Fall of Man = Beginning of Agriculture

I propose a topic with the premise that the Fall of Man as depicted in Genesis is actually a mythological rendition of the transition from hunter/gatherer to agriculture. I believe this would go into the Religion Forum because it is philosophical in nature, though I think we can apply some scientific principles. For example, we do have some modern studies of hunter/gatherers to draw on and we also have anthropological studies of agricultural societies and hunter gatherer societies.To flesh out the premise:If the Fall is the beginning of agriculture, then hunter/gatherer societies should be similar to the Garden of Eden as depicted in Genesis. So in contrast to the Hobbsian notion of "nasty, brutish and short" we should find a more tranquil existence for hunter/ gatherers.To be the Fall, agriculture should have brought great benefit (eating of the tree of knowledge) but also great harm (cursing of the earth).The Genesis writer(s) would have had to have had knowledge of both hunter/gatherer societies and agricultural societies (good side and bad side), as well as transitional types such as nomadic herders. I am suggesting we should be able to find evidence of this knowledge both in the Genesis text and from anthropological studies.I will let it go at that for now. I have some ideas on this of course but would like to see what the administrator decides and what others might come up with before saying more. Edited by deerbreh, : punctuation

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

I agree with you. With agriculture you get a big cultural shift. The society can start to specialize in ways it never has. This has been called the 'farming revolution' and it is this that allowed neolithic humans to develope society.This could be seen as more important than metallurgy. Farming would of course have included animal husbandary too. One of the earliest situations when this could have taken place was the Fertile Crescent (running north from Egypt to Palestine to Anatolia to Mesopotamia).The big change here is a new concept of surplus. Early records have shown that at 9000BCE there was a village at Jericho, fast forwards 1000 years and the surplus allowed a much larger settlement to house many more people.More resources in one place may have made a tempting sight for the ramaining hunter gatherers. This could reasonably have led to conflict where in the past, societies would have been much smaller and more spread out (so less liekly to come into conflict). This would have kick started the warrior classes (indead it is around 7000BCE that copper was being worked in Anotolia and the demand to make weapons would push metallury onwards to bronze to iron).When you start getting people in charge, you start getting people under the thumb and concepts of higherarchy. People would long for the 'before times' or the 'long long ago' when people were viewed on their capablity to add to society rather than ability to simply protect what was theirs.It would seem to me that the world changed for humans and the memories of times that were 'better' wcould create within a culture a perception of a fall from grace that xians would see as the Fall. Add a priest class and a justifying mythology to cow the masses and you are pretty much done.

Good analysis. I also think that the Cain/Abel episode is a depiction of the strife between nomadic herders (Abel) and tillers of the land (Cain). Note that the agriculturalist won over the nomadic herder, as has usually been the case in the history of man.

Nice post, Larni.Another change that accompanied the development of agriculture involved the role and status of women. In hunter-gatherer bands, women generally contributed the lion's share via gathering, while the meat provided by the male hunters was more sporadic.It seems likely to me that women, as expert gatherers, supplied the initial insights for agriculture. They may have unwittingly paved the way to a male-dominated society: once the nomadic lifestyle was replaced by a fixed dwelling and men took over much of the plant-based food production, women would have seen their once primary (or at least co-equal) role as breadwinner become replaced by their biologic role as mothers.The natural birth control effects of nursing and lean nutrition that kept hunter-gatherer children spaced far apart and few enough to feed were supplanted by both a richer diet and a greater need for agricultural labor: earlier onset of menarche, more frequent pregnancies, and a loss of material social status and independence are reasonable suppositions. Thus, it is not surprising that we see traces of matriarchal deities and practices that predated the patriarchal gods.More speculatively, the existence of fixed property that required defense would have encouraged the formation of a warrior class and facilitated the view of women as property to be protected.

Remember though, while such themes might be in there, that is not what the stories are about. By the time the earlier Genesis tales were put into even oral form, all the the stories through the Flood, the move to agriculture was way in the past. Civilization even then was old and many folk settled.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I forgot the Cain and Able bit . I tend to go off on a Mesopotamian mission when I talk ancient history In Sumerian mythology the Enki made humans specifically because the gods did not want to be bothered with looking after the aninmals and the crops.This was our role. The Sumerian gods seem to have been mangers and we were on the shop floor.

Thanks Onmi That sounds about right. Power started to get concentrated. Warrior and beuraucracratic class changes into the Priest and Noble classes. Seems to me you need a Fall for the Preiest class to form.All this talk of Warriors and Priests makes me expect the Rogue and the Magic User pop up soon

How do you explain the Garden of Eden then if it doesn't refer to a hunter gatherer society? Also note that the there was a long transition period. Even up to the present there are a few hunter gatherer groups left. It seems likely that the agriculturalists idealized these groups even as they drove them off the good agricultural land. Look at the European idealization of the "noble savage" even as the New World colonists were driving out the native Americans. When Genesis was written there would have been enough of these groups still around that they could have served as a model for Eden, imo.

I'm willing to bet that the oral histories can last for a long time indead.Look at the oral tradition of the Australian Aborignal people.Aborigines have the longest continuous cultural history of any group of people on Earth - dating back - by some estimates - 65,000 years. Dreamtime is Aboriginal Religion and Culture.Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, Mythology - Crystalinks

I don't doubt that in the least.My point is that there are more direct and IMHO reasonable explanations for the tales. For example, the Creation tales in Genesis probably were just that, creation myths. But they also served other purposes. They describe GOD's relationship with Man, Man's relationship with GOD and also the other animals. They explain teh seven day week, why we take one day a week off, why childbirth for humas seems more painful than for the other animals, why we fear snakes, why we need laws, why we wear clothes but the other animals don't (even though that is really one of the weakest of the arguments) and other social and cultural mores.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Yes the first couple of chapters of Genesis are certainly creation myths. But I do think that Eden and the Fall are much more than that.

Good point Jar, it is posible to get carried away and trying to fit the evidence into ones expected conclusions.I would however add that Abrahamic collection of faiths ahve made a habit of co-opting, absorbing and re-writing other religions mythology to make it easier to assimilate. I apprehebded that the significance of seven comes from Babylonian astronomy. It is not hard to see examples of (as in the Phoenician god Baal- In the Bible, Baal is called Beelzebub) the Abrahmic faith assimilating other myths.But I drift off topic, sorry to get carried away

The research that has been done on modern hunter gatherers such as the Bushmen of Southern Africa suggests that this lifestyle is a fairly leisurely one of less than a 20 hour work week, a varied and nutritious diet of about 2000 calories per day and a life span close to modern industrial societies (not taking into account infant mortality) It is quite easy to see how agriculturalists could have idealized this existence into Eden.Link here to more reading. The chapter titled "Abundance" is worth a read.HTTP 429

These (yours and Larni's) are not mutually exclusive takes on those stories.One could say that the Oresteian Trilogy is about desperate housewives and dysfunctional families in war-time, but they are also "about" human-devised justice supplanting supernaturally mandated vengeance.There are no doubt other "abouts" to be garnered as well relating to Greek history and cultural development.