But I've long had the pet theory that the Green Sahara is the origin of the Eden Myth.
Homo Sapiens origin, lush vegetation, turns to dessert for some reason beyond our comprehension...
Before agriculture, people lived as hunters and (mainly) gatherers. The life of a Hunter-gatherer is, surprisingly, mostly leisure, because of the abundance of food and the low population density. Even Kalahari Bushmen, who had been forced to live in the dessert, were found to average only about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours of productive labor a day in a study [1].
In the bible, God's punishment is [2]:
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
[1] Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins (https://archive.org/details/StoneAgeEconomics_201611)
[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%203&ver...
After eating the fruit God lists a number of consequences, which sounds somewhat like a punishment, but that could just as easily be interpreted as "well, I didn't want this to happen to you, but now that you got to this point, you'll have to deal with the following". That includes increased pain in giving birth (a consequence of having larger brains), and the rise of agriculture. Eve is also only named after eating the fruit, not before.
The snake gets cursed for what it did, and so does the ground, but not Man. God even goes so far to provide them with clothes, and acknowledges their growth.
The tree of knowledge of good and evil is basically just the spark of consciousness. Humans are unique in our ability to consciously foresee and plan for the future.
On the one hand, that's a blessing because we've made tons of progress towards alleviating objective suffering and scarcity.
On the other hand, it's a curse, because we always have to be aware of the impending inevitability of our death. We can't ever completely live in peace and paradise ever again, because we have become conscious of our existence and the context our life experience exists within.
Would it be better to not have gained that spark of consciousness and live the paradise of ignorance as animals in the wildreness? Lives at peace except for occasional bursts of pain and terror.