's just talking about the tree in the middle of the garden (which should be the same Garden of Eden we previously heard about of course). Now there's an error because the previous chapter did not talk about one tree in the middle, but two, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe the tree of life is the evil one that kills. It's a trap!

⁴ "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."

Who are you going to trust, a serpent or God himself? God wouldn't lie after all, because lying is evil and God isn't evil, is he?

⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Well, I guess God was indeed lying (I know people have different ways to say he wasn't). Now I have a couple of things to add. First of all, Eve couldn't even know that eating from the tree was evil; she didn't have the required knowledge or wisdom to understand that before eating the fruit. Also, why is God putting a tree with good food in the middle of the garden if nobody's supposed to eat from it? It's even more evil coming from him if it's true that he knows everything and so already knew that this would happen. Finally, once again what's so bad about being naked? I'll repeat that it's because of the society we live in that we don't feel comfortable walking around outside wearing no clothes, not because we are born ashamed of nudity.

⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"

So God is walking around in the garden? Just like resting, I just didn't picture this God character as someone that would walk around the place. Now, don't Adam and Eve know that God is everywhere, so they can't hide from him (which begs the question: why is he asking where they are?)

¹⁰ He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."

Adam is like that semi-retarded guy who would reveal all your secrets as soon as you told him.

¹¹ And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"

How about "I'm not blind! You gave me eyes to see." I know we're probably talking about a deeper meaning, like he couldn't understand he was naked before, but still sounds like a dumb question.

¹² The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."

Hey, nobody likes a squealer! Good way to sound like a 5 years old Adam! Well, I guess that's one line in favor of misogyny.

¹³ Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."

Yeah, blame the serpent; you're just like Adam now blaming someone or something else. Hmm, Adam blames the woman and Eve blames the serpent, which could be taken as a metaphor for a penis. I'm probably reading too much into this. But Eve has a point though, she didn't know she was doing an evil act, God put the tree there, God made the serpent, the serpent was telling the truth while the good God was lying. I think her defense is solid.

¹⁴ So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

So we get no description of the serpent before he was transformed to his current form. The way I see it, he must have been some kind of humanoid, after all he could speak. (By the way, you're reading too much into it from your Christian perspective in my opinion if you actually say that the serpent is Satan. You're trying to give it more meaning than it actually has. The book doesn't really leave particular clues to indicate that anyway.) Technically, I don't think serpents see their form as a curse, no more than platypuses! They're just an animal like many others and they don't eat dust, that's for sure.

¹⁵ And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring ^[a] and hers;
he will crush ^[b] your head,
and you will strike his heel."

It might be confusing at first, but you've got to understand that God is still talking to the serpent in this verse. So he's talking about the fact that apparently humans will squash serpents and serpents will bite humans. I don't think we need a Bible verse for that. Plenty of animals will attack us for survival, because they fear us, to eat, etc., nothing magic about it and I don't know why there's such a focus on the serpent. People must have thought they were the most mysterious animal back then.

¹⁶ To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."

Once again, I don't think there's anything supernatural to women experiencing pain in childbearing, that's just how nature works and I don't see how it would've worked any other way before. If you have to push a baby out from your vagina, it has to stretch much more than it usually can and so it hurts. That's normal and other animals experience pain too, even if they did nothing to piss off God. Another verse for misogyny too right here and the Bible is full of them (full of all kinds of hatred in fact). The Bible, pushing feminism 2000 years back. Well, the Bible was written by barbaric men, so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that "God" (wink, wink) said that.

¹⁷ To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.

Yeah, now that we know it doesn't kill, you're reinterpreting your own lines. Congratulations God! All I'm seeing in this verse after that is the author facing his reality, in which he had to work hard on the ground to eat at the time (now we just go to the supermarket while big corporations and farmers take care of the rest, in industrialized countries at least). Previously, he had his fantasy of the Garden of Eden where everything was given to man naturally. After all, if you lived 2000 years earlier, you'd most likely hope for something better. Also, without science, you'd have to invent a story that explains satisfiably why the world is now like it is. Well, not that you'd have to, but humans tend to do that because of their brains.

¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

In a way, I feel that if God is real we must be making him pretty angry when he looks at us living in the modern world with the comforts of modern technology (of course, I'm still talking about industrialized countries and people who can afford it). It's not perfect, but it's really great if you know how to use it. Bottom line is we live much better than people at the time of the Bible and it looks like we screwed God and his punitions for us (of course, people say he's still cursing us with aids and catastrophes of all kinds, but all I'm seeing is a natural world working like it's supposed to).

¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."

I know that I'm not made of dust, I was not taken from the ground either, but this verse is still somewhat accurate, I'll give it that. Not that we return to the ground because we are taken from it (we die because we get sick or because our cells stop regenerating themselves after some time, you know just like objects are not eternal either). And not that we literally return to the ground, but our bodies do decompose and the energy that was within us is distributed in the universe. Insects and bacteria eat us. We become fertilizer for the ground and plants live on that. Animals eat plants. Animals eat other animals. Animals die. The cycle repeats itself. Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transforming.

²⁰ Adam ^[c] named his wife Eve, ^[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

The man actually names his woman, like he did for animals. Wow, that's pretty awkward! Can you imagine that still going on today? Also that's one verse which might have lost some meaning in its translation (the footnotes suggest Eve means living so that it makes sense, but that just seems to be a wild guess). Anyway, Eve would become the mother of all the living after lots of incestual sex (you can't go too long without that in the Bible).

²¹ The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." ²³ So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side ^[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

You know, it's becoming really mysterious how God is referring to himself in a plural way. So the tree of life really was good and made you live forever? And why didn't Adam or Eve ever eat from that tree at least once before the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? It's not like God explicitly forbid it. And the way I read it, it just seems like this Garden of Eden place is supposed to be an actual place on earth, something you might expect from a book written by humans 2000 years ago which lived long before humans had explored the whole earth and thus wouldn't know there's not such a place here. Anyway, that cherubim character seems interesting; I hope we see more of him, maybe a boss fight with the flaming sword (a flaming sword to protect a garden?!)

Footnotes:

a. Genesis 3:15 Or seed
b. Genesis 3:15 Or strike
c. Genesis 3:20 Or The man
d. Genesis 3:20 Eve probably means living .
e. Genesis 3:24 Or placed in front