Do both. :) Do a shoot from the hip response. You can add another response from your source.

There's so much stuff in just that one piece. Something that has me thinking since I re-read that was the imagery of the serpent. One of the participants in the roundtable mentioned that the snake was a phallic symbol and that the serpent represented a sexual awakening.

That would not have occurred to me. I thought of the serpent as the evil force or the representation of the devil.

Looking it up in wiki, it's both. Serpent

Is that the source of the idea that sexual awakenings are shameful?

Did the interpretation of that imagery have implications for how sex is seen in the Bible?

The difficult task in looking at this story as if it's just another story is all the background that comes with the story. If I hadn't known anything about the story, like if I was an alien from another planet, I wouldn't know about the devil, so I wouldn't have been able to interpret it that way. Since religion affects so many people around the world, it would be difficult to find someone who could read the story from a neutral point of view. It would be so fascinating to see what they had to say.