Why were Adam and Eve cast out of Eden?

I’m not going to take a side in the specifics of your discussion with @Mark10.45, but this seems like a naive statement to me. The Old Testament (a.k.a the Hebrew Bible) certainly has a coherent storyline and a well-defined collection of recurring themes that are developed through the whole collection. This is unsurprising since there was a centuries-long, deliberate process of compilation, editing, and revision both of the individual texts as well as the collections of texts which shaped the whole collection into a coherent grand narrative of the story of Israel.

Are there paradoxes and tensions in the text, that the cynical 21st century Western skeptic would regard as “inconsistencies”? Yes, such as Proverbs 26:4-5:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.

But clearly the original author or compiler of the Proverbs did not intend to literally contradict himself into incoherency in two consecutive lines. It would be the height of chronological folly to assume that people back then didn’t know that A and not-A cannot be true at the same time! Rather, the text is clearly meant to reflect that wisdom is multifaceted, situational, and difficult to express as a single proposition. Sometimes life (and God) does seem to be paradoxical, and the Bible is not meant to necessarily give nice, clear-cut answers in every case, as we see clearly in the story of Job. Thus, to approach the text in a skeptical, abstract, literalistic and legalistic manner which results in many perceived contradictions would be to misread the text in a way that it was never intended to be read.

This process of compilation is also seen in the texts of the New Testament, which have differences in emphasis, perspective, even some outright tensions. But again, there are also a great host of similarities and common themes which make it possible to interpret the whole collection in a coherent manner. Furthermore, the Christian community decided to keep the canonical texts together and rejected as heretical attempts to carve out any “canon within a canon” (as people like Marcion and “red letter Christians” attempted to do), because sometimes the tension is the point. God and his revelation can’t be fully expressed as a series of neatly stated propositions, despite the best intentions of some modern Christian analytic philosophers.

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