101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

yth #22:
God forbid Adam to eat certain fruit.
The Myth: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God
hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. (Gen. 3:3)
The Reality: The Forbidden Fruit motif comes from Sumerian myths about
life in paradise.
In Myth #20, we saw that the Hebrews replaced the Egyptian deities associated
with Moral Order and Life with two trees, one of which bore forbidden fruit that
carried a threat of death if consumed. This Forbidden Fruit motif comes from
ancient Mesopotamian myths and was picked up when the Hebrews came under
Babylonian cultural influences.
The best-known of these stories, The Myth of Enki and Ninhursag, tells of two
important deities known as Enki and Ninhursag, who were brother and sister and who
lived in an earthly paradise named Dilmun. On one occasion, Ninhursag managed to
trap some of her brother’s sperm and used it to create eight previously unknown plants,
which were to remain untouched by others. Her brother, curious to know what these
plants were, tasted each of them. When his sister saw the damaged plants, she cursed
her brother, saying,“Until he is dead I shall not look upon him with the eye of life.”
Soon, Enki began to waste away, but a fox appeared and arranged for Ninhursag
to return. When she came back, Ninhursag asked her brother what bodily organ ailed
him and he named each of the painful spots, eight in all. For each illness mentioned,
his sister proclaimed the birth of a deity, and each birth cured a corresponding illness.
(The text doesn’t say who the parents were for these births.)
In this major Mesopotamian myth, which would have been well-known to the
Hebrew scribes in the Babylonian era, we find the motif of forbidden fruit in an earthly
paradise coupled with a curse of death upon eating the fruit, themes presented in the
Genesis story. Ninhursag’s curse against Enki provided the motif to challenge the
Egyptian idea of“eating moral order,” leading to the biblical theme of“forbidden fruit.”
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