[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
I didn’t say God couldn’t tell them what to do, I’m saying it wasn’t “wrong” for them disobey. You can tell a dog what to do, that doesn’t mean the dog is committing a sin if it disobeys.
Also, God was lying. That means he was the only one of the four principle characters who was doing anything morally wrong.
But this is a story that goes right to the core of the theology. It’s more than just an inconsistency in the story, it’s giant gaping hole in the theology itself.
[/QUOTE]
Ok, so it morally wrong, but it had consequences which they knew about. It is commonly argued that death did follow (eventually) as a result of eating the fruit, that had they not disobeyed they would have lived forever. It is not at all clear that this is a gloss and not the original intent of the storyteller. It certainly seems like a reasonable reading to me.
And I’m not sure that not morally wrong equates to not sin. I don’t know what the understanding of sin and morality was of the Israelites at the time the story originated, but a longstanding understanding of sin in Christian theology (and possibly Jewish–I’m not sure) is that sin is that which separates us from God or causes us to “miss the mark” that God set for us (i.e., perfect communion with him).
To further this point a little, and respond to your last sentence, it depends on which theology you mean. In some theology (e.g., most Jewish theology, Mormon theology) it isn’t anywhere near the core of the theology at all. In other theology, the snake is clearly symbolic of/identical with Satan, which you reject out of hand. (It certainly wasn’t the intent of the author, but IMO that necessarily doesn’t make it an invalid interpretation. Folklore often gets reinterpreted.) Some liberal Christian theology just ignores any inconsistency, but some gets along just fine with a purely metaphorical Creation/Fall story.
Since people reacted positively to my earlier exegesis, I’ll give another personal interpretation of the story. (See what happens when you encourage me, folks!) Keep in mind that this is a different take than the one I gave earlier, but I find no problem with multiple interpretations of a literary work.
When I was in struggling with my beliefs in seminary (becoming, in the end, an atheist) I had a lot of problems with this story. Even the most metaphorical understanding seemed to be at odds with evolutionary theory. After all, in any version of evolution, there was no perfect creation, and so no Fall. All the things that make up sin–violence, greed, deception, etc., were present in the animal kingdom long before we arrived on the scene. In fact, we couldn’t have evolved without these traits being present in our pre-human ancestors. Not only is sin not a corruption of a perfect state, it was a necessary and integral part of our creation!
This seemed to contradict everything the story told us about the origin of sin–that it wasn’t part of creation, that it came later, that it was our fault.
Eventually, though, I started to look at the story freshly, without the baggage of earlier theology. I discovered, to my surprise, that it worked remarkably well as a parable not of the Fall, but of evolution!
As others have pointed out, there are problems with the story as traditionally told. If sin is our fault, how does the snake fit in? The story as it is written presents the snake as one of God’s creatures. Why isn’t he perfect? What is the source of his shrewdness (contrasted punningly in the text with our nudeness)? If he is Satan, as later assumed, what is the story of his fall? Milton tells us, but not Scripture.
But it fits with what we know through science! In the story, sin does precede us, in some sense. It is part of creation, of nature, before we become as we are now. And choosing sin, becoming aware of it, is a necessary part of our creation–before such a choice we were not morally culpable, were not really human in the way we are now. We were more like animals, who commit violence and deception without guilt, without knowledge or self-awareness, but also without anxiety, without confusion, and without the pain of having to find our own way in the world without instinct.
The author of the story knew nothing of biology or evolution (and I don’t believe in knowledge through revelation), but he or she was acutely aware of how humans differ morally from other animals, of how closely bound violence and nature are, and how morality, awareness, and human pain are three sides of the same thing. So perfect were his or her understanding of these things that the story seems to fit even better with what we know know that with what was believed then.