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Essay on Agriculture in the Old Testament
Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as sovereignty preceded domesication and self-domestication, the balanced and the social precede the symbolic. Food production, it is perpetually and appreciatively acknowledged, "permitted the cultural potentiality of the human species to develop." But what is this tendency toward the symbolic, toward the elaboration and imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity for objectification, by which what is living becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more that the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences.
To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. The name for it PONOS has the same root as the Latin POENA, sorrow. The famous Old Testament curse on agriculture and the expulsion from Paradise (Genesis 3:17-18) reminds us of the origin of work. As Mumford put it, "Conformity, repetition, patience, was the keys to this culture the patient capacity for work." In this monotony and passivity of tending and waiting is born, according to Paul Shepard, the peasant's "deep, latent resentments, crude mixtures of rectitude and heaviness, and absence of humor." One might also add a stoic insensitivity and lack of imagination inseparable from religious faith, sullenness, and suspicion among traits widely attributed to the domesticated life of farming.
Although food production by its nature includes a latent readiness for political domination, and although civilizing culture was from the beginning its own propaganda machine, this changeover involved a monumental struggle. (White, Lynn Jr)Adam and Eve produced a number of sons and daughters. (This is stressed in Genesis 5.4). They grew up to manhood and womanhood, and because later problems did not affect them in their primitive state they were able to intermarry quite happily and produce many children.......
