"what if Adam and Eve were merely symbols of companionship? And Eve, different from him, woman instead of man, was simply a tool by which God noted that companionship was something you got from a person outside of yourself? What if that was all it was? And why not? By now I knew enough that there were at least a few allegories in the Bible -- those ones that were explicitly identified as such. So why should other stories in the Bible, like the story of Adam and Eve, not be conductive to allegorical treatment as well? After all, if it were to be taken so literally, women, then, did Cain marry, if only Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were in existence at the time? If it were to be taken literally, whom, then, was God warning against taking vengeance on Cain? Who else would have been on earth to warn save Adam and Eve, Cain's own parents, who, from all signs, had no intention of killing their son? Surely there must have been other sets of mankind, other possibilities of human existence, Adam and Eve being only one instance, a symbolic representation of them all" (83)