Genesis is not a history book. Adam and Eve were not real people. The snake did not talk. And once you stop defending those claims, the actual point of the story gets a lot more interesting.
What Genesis is doing is myth-making, which sounds like a dismissal but isn’t at all. Myth is how ancient people carried the deepest truths, the ones too large for a straightforward account.
Why does the world exist? Why do humans suffer? Why do we keep reaching for things we shouldn’t have? Why do we feel both magnificent and broken at the same time? You cannot carbon date those questions. You can only tell a story about them.
The problem has never been that Genesis isn’t literally true. The problem is that we’ve been asking it to be a different kind of book than it actually is, which is a little like criticizing a poem for failing to include footnotes. So stop defending the history and start sitting with the story.
