Adam and Eve

In the creation story in Genesis, Adam and Eve each receives as a punishment for original sin a kind of labor particular to his or her gender. Adam will be condemned to toil in the fields for food. Eve will experience great pain in childbirth. And so the difficulty of making ends mete, punishment, and pain all fit together within the ancient Hebrew perspective. The ancient Greeks related them also, but perhaps differently or not in as clear a way.

The fact of pain in the world is associated with the necessity of maintaining the species through labor in this story, and the fact that this is difficult to do (which is why it is painful) is explained in terms of the necessity of punishment as a response to sin, which is a result of God's divine rule. This is not a story about how the world began; it is a story about what pain means, just like a story about why there are rainbows or how leopards got their spots.

The work of Eden lies in the fact that it gives the ontology in precisely the opposite direction that it should. Begin with God, then work your way to pain. But what happened historically is that this system developed in the other direction (says Nietzsche). In the beginning, there was pain. We can endure pain only by giving it a meaning. This was provided in terms of punishment, justified by sin and carried out by a divine Punisher. You have to tell the story in reverse order in order to cover up the history of the concepts, which is a standing threat to their apparent explanatory power.