Personally I think it's a racket; men wrote it, and wrote it thus in order to provide divine justification for the oppression of women. I highly doubt that God said any such thing at all. But then, I'm a godless heathen with all manner of unapproved religious notions.
Do you know the Gnostic version of Scriptures? The idea that the God Yahweh of Genesis is actually the Demiurge, a false God who created the earth and humankind because he wanted to rule over something? It goes on that Satan was actually sent by the true Creator (or came of his own volition, the stories vary) to encourage Adam and Eve to partake of the Tree of Knowledge in a bid to free them from the blind enslavement forced on them by the evil Yahweh. In this interpretation, Christ came not to offer people eternal life with Yahweh via the traditional Christian take on salvation, but to offer them freedom from Yahweh's tyranny through enlightenment.
Alternatively, there is the story of Lilith, said to be Adam's first wife. The story for her follows that because she was created simultaneously with Adam, she considered herself his equal and would not submit to him (some variations put a decidedly sexual spin on this, saying that Adam wanted Lilith to be on the bottom, and she adamantly refused). She left him, and was turned into a demon, and Eve was given to Adam as a replacement. She had no real choice but to submit because she owed her existence to Adam, originating from his rib and all.
Both stories put a veeerrrry interesting new spin on how to interpret the Fall, and the Gnostic stories have always made much more sense to me, lending some internal consistency to the Scriptures that otherwise aren't there in the traditional texts.
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Do you know the Gnostic version of Scriptures? The idea that the God Yahweh of Genesis is actually the Demiurge, a false God who created the earth and humankind because he wanted to rule over something? It goes on that Satan was actually sent by the true Creator (or came of his own volition, the stories vary) to encourage Adam and Eve to partake of the Tree of Knowledge in a bid to free them from the blind enslavement forced on them by the evil Yahweh. In this interpretation, Christ came not to offer people eternal life with Yahweh via the traditional Christian take on salvation, but to offer them freedom from Yahweh's tyranny through enlightenment.
Alternatively, there is the story of Lilith, said to be Adam's first wife. The story for her follows that because she was created simultaneously with Adam, she considered herself his equal and would not submit to him (some variations put a decidedly sexual spin on this, saying that Adam wanted Lilith to be on the bottom, and she adamantly refused). She left him, and was turned into a demon, and Eve was given to Adam as a replacement. She had no real choice but to submit because she owed her existence to Adam, originating from his rib and all.
Both stories put a veeerrrry interesting new spin on how to interpret the Fall, and the Gnostic stories have always made much more sense to me, lending some internal consistency to the Scriptures that otherwise aren't there in the traditional texts.