Farming a divine calling? . . . think again
by Nicholas Klassen
Photo from the New Holland farm equipment magazine.
It’s an evocative image. The noble farmer rising at the break of day, toiling in earnest so we may be fed. Running soil through his fingers, adjusting his ball cap, squinting at the sky to gauge whether a storm is coming. It’s not a stretch to imagine farmers living out some sort of divine calling, that working the land is what we humans were “meant” to do.
I might be inclined to agree.
But then I read the book of Genesis, and, well, if you believe that account, the noble farmer is actually a disobedient child, serving out a millenia-old sentence, with farming as a form of punishment. Yeah, his ancestors lived in a bountiful garden paradise, until they were banished to plow the fields because they pissed God off. The supposed bucolic ideal is actually penance for disobeying our maker. Ouch.
But don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself:
Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return. (Genesis 3:17-19)
Seems unambiguous to me. Painful toil. Thorns and thistles. Cursed ground. Eating “the plants of the field” is not the sacrosanct act we’ve made it out to be; it’s actually an inescapable curse.
Now, before you try to dismiss the Genesis story as a “myth,” keep in mind that it’s a whopper of a worldview-shaper for us Western types – and by extension, those we colonized. It’s a story our ancestors have told for centuries to explain where we come from. Seen through this lens, then, the biblical Fall is a clear chronicle of our passage from hunter-gatherer to agriculturist. The primordial hunters’ world is represented by Eden, the paradise where God provides so long as we don’t muck with things too much. The Fall, in turn, represents the Neolithic revolution – the domestication of plants and animals (approximately 9,000 BCE).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t have to labor for our daily bread. But shouldn’t our most-foundational myth couch it in more favorable terms?
It continues. After the exile from paradise, Eve gave birth to Abel, who kept flocks, and Cain, who worked the soil. God was pleased with the herder, but not the tiller. Hence, an enraged farmer Cain killed his shepherd brother. In response, God condemned Cain to live as a “restless wanderer.” Cain proceeded to build the first city and ever since, his descendents have subsequently been driven by a perpetual need to colonize new territory.
So there you go. From foraging, to herding, to farming . . . and each step required offending God. Humans spent 290,000 years as hunter-gatherers; then a mere 10,000 years ago we embarked on an expansionist agricultural project that has become such a runaway “success” that we refuse to truly grapple with how unsustainable it is.
Nicholas Klassen is a former senior editor at Adbusters magazine and a principal at BiroCreative in Vancouver, BC.
Comment
Questions? Comments? editor@geezmagazine.org
hey
Hope I can be forgiven for truly not understanding the point here. Genesis disses farming so maybe it’s like, a bad thing?
Is the point that farming is unsustainable? These days, so is herding. Goats are more or less an eco weapon of mass destruction in any dry or marginal ecosystem. Hunting isn’t necessarily any great shakes when it’s the main means of survival—we were overly good at killing long before rifles were invented. Gathering (always the real mainstay of true hunting cultures) — less impact for sure, and sustainable if the population is small. But only then.
Is the point that the Bible is sexist and most of it (creation story, myth, etc included) is going to value male work above female? That’s how I read Genesis: farming, originally conceived of by women, was gradually replacing hunting (male) and gathering (female), and enabled us to begin to domesticate animals. The guys (and thus by extension, God) were pissed and insecure. Hence the male dominated, ag-dissing myth/ long-term historical account of the first chapters of Genesis. Maybe a rabbi or three could apply some insights here. They’re the experts on this part of what we call the Bible, and it’s rarely as straightforward as yours or my reading make it out to be.
As for our White bread colonizing ways: couldn’t agree with you more. One important point though: the heavily settled eastern third of “North America” was dependent on agriculture (and burning the forest understory back to allow for hunting too) long before Europeans heaved into view. Ditto for the Maya lands, the Andes and (possibly) even the Amazon. There’s a reason corn (which cannot grow without our assistance) figures in other creation stories. Have a read of 1491. Great book. It points out that agriculture can be sustainable over the long term.. meaning that your point about unsustainability should be applied to the way agriculture has been forced to “evolve” in North America, at this time, under a capitalist economic system.
Anyway, I find the Bible can be whatever you want it to be. Just ask the creation-dominator fans who also love Genesis. Maybe Genesis is relevant when describing industrial agriculture specifically…. Maybe a Middle Eastern read of the land is not relevant in the Aboriginal lands of Turtle Island….maybe Genesis really doesn’t have much to say about farming. I do know that I know farmers (male and female) like the “he” you describe. And they want to get out of the unsustainable trap we’ve indeed created, Genesis or not—and keep farming in a new way.
— Julie Graham · Jan 30, 09:01 PM · #
hear, hear!
i really appreciate the thoughts in this article.
— heidiann(e) · Jan 31, 06:58 PM · #
Well, here you go; falling into the same pattern of arbitrarly reading bits of the Bible through your self-righteous eyes and not grasping it for what it wants to say.
If you note a little bit earlier, humankind was given Eden to care for it. The point of the curse was that earth would still yield its’ stuff but we would actually have to sweat in order to produce anything useful. We worked before, now we have to work hard.
— harvey · Feb 20, 02:14 PM · #
I find the article interesting; however, I think Klassen is making a bit too much theological hay from the story of Cain and Abel. It is assuming too much, saying that God approved Abel’s offering more than Cain’s because of the kind of offering it was, thus giving a divine thumbs up to one form of work over and against another. Is that really what the text wishes to communicate? Perhaps, I don’t know. And if we take this story as some kind of foundation for our view of creation care, we ought not to forget that just a few chapters later God is well prepared to nearly destroy the world, via the Flood, because people were wicked at all times.
perhaps God’s anger at human apathy and wickedness is an even greater danger to the environment than human ‘footprints’.
— Marco · Mar 2, 11:38 PM · #
I agree with Julie and Harvey. I really don’t wish to be taken as unnecessarily critical, but I really did not understand the point of the article. Neither do I think the writing was up to par. Please take this only as constructive feedback.
Peace.
— brian · Mar 12, 05:20 AM · #
Props to Julie Graham for making some great critiques, and doing it not just for the sake of critiquing
— Luke · Mar 13, 01:17 PM · #
I think this is a poor reading of the text. Whether one takes it as literal or as myth or somewhere in-between, it is most certainly not obvious that your interpretation is accurate, or even more honest, plain, or profound. Have you not noticed that the work came before the “fall”, even if it may have been of a different sort? And what, exactly, are you attempting to criticize or contribute? Are you privy to an occurence of some deconstruction we could all benefit from? Are you setting something free from the violence of our typical reading of the text? Have you circumvented the mistakes that, if you are correct, have been made by the likes of John Milton or John Donne, Wendell Berry or Walter Bruggemann, to name a few? Or are you simply attempting to provoke people, challenge the assumptions of the counter-culture and move them into a deeper understanding of their positions? Please help us understand your point.
— Chris · Mar 30, 04:05 AM · #
Wouldn’t it be a divine calling anyways? The land is cursed but there are the farmers who are willing to try to grow food so we can eat.
I’d like to see normal people eat if everyone stopped farming. I see articles in the newspaper talking about if the world is going to run out of food. No, it’s not, but we won’t be able to eat as we are now. Pine needles are edible, but I don’t think people are going to want to eat them as a staple.
— Rachel · Jun 6, 02:59 AM · #
This isn’t the whole article. The one in the magazine made more sense and made a point at the end. (eg. the next sentence would’ve been “Now, I’m not suggesting we should turn back and become hunter-gatherers again…”)
Also, I thought about the same thing he was talking about in college while I studied anthropology. We have a myth of progress that this article questions, and the advent of agriculture is a seminal moment in the myth of progress.
“Somewhere along the line we have turned our exile from paradise and estrangement from our creator into a story of progress.” (he writes later)
That is why I liked this article. I think that is a very good point, would inform our desire to think more humbly about our way of life (which includes farmed food) and reminds us that “our domination of the planet is not a given.” Also, whether or not you want to read genesis this way (and I wouldn’t consider “care-taking” equal to farming) it fits well with anthropological data, and our notion of progress should still be questioned.
— Sarah Lynne · Jun 19, 04:17 PM · #