A hard chapter from which to draw directly any usable lesson - one is pressed to step back and say something general about the profound human need for explanation, for a sense of whodunit. Useful reflections on good and evil require a departure from, rather than reflections upon, this chapter. That's quite unusual when dealing with scriptural passages on good and evil - when these are the subject there are nearly always nuggets and delights and lessons. Instead, we have here a chapter of interest mainly for its mythologies, for recovery of old tropes, forms, images - a flaming sword barring the tree of life - many probably irrecoverable to the critical reader. But these interests come from just how unreconstructed the passage appears, the very thing that - probably - deprives it of much meaning for the reader as such.
All in all, the chapter is one of those rare, intractable low points in the scriptures, considered as a book for reflective reading.
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