Excerpt from Knowledge and Life

The primeval struggles of humanity to obtain civilization have been symbolized in the mythologies of many nations - most poetically perhaps among the Greeks, whose hero stole fire from heaven, but most explicitly in the Jewish version where the protagonists exploited a tree of knowledge.

In the Old Testament, the familiar parable of the Garden of Eden has been treated artlessly yet with conviction, so that from the finite behaviour of the characters human, divine, ophidian, the story actually gains effectiveness. In it, of course, Jehovah is by no means made to play the part of vindictive tyrant that professional interpreters have been inclined to assign to him, he is, on the contrary, a hasty, jealous, but essentially kind-hearted deity of the traditional type.

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