Paradise Lost temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men". In his introduction to the Penguin edition of "Paradise Lost", the Milton scholar John Leonard notes, "John Milton was nearly sixty when he published Paradise Lost in 1667. The biographer John Aubrey (1626–97) tells us that the poem was begun in about 1658 and finished in about 1663. However, parts were almost certainly written earlier, and its roots lie in Milton's earliest youth." Leonard speculates that the
Adam and Eve been Satan, or that Satan was using a serpent as a mouthpiece, although there is no mention of this identification in the Torah and it is not held in Judaism. Conservative Protestants typically interpret as defining humanity's original parents as Adam and Eve who disobeyed God's prime directive that they were not to eat "the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (NIV). When they disobeyed, they committed a major transgression against God and were immediately punished, which led to "the fall" of humanity. Thus, sin and death entered the universe for the first time. Adam