Thanks for responding.

You say that there are many flaws in my alternative interpretation. Your list, however, seems to refer to the text of Genesis itself, and your commentary on it, rather than my interpretation. For example, nowhere do I say that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and neither does the text. That is a later theological addition.

You refer to various difficulties in the text, and I agree that there are some. I never say that the text is coherent, and makes complete sense, at least not at the surface textual level as it has come down to us via translation. It's possible that it once made sense in a Hebrew esoteric context.

You say, that “Yahweh says, 'become like us,' meaning like gods themselves”, but in my edition it is the serpent that says this.

You ask “if eating from the two trees was so important, why were no guards placed at the trees in the first place?” Regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the guard was the commandment or prohibition in the first place. Yahweh perhaps assumed that they would obey.

There was no need to have a guard to the tree of life at that point, because the disobedience had not yet taken place. It was only then that God decided to make the return to the spiritual realm difficult, at least according to my interpretation of the story. The tree of life is the spiritual realm (Garden of Eden) where the soul/monad is eternal.

I agree with you about the Catholic Church and Original Sin. They made the mistake of thinking that Adam and Eve were the first humans and, as you say, that humans have therefore inherited their sin. (Was Augustine the first to say this, therefore the one who invented that interpretation?) We would therefore have to agree with Ezekiel. My alternative interpretation seeks to correct that mistake, by saying that Adam and Eve were not the first humans, that we are all Adam and Eve.

That does not of necessity remove the need for Jesus and (a true) Christianity, both of which can be understood within the context of this alternative interpretation.

By the way, none of this is necessarily the truth. I am merely trying to get to the bottom of what the text is actually saying.