Adam, Eve, and Agriculture: The First Scientific Experiment

Adam, Eve, and Agriculture: The First Scientific Experiment By

Harry White Department of English, Northeastern Illinois University

Abstract: Genesis offers little to no evidence for the traditional interpretation of humankind's fall into sin and evil. Rather it dramatizes the movement from hunter-gathering mixed economies to the beginnings of agricultural civilization, inaugurated by Eve's decision to test God's word and discover for herself and thereby gain for all humankind a method for knowing good from bad, right from wrong, true from false.

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Adam, Eve, and Agriculture: The First Scientific Experiment

The standard interpretation of Genesis holds that by coming to know good and evil mankind fell into a state of sin and womankind into something even worse; and we did so primarily because the first female like all her female progeny lacked right reason and good sense. Well, that interpretation is simply wrong, not because I find it disagreeable and unpleasant, but because it is not true to the text. However, so ingrained into our thinking has that misinterpretation become that even a remarkable woman scientist cannot bring herself to come right out and simply state that the interpretation is wrong. Lise Meitner writes correctly enough that "the Bible has contributed to the discrimination against women by the role it has assigned to Eve in Paradise. It is Eve who bears the chief blame for the sin against God's commandment." What I will contend is that Eve bears responsibility not for our fall into sin, but for inaugurating a revolutionary method of thinking that, after the creation of the world, resulted in the origin of human civilization.

The now familiar, authoritative interpretations that have accrued over the centuries have served to justify the arbitrary control ruling elites have exercised over the presumably sinful many and have successfully limited women's and men's potential in numerous endeavors throughout Christian civilization. However by situating the story where it properly belongs we might eliminate many of the interpretations which have no warrant in the narrative and thereby gain a better understanding of its more probable import.

We might start by recognizing that in fact the story of Adam and Eve meant

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very little to the people who first inherited it. No book of Hebrew Scripture makes mention of an event in the garden which according to Milton's Paradise Lost is supposed to have brought "all our woe" into the world. And if, as traditionally taught, the sin of sexual desire played such an important role in tempting our first parents, how do we explain that sexual pleasure is celebrated throughout Hebrew Scripture and appears no less enjoyable nor any more guilt-ridden outside the garden than it was within it? Nor is there anything in the 613 commandments and prohibitions contained in Hebrew Scripture having to do with anything like a hereditary sin original to our being. Jesus' teachings also make no mention of an evil inherent in our nature.

If we would actually read the Bible in place of listening to what others tell us the Bible says, we will find that Genesis depicts no fall by which humankind dropped from a higher to a lower state of being. There was no ontological descent. The movement was horizontal and not vertical: Adam and Eve were simply displaced from the garden where food was abundantly available: "No more free lunch."

Fundamentalists who insist on the literal inerrancy of books like Genesis find that their interpretations are contradicted by modern geology, biology, cosmology, the books themselves and God knows what else. But there is considerable anthropological and archeological evidence to support the Genesis account of ancient history if we regard it from the perspective of what the people who composed it were truly familiar with and could in truth bear witness to. And if we do we will find that what it tells us is of no small importance. Genesis portrays

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what Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have called "the most significant event in the history of mankind": the "invention of agriculture." As the anthropologist, John Pfeiffer, put it, the "shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture" marks "the most radical development in [humankind's] evolutionary record." The agrarian revolution, or more correctly the evolution of agriculture, occurred independently in several places round the globe: in Meso-America, the Andes and Amazonia in the Western Hemisphere around 3500 B.C.E., in the far East by about 7500 B.C.E., but it first occurred in southwest Asia, in the Fertile Crescent and then greater Mesopotamia around 8500 B.C.E.--the area in and around modern Iraq which scholars take to be the area described in the Eden story. And the notion, similar to what we find in Genesis, that humankind enjoyed a better life before the advent of agriculture persisted into the time of Ovid (42 B.C.E.-18 C.E.) and well beyond. Metamorphoses notes that at one time "Earth, untroubled,/Unharried by hoe or plowshare, brought forth all/That men had need for, and those men were happy,/Gathering berries from the mountain sides,/Cherries or blackcaps, and the edible acorns. . . ./Earth unplowed, brought forth rich grain; the field,/Unfallowed, whitened with wheat."

The story of Eden was thus transmitted in the same area and around the same time period that agriculture first evolved, from approximately the 10th through the 9th centuries B.C.E. in ancient Mesopotamia, and it reached its final form in settlements which had long ago selected and cultivated a variety of edible plants. But before humans began domesticating food and even long after, much of the plant life they encountered was not edible--only about .1% per acre in the wild

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is edible as compared with 90% per cultivated acre. Moreover a lot of the fruits that looked tasty to the innocent eye could be poisonous, and anyone who didn't learn to discern good fruit from bad might surely die. So if we situate the Eden myth within the context and from the perspective of people acquainted with the benefits and hazards of gathering sustenance from the wild, a people also well acquainted with the difficulties of farming and the troubles of a civilized life, the story takes on a significance different from the tales of disobedience and sin we have come to know and accept.

The events portrayed in Genesis tell of humankind's emergence from a mixed economy of hunters, gatherers, and gardeners to a complex society including hunters, gatherers, gardeners, but now also farmers and herders. Moreover, just as the industrial revolution was made possible by a prior revolutionary shift in the way men regarded the world, so, according to Genesis, did Eve initiate a fundamental change in the way our ancestors looked at things which led to the advent of the agricultural way of life. It depicts what other sources confirm, that civilization, with all its advantages and difficulties, arose out of a particular kind of knowledge that humans originally acquired--a knowledge, in this instance, of how to plant and harvest food.

As Pfeiffer has noted, the "hunter-gatherers on the verge of agriculture," the "first farmers or proto-farmers seem to have been gardeners," living in or near "gardens containing a few fruit and nut trees," but growing in "apparent disorder" so that the gardens looked like "miniature versions or imitations of the . . . forests surrounding them." So although Adam lived in a garden that appeared hardly any

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