peacefulpete:
Kaleb are you then suggesting the two introductory stories were,by design, supplementary and the work of the same hand?
Or simply that source critical approaches are uninteresting (and and perhaps futile) therefore assessing the final product is preferable.
Neither.
I just wasn't talking about the source/authorship in my explanation. I also wasn't saying that the critical approaches were uninteresting.
Consider the recent book that also talks about the meaning of the creation myth of Genesis. Entitled Feh (which is a Yiddish expression a Jew uses for something that they find contemptible), it is basically a humorous commentary "origin story" written by Shalom Auslander, reflecting on his recent brush with death after taking one of those so-called weight-reducing drugs that so many of the rich and famous have been taking.
Having been friends with the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman who died of a drug overdose in 2014, his own recent brush with the Grim Reaper by means of a pharmaceutical that Auslander sought out as a fat-reducing and life-changing panacea was not lost on him.
But what Auslander focuses on is neither whose hands were involved in writing the myth of Genesis to begin with or even God and his instruction regarding the forbidden fruit. The problem is that not only "God" but philosphers and scientists themselves all seem to want to tell Auslander and the rest of us that we come from dirt.
Dirt.
We were made from dirt.
God and men who supposedly know better than the rest of us have come to agreement without our permission or consensus that you and I are no better than dirt--feh.
You don't even have to join a religion to self-loath yourself and want to die. You just have to be fat like Auslander was and take a prescription drug that didn't agree with you to look like some guy on the Internet because you genetically cannot possibly look like someone who spends 72 hours a day in a gym and who eats nothing but chicken breasts and raw egg yokes and is made of marble and has a 12 inch penis and dates models and drives a sports car...and die, because this drug can kill you.
Who gives a f*ck about who lied and and ate what fruit because a snake had legs? God, philosophers, and 9 our of 10 scientists agree you are made out of dirt. That is why you hate yourself. You don't even have to be a Jehovah's Witnesses. You will never be pretty. You are dirt. Don't you want to die too? It's more than religion. It's science.
Of course, the above is just a somewhat morbidly/humorous take/interpretation on the Genesis story by another Jewish writer. The point is that there is no room in Auslander's take for which redactors wrote what part of the story in Feh. His commentary is meant to reflect on how society is self-destructive in its behavior, no better than dirt, treating other people like dirt, and that perhaps there is an essential "truth" in this mythology (unfortunately).
My commentary was similar. You don't always lean on "who wrote what" to make your point.
