Catch 22?

Let me just start by saying that you guys are all blowing my mind grapes. Perhaps the purpose of the talking serpent is not an allusion to Narnia or a claim that devil animals may have had the power of speech nearer to the dawn of time. Perhaps it is meant to suggest, rather, that the temptation to disobey comes from an external source foreign to the essence of humans. More specifically it comes from the beast, traversing the boundary that separates humans from animals. The subsequent struggle throughout history between Godliness and rebellion is here defined in terms of humaneness verses beastliness. Here, beastliness does not refer simply to the nature of animals, but to the nature of monsters, which I will define ad hoc as non-humans posing a threat to human life.
That said, I love how truly crafty the serpent's approach really is. The first thing that the serpent does to the Woman is to imply a question through the explicit suggestion, which is an exaggeration of the truth. Check it: "Did I understand that God told you not to eat from any tree in the garden?" The implicit questions that the serpent can expect the Woman to pose to herself are as follows, 1. "Wouldn't it suck if God had forbidden you to eat from any tree in the garden?" 2. "Is the restriction of two trees qualitatively different from i.e. more just than the restriction of all trees?" This is brilliant! The Woman's internal thought process is probably similar to my own. To the first implicit question, I would answer, "yes, if God were to restrict all the trees, it would be unfair." This first implicit question serves to introduce the very concept of unfairness, and furthermore unfairness on the part of God. To the second implicit question, I would think, "Maybe the restriction of two trees is unfair. I need time to work that question out." Before the Woman had time to work that out, the serpent strikes with the statement contradicting God's statement, "you will not surely die. [God lied to you to prevent you from threatening his power]." Ultimately, the woman and the man bet against God. What were their motivations? Ironically, Eve may have felt she needed fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil in order to work out implicit question 2. Indeed, what is fair or unfair? just or unjust? good or evil?
If the woman and man truly did not have knowledge of good and evil, then how can they be faulted for disobeying God. We, on the other side of paradise, judge our progenitors for having sided with evil, but we assume they should have known better as a prerequisite for their humanity. Did the first humans already have an inherent knowledge of good and evil before eating of the tree? If so, they chose evil after really or potentially having identified it as such. If the knowledge of good and evil was not inherent to the first man and woman, then there was only one way to find out whether the serpent was trustworthy or not. The man and woman did learn something after eating the fruit, but it was not that disobedience was a mistake, but rather that their nakedness was worthy of shame. Is this the same as realizing that nakedness is evil? We can see from God's words in Gen. 3:22 that the fruit did indeed transform the knowledge of humans, "God said, 'The Man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything ranging from good to evil." Did God set up a catch 22 by restricting the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden? I echo Crazy Molly's question about the supposedly fatal consequences of eating the fruit of good and evil. If Adam and Eve were immortal while in the garden, then why was the tree of life restricted? They seem to have always been destined to surely die, whether eating from the tree of knowledge or not.
It would not surprise me if this story were intended to reveal to us our own affinity for earnest questions as the key to human nature. We love posing questions that we honestly do not know the answer to. I tend to dislike the serpent because he seems to have posed questions to which he already knew the answers, or did he? Did the serpent ask these questions in earnest, just as surprised to get his and the humans' butts kicked by God as a result of eating the forbidden fruit? Just like any other tool, I think questions are good when asked out of genuine curiosity and bad when used as instruments of coercion and manipulation. "The serpent seduced me, and I ate."