Simon_Jester wrote:I said what I said because it occurred to me as I was typing that there might be a translation issue, but I had no time or inclination to research the matter and didn't know anything about it.
But basically, we today generally say "you should only obey someone if you know it's right to do so, and people who are too crazy/young/immature/stupid to understand why they should obey cannot be blamed for not obeying."
Whereas in the kind of intensely patriarchal, low-margin society you'd see in the Bronze Age Middle East, I would expect people to be more likely to say "you shouldn't need an explanation to know why you're supposed to obey your parents/overlord/deity, we don't have time for that foolishness, you just do what they say! And if you don't do it, then you get beaten up until you learn to do it!"
That doesn't get around the point that, even if we accept the "you should know to obey" position, someone would need the capacity to know that it is "right" to obey your parent/elder/deity - in the story, Adam and Eve possessed literally none of this. You must have some concept of why you should do something or why you shouldn't do something else. It was purely due to their naivete and lack of imagination that they didn't do anything else that could get them in trouble - like killing other animals for fun, injuring themselves, etc.
If we take it as just a story about morality and such, then from the perspective of people who already possess a sense of right and wrong, we can grasp what it is trying to convey...