The Original Sin of Agriculture: Knowledge of Good and Evil

One of the most interesting aspects of this discussion, particularly in Ishmael, is the application to the interpretation of biblical texts. This series is called the “original sin” of agriculture in part because of the interpretation of Genesis 3 and 4 in Ishmael. Chapters 3 and 4 tell the story of the Fall and Cain and Abel respectively. These are stories that are embedded in our culture and ones we read with a lot of assumptions and preconceptions. Without disregarding many of those readings of these texts, let’s try to hear a fresh interpretation and ask what it might contribute to our understanding of sin, history and agriculture.

We’ll begin with Cain and Abel. This story is clearly about the rivalry between two kinds of agriculture, farmers and shepherds. Ishmael contends that this represents the rivalry between Takers and Leavers. Cain, representing Takers, conquers Abel, representing Leavers, through violence as he murders his brother. This is a story told by Leavers against Takers. The nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life is threatened by the surging agriculture and social changes the Takers advocate. After Abel’s murder Cain and his descendants go on to found the first city, domesticated animals, musical instruments, tools of bronze and iron basically all the building blocks of civilization and culture as we know it, agriculture, weapons, art and cities.

Ishmael describes the story of the Fall in Genesis 3 through an alternate mythology. In his interpretation the gods struggle with knowing who should live and who should die. For example, from one perspective it seems right for the lion to kill his prey, a deer, one day in order to keep the population down and feed the lion. However, from another perspective shouldn’t the deer live in order to feed on the grasses and play its role in the ecosystem. You see the conundrum? How do you decide when to let the deer escape and when it should die, along with millions of other decisions within a given ecosystem? The gods decide that one day the deer will live and the next it will be food without any real reason or explanation. It’s left a mystery.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil has always been kind of a mystery. There have been many different ideas and interpretations about what it means or represents. None have ever been very satisfying to me. Ishmael suggests that the knowledge of good and evil is the knowledge of who should live and who should die. The consequence of Adam and Eve eating from the tree was not that they actually possessed this knowledge, but that they thought they possessed this knowledge.

So, what’s the original sin of agriculture? The Leavers originally told the stories of creation and fall to point out the problems in Taker’s way of life, but Takers took it as a flaw in human beings in general. Takers believed that the reason they were not able to ultimately free themselves from the constraints and limitations of creation was something inherently wrong with themselves as human beings and not their way of life.

The original sin of agriculture is the notion that we, humans, possess a kind of knowledge that we do not. We believe that we are able to manipulate and control nature, bending it toward our ends in order to become masters over it and eventually free ourselves from it. The sin is that this way of thinking about who we are and how we are related to the earth is a lie.

This is the final post in a series exploring basic assumptions about agriculture, history and our relationship to creation: The Original Sin of Agriculture Part I, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Food in the Bible: Sabbath

When I wrote the post on Joseph’s experiment in redistribution, I was stunned by what I found. It is still profoundly disappointing to see such injustice, particularly in our own scripture. As I pondered that, however, I thought that perhaps the Year of Jubilee in Leviticus 25 is the antidote. In Joseph’s story he tries to bring about a just distribution of goods and fails miserably. In Leviticus 25 we are given a model that seems to undo this kind of injustice, but scholars tell us it was probably never tried. This idea that Jubilee is the antidote to our failing human efforts at justice brings me to a foundational concept in Scripture that serves as a basis for much of my thinking on food, poverty and justice… Sabbath.

J.D. Crossan in God and Empire says, “It is not humanity on the sixth day but the Sabbath on the seventh day that is the climax of creation… our ‘dominion’ over the world is not ownership but stewardship under the God of the Sabbath” (53). The reason that scripture gives for observing the Sabbath is not worship, which most Christians and maybe Jews seem to think. The reason given is so that the slaves and foreigners could have rest as well (Ex 23:12; Deut 5:14). Again Crossan says,

The Sabbath Day was not rest for worship, but rest as worship… In summary, the Sabbath was about the justice of equality as the crown of creation itself (54).

The Sabbath Day is extended to the Sabbath Year (Ex 21:2 and Deut 15) and finally the Sabbath Jubilee (Lev 25). Every seventh year both male and female slaves were to be set free and debts were remitted, or forgiven. Provisions are given for both male and females to ensure that they are cared for within the social context of the time. Both male and female slaves are to be restored to a just and equal standing in the community when they are set free. Deuteronomy warns that masters should not consider this a hardship. Lenders are also warned that they should not withhold loans from their needy neighbors when the seventh year is close. “Your neighbor might cry to the Lord against you, and you would incur guilt” (Deut 15:9)

The Jubilee goes even further by commanding that every seventh Sabbath Years “you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family” (Lev 25:10). God had divided the land up between the tribes, but knew that inevitably inequality and injustice would creep in. The Jubilee is the final rule that prevents inequality from remaining within the people of God. Lest we think this applies only to Israel or the church, remember that the purpose of God’s covenant with Abraham constituting the people of God was that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3). Israel was meant to be a model to the rest of the nations of what it meant to live in relation to God and each other.

The Sabbath was not just about people either.

“For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard and your olive orchard” (Ex 23:10-11).

The whole of creation rests on a foundation of balance between work and rest. This passage also clearly indicates the relationship between the work and rest of the land and the people as well as the implications for equality and justice. Thus the right ordering of relationships, between people and between people and the earth involves a balance of work and rest which ultimately results in just distribution of resources.

Crossan sums it up by saying that through the progression of Sabbath laws “we can see clearly the demand of God for a just distribution of land-as-life based on the creation theology in Genesis 1:1-2:4a” (71).

Joseph’s Experiment With Redistribution

I’m shifting my schedule by a day this week for this extra post on the Joseph story.

In a recent Food in the Bible post on Exodus 3:7-8 one of the intelligent readers of this blog (if you read my blog I assume you must be above average and good-looking) asked a question about my charcterization of Joseph’s policy to deal with famine as “misguided.” Wasn’t it God’s will for Joseph to interpret the dreams and save the people from famine (including his own family)? If the policy was wrong, then was God wrong? I think it will help to look closely at the text.

First let’s look at what Joseph’s actual plan was for dealing with the famine,

Let Pharaoh proceed to appoint overseers over the land, and take one-fifth of the produce of the land of Egypt during the seven plenteous years. Let them gather all the food of these good years that are coming, and lay up grain under the authority of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it. That food shall be a reserve for the land against the seven years of famine that are to befall the land of Egypt, so that the land may not perish through the famine. (41:34-36)

So, take one-fifth of the produce of the land and store it up for the seven bad years. Good idea. What happens when the time comes?

He gathered up all the food of the seven years when there was plenty in the land of Egypt, and stored up food in the cities; he stored up in every city the food from the fields around it. So Joseph stored up grain in such abundance–like the sand of the sea–that he stopped measuring it; it was beyond measure. (41:48-49)

It says that Joseph stored up all the food. The plan was pretty specific about storing only one-fifth of the produce, so I take the general term “all” to mean that Joseph did not follow this policy. The description of the amount of food is intended to make clear exactly how ridiculous the amount of food he stored was. I will speculate that Joseph took as much food as he could without people dying. So, the people lived a subsistence existence only keeping enough food to survive on.

Why did Joseph do this? We don’t know. Maybe he was worried that one-fifth wouldn’t be enough. Maybe the power got to him. It tends to do that as we see when we turn to the famine years in chapter 47.

Now there was no food in all the land, for the famine was very severe… Joseph collected all the money to be found in the land of Egypt and in the land of Canaan, in exchange for the grain that they bought; and Joseph brought the money into Pharaoh’s house. (47:13a, 14)

Next the Egyptians come asking for more food. So, Joseph asks for their livestock. That goes on for a year until the livestock are all gone. (It’s worth noting here that the livestock and the money are not “all gone.” They are now the property of Pharaoh.) So, the people again ask for food saying, “Buy us and our land in exchange for food…just give us seed, so that we may live and not die.” (47:19). They are forced to sell themselves into slavery and leave themselves landless. Well, now who is going to work the land? The landless slaves of course.

“Now that I have this day bought you and your land for Pharaoh, here is seed for you; so the land. And at the harvests you shall give one-fifth to Pharaoh, and four-fifths shall be your own, as seed for the field and as food for yourselves and your households, and as food for your little ones” (47:23-24)

Lest we forget, this is in the midst of a famine. The reason they are coming to Joseph is because they have no food and can grow no food. His solution is to take their land and their freedom and tell them to go back to the land they no longer own and try growing some food. Notice that the specific number of one-fifth returns at this point. Now that the people have become landless slaves, Joseph is handing out seeds instead of food (Where did the “sea” of food go?). Now that he’s forcing the people to grow the food he promised them he’s also requiring them to give the one-fifth that was supposed to be collected during the years of abundance, not the years of famine. Joseph says it all with a big smile as if he’s doing them a favor.

So, there are probably a number of ways of interpreting this. 1) You could claim that the whole thing was God’s will. What we perceive as injustice and/or suffering might just be part of God’s bigger plan (i.e. bringing the Hebrew people out of slavery later to create the nation of Israel) 2) You could claim that Joseph’s original policy was God’s will and he botched it because of his own greed, incompetence or both. Or 3) it is not at all clear from the text that Joseph’s policy was given by God at all.

The first option makes light of suffering, injustice and evil and cannot be reconciled with the portrait of YHWH as a God of justice. The second option is fine if you need the plan of action to be ordained by God for some reason, but it seems to me from the text that the policy was Joseph’s idea. It might have worked out better if he had followed through, but he didn’t.

I think the Bible is made up of some passages that describe the way the world should be and some that just describe the way things are. My opinion is that this falls into the latter category.

The Long and Short of It

Tonight I am teaching at Meadow Oaks Baptist Church where I’ve been a member for about 4 years. I am teaching about my journey and calling toward agricultural missions and understanding the role food plays in our lives, globalization and justice. This is a pretty concise summation of why food is so important, my theology of mission and how food fits into God’s mission for the world. By concise I mean I had to cut a whole lot of important stuff out. Luckily I have a wife who listens to me ramble and tells me which parts to cut and which parts don’t make sense. So this is both very long for a blog post, but too short to say everything I wanted.

The full text after the jump.

Food in the Bible: Genesis 49:20

Asher’s food shall be rich, and he shall provide royal delicacies.

This is part of Jacob’s final blessings to all his sons before they die. Some of the blessings are convoluted and don’t amount to much of a blessing. Asher’s is pretty straightforward. I only include it because my son’s name is Asher and it involves food.