Here’s what they tell you:
God created Adam in his own image. And in the dirt beside him God gives Adam a wife, and she’s Lilith, and Lilith and Adam are equals in every way. Adam is God’s beloved creation and Lilith knows God’s true name. And together they wander the Garden and they’re happy and life is good. Until Lilith gets bored, because the Garden is boring, and Adam is boring, and so she leaves and wanders on her own and makes her own garden, and because she strays from the path she is damned.
Adam gets lonely and so God makes him another wife, this time from his own rib, and she’s Eve, and Adam and Eve aren’t quite equals because God and Adam think, maybe if we make her less willful, this time she’ll stay. And together they wander the Garden and they’re happy and life is good. Until Eve does the one thing she’s been told not to do, and she takes the fruit, and God thinks well, that’s that then, and they’re cast out of Eden for good. And Adam thinks, what terrible luck I have, to be saddled with these women. And in punishment for her sin Eve is given the curse of childbirth. And that’s how humanity begins: wandering. Debased. Cursed.
Here’s what they don’t tell you:
Adam has no reason to look beyond the garden because the garden was made for Adam. He finds nothing wanting because it is a world where he’s meant to be king. And from their beginnings Lilith and Eve both are meant to be a partner for Adam. But they are human and it’s not enough, it’s not enough to play second fiddle in someone else’s story, to be the person after the and. The Garden wasn’t made for them. So the story calls their actions sin when really it’s just curiosity, it’s the hope they have that there’s a place better than the place that they’re in, it’s the action they take to find that place, to make it with their own hands.
So the Genesis story gets written as a justification for why women are they way they are, of how they’re the ones to blame, and of why it’s right for men to take charge, because when a woman decides for herself… well, isn’t that how everything ended up so terrible? But what the story really says, this story men made up to hold women down, is that women have the power to change the world. Women have the power to throw the world into chaos and they do it because the world as it is isn’t good enough. Adam is content and Eve is proactive. Women see God’s world and think, this could be better. Let’s make it better. And if that’s called sin than it’s the best sin there is because without change nothing would ever happen. Without women, the story doesn’t even begin.