h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Book of Genesis has two different and differing stories of Creation. Though the Eden story is older than the magnificent Priestly account that opens the Old Testament, it follows the opening record. Almost all the constituents of the Eden myth are known to have circulated in Mesopotamia centuries before the Old Testament was written in some of the world's oldest literature: the epic poem of-of Gilgamesh. Here is the creation from soil or clay of an instant-adult, though his name was not Adam. The epic also records a consequential meeting between a naked man and woman. Another section tells of the first man to enter the garden paradise, and the poem tells of a serpent with a human head. All these stories originated in Mesopotamian polytheism, in which human heroes had to defy the gods for the sake of human advance. Therefore the man in the original garden was separated from Adam by more than the simple passage of time, and when the myth-history of Adam and Eve and the speaking serpent entered the written Old Testament it was interpreted from an entirely different standpoint. This record is rightly preserved in Genesis but should be interpreted in the light of its origins. Behind Adam and Eve stand another naked couple whose story enshrines an uplifting anthropological record. That message has long been misinterpreted in the traditions of Judaic/Christian monotheism, but when the Eden story is interpreted in sympathy with its images of serpent and tree, this fabulous myth-history reveals its treasure. Anyone interested in the other Eden should see: Eden: The Buried Treasure - Eve Wood-Langford (Amazon).

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