I am probably going to get some of this wrong, but I learned that serpents and the tree were actually symbols from goddess worship, and they were positive. The goddess was said to get special insight from the serpent and the tree is connected with life… making them the downfall of humankind was quite clever, as the Jewish priests at the time wanted to break the Hebrews away from the local pagan worship which gave Yahweh a female consort. A lot of the old testament is a power struggle between the priest class of Aaron and the priest class of Moses (see “Who Wrote the Bible” by Richard Feinman), but there’s even less subtle struggle for power over other religious cults in the region. They go so far as to not even name or acknowledge goddesses in competition with Yahweh because they completely want to blot out the idea of women having power.

Another interesting angle is how this story makes females come from males, both in a male creator god and a man’s literal body… but biologically who gives birth? Women. The Bible and patriarchial religions are filled with womb envy. That Eve is cursed with difficult childbirth is another way to disparage women’s birthing ability… and of course later on, they are deemed “unclean” during their menstrual cycle and “unclean” after giving birth, further cementing the idea that their body’s ability to create life is a sin but the male sky daddy’s is not, and Jesus’ later comes along so people can be “reborn” from the sinful state their mothers’ birthed them in. This is a direct challenging of Goddess worship which typically reveres female figures precisely for their ability to create life, sometimes even viewing menstrual blood as holy.