From my previous post, I hope one of the takeaways is this: I take the historicity of the Genesis story very seriously. I do believe the first chapters of Genesis present history, but it is not history in the way most people read it today. It is history written by very learned men with a very specific agenda. It is also my belief that this agenda sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. This is something I will elaborate later in this series, but suffice it to say that I believe the rest of the Bible, including the Christian Scriptures, are a commentary on the first 11 chapters of Genesis. I think this will come apparent as I proceed with the posts.
Let's begin by reflecting on the typical origin story. Origin stories always start with at least one fully formed, fully articulate adult Homo Sapien. Humans are almost always formed or created by a god or the gods for their benefit and service. This is true whether the origin stories are from Mesopotamia (Atrahasis – humans made to do manual labor for gods), Babylon (Enuma Elish – humans made from Kingu’s blood to relieve the gods from toil), Aztec cosmology (humans created to feed gods with blood and keep the universe running), Maya (Popol Vuh – humans created so someone exists to worship the gods correctly), Hindu (human's created to perform yajna [sacrifice] which nourishes the gods and maintains cosmic order), Egyptian (Humans molded by Khnum from clay and are expected to care for the gods’ temples, perform rituals, and maintain ma’at [cosmic order] for the gods). Israel (Humans are created to tend and keep the Garden of Eden). Humans are not, then they are. And when they do burst on the scene, they are immediately put to work at relieving the gods of their labor, or providing them with sacrifices (food and nourishment) and infrastructure (temples, palaces, irrigation ditches, canals, etc). More on this topic in a later post.
Modern origin stories (which also usually begin with fully formed, articulate humans) are often framed by two contrasting views, typified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes. Rousseau argued that humans began as hunter-gatherers living innocently and egalitarianly, and that the agricultural revolution and subsequent civilization born from it brought both cultural advances and most social evils (unsurprisingly, this is rather close to the biblical view, as we shall see below). Hobbes held that the original State of Nature was in no sense innocent; instead it was violent and miserable - a "dog eat dog world". Hobbes' contention is progress came precisely through the rise of states, laws, courts and bureaucratic institutions (police and armies) that impose order.
Whichever origin story one begins with, the classical and still normative narrative, which was originally created and codified thousands of years ago by the first great agrarian kingdoms wishing to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the tribes from which they came, portrays the development of the agricultural revolution (i.e. the development of a single crop or several crops that could be easily transported as well as easily taxed by a city-state) as a moral and social advance over a primitive, uncultured, barbaric hunter-gatherer people resistant to change. These societies frame farming as the foundation of a settled, cultured life of religion, law, and government, exemplified by the city-state. Agriculture replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads. This worldview was reinforced by myths in which gods granted sacred crops to chosen peoples, legitimizing agriculture’s superiority and the authority of agrarian states. The logical direction of history is thus seen as a progression from the nomadic gather-hunter to that of pastoralist, the farmer and, finally, at the top of the pinnacle, the City dweller, being undergirded and supported by the state.
This view rests on the assumption that sedentary life is safer than, superior to and more attractive than mobile forms of subsistence living and that no one who had experienced the sedentary life under state control and protection would want to return to their previous mode of existence. Ironically, at the same time this narrative is promoted by kingdoms, their laws and religious texts are filled with laws and invectives that impose harsh sanctions on people that want to return to the "wastelands", hinting to a desire of many people to return to the previous life they knew. The reality is the boundaries between state, city, farm, pasture, and hunter-gatherer is more porous than the state wants to admit. In fact, historically cities and states, until the advances of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in reducing disease, famines, and poor living and working conditions, had great difficulty attracting and retaining people and often resorted to slavery as a means for supplying people to their domains.
The third and fourth chapters of Genesis strongly hint that the sages who wrote the passages extoling the virtue of obtaining one's primary subsistence from trees and the double curse against the ground (one for Adam and one for Cain) would, at first glance, have sided with Rousseau and the modern anthropologists and archaeologists on the downsides of the agricultural revolution and the civilization that sprung from it. Chapters 2 and 3 depict humans in their innocent state, gathering nuts, fruits and berries from a variety of trees as in James Frazer's The Bough. The latter part of Chapter 3 and the first part of chapter 4 (the cursing of the ground) depicts the shift from a simple gathering community to one focused on agricultural specialization (food resources from a small number of sources) and its subsequent negative effects (anthropologists tell us one effect of the shift to grain as a primary food source, besides the difficulty described in the texts, is more frequent births but a higher infant mortality rate, hence Eve's curse). Chapter 4 introduces us to the typical nomadic/pastoralist represented by Abel, and the typical sedentary farmer turned city-dweller represented by Cain, and the first act of physical violence (committed by the farmer) followed by the threat of mass retribution, “Therefore, whoever kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold” (Genesis 4:15). That is, if one person kills Cain, six additional innocent people will be sacrificed in addition to the original person who committed the act. Remember this is GOD talking! No wonder Lamach had no problem increasing the number of people for hurting him to 77, violence seemed sanctioned by GOD himself. From the point of view of Genesis 3 and 4, civilization does not look too inviting! And from here to the end of chapter 11 it only gets worse!
So, the Bible itself hints that the shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to that of an agricultural lifestyle contributed to violence, but how? The traditional, classic narrative extols the virtues of the agricultural revolution. Farming produced year-round settlement, a predictable, storable surplus, increased population and, thus, labor availability, infrastructure such as houses, roads, irrigation, storage facilities, craft specialization (potters, metalworkers, builders, administrators, priests, scholars, etc), writing, mathematics, record keeping, trade networks, economic complexity, and political, religious and military institutions. Some of these benefits are even listed in Genesis 4 (music, advances in agriculture, the arts) and fleshed out in the story of Joseph's tenure in Egypt at the end of Genesis (by the way, what most people miss about the Joseph story is this - it is the negative impact of Joseph's administrative program on the Egyptians that leads the Egyptians to turn on the Israelites in Exodus 1; this, in turn, leads to reforms in the Mosaic Covenant such as a decentralized Priesthood and no permanent debt-bondage in the form of the Jubilee, i.e. "Year of Release" or "Year of the Lord's Favor", overturning the two main aspects of Joseph's program which lead to the Egyptian bondage in Genesis).
Before answering the question at the beginning of the previous paragraph, lets bear in mind that Israel always had a large nomadic/pastoral population. After the death of Solomon, when Rehoboam was confronted by the people of Israel to lighten the tax load and corvee labor of his father, 1 Kings 12:16 states, "So Israel departed to their tents", suggesting most people in Israel at that time did not have permanent residences, most likely still relying heavily on a simi-nomadic, pastoral lifestyle. In the 35th chapter of the Book of Jeremiah, the Rechabites were held up as an example of a clan that deliberately chose a nomadic lifestyle, "Then I set before the sons of the house of the Rechabites bowls full of wine, and cups; and I said to them, “Drink wine.” But they said, “We will drink no wine, for Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, commanded us, saying, ‘You shall drink no wine, you nor your sons, forever. You shall not build a house, sow seed, plant a vineyard, nor have any of these; but all your days you shall dwell in tents, that you may live many days in the land where you are sojourners.’ Thus we have obeyed the voice of Jonadab the son of Rechab, our father, in all that he charged us, to drink no wine all our days, we, our wives, our sons, or our daughters, nor to build ourselves houses to dwell in; nor do we have vineyard, field, or seed. But we have dwelt in tents, and have obeyed and done according to all that Jonadab our father commanded us" (Jeremiah 35:5-10). This is a backhanded critique of the settled, agricultural lifestyle the Judeans had eventually chosen which led to their eventual downfall and deportation to Babylon. This critique is similar to that made of the northern Kingdom by the prophets that railed against her (Amos, Hosea, etc).
So, once again we ask, what does the Bible have against the agricultural lifestyle and how does it contribute to violence? We will explore this further in our next post.
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