This idea comes from the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. It is shortened from a whole chapter, I wanted to see what people thought of it.

2,000 years ago, the peoples of the agricultural revolution (which started around 8,000 BC and according to Quinn, never ended) took a story as their own, written about them by those who they killed, the hunter-gatherers. After a while, they didn't know what the story meant, and ironically it was about their own origin. They passed it on to their children's children, and so on, until it became myth.

For now, we're going to call the people of the agricultural revolution "civilized" or as Quinn says,"Takers" and the hunter-gatherers "primitive" or as Quinn says, "leavers".

Got it?

Agriculturalists=Civilized=Takers

Hunter-Gatherers/Herders=Primitive=Leavers

K.

The takers believe they have knowledge which the leavers lack. This knowledge could enable them to rule the world.

Let's go back a little.

The Gods created the garden of eden and all the animals and bugs within it. They were having disputes about which bug should eat which, as well as for creatures. They could not decide which was right or wrong because they looked at all creatures as equals. It was clear to them that any action they take would be good to some and evil to others.

They decided to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. By deciding one day the predator would go hungry and the prey would live, and the next day the predator would eat and the prey would die, they believed both acts cancelled each other out and they had achieved balance. (The Circle of Life if you will)

The other God who didn't eat from the tree used the same reasoning they used before eating from the tree. This God told them surely they are still doing the same thing. When he ate from the tree, he said "Yes, I see now". They realized this tree possessed the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die

The Gods saw Adam awakening. They saw he was very fair, and discussed whether or not they should give him the tree of "life" (NOT the tree of knowledge of good and evil) when he had reached adulthood. Another said why give it to him instead of let him seek it on his own? Letting him find it may give him great wisdom. We shall give him the care he needs as a child, then a quest as an adult. They decided they would let him find the tree of life on his own, rather than just give it to him. They also believed that him eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would not give him the knowledge of good and evil, because they knew only they could possess that knowledge. They thought the thought of him touching it was absurd, because believing he has the knowledge of right and wrong would only be illusion.

One of the Gods said "Adam would just say 'whatever I can justify is good and whatever I cannot justify is evil'". The other Gods scoffed, saying this was not the knowledge of good and evil. They said he might look in the garden and say "what's this, the lions and wolves and foxes take the food that I want to eat. This is evil. I will kill these creatures and this will be good.

"Look here, the rabbits and grasshoppers take the fruits that I would eat. This is evil. I will kill them and it will be good. I will kill all kinds who do not serve my growth, and it will be good. Because these things are good, they must be done at any cost. Even when all the resources of this land and world are used up, I will tell others like me to grow, for this is good. I will go across the lands telling them to grow. When they can grow no more, they will fall upon the people of new land and murder them, so they can grow more."

When the Gods saw this, they decided the tree could ruin Adam by making him follow a delusion that he is above all others on the planet. They knew this could bring his own species to extinction. So one of them told him not to eat from it.

Posting part 2 in a minute...

[This message has been edited by Fuck (edited 09-10-2003).]

They told him to eat from every tree in the garden, to let him find the tree of life on his own, except for the tree of good and evil. On that day, he would certainly die. He would bring all others who believed that what they could justify was right and what they couldn't justify was wrong, to destruction.

According to "taker" (refer to last post) mythology, man is supposed to rule the world. Having the knowledge of good and evil would be the most beneficial. So why would the Gods withhold this knowledge? From the taker point of view, it makes no sense. The disaster of how the world came to be the way it is was when 10,000 years ago, the people of our culture took into their own hands the power of life and death. When they did this, their doom was assured.

For 3 million years, the leavers had lived succesfully, taking only what they needed to live, and letting others do as they wished. For billions of years, the Gods had ruled the universe just fine. After a few thousand years, under human rule, the world is at the point of its death.

The story of Adam was written from a leaver point of view. If it were written from a taker's point of view, the Gods would have thrust the tree upon him saying "You're nothing without this knowledge. Stop living like a lion or bat. You'll realize that you're naked, naked to the world: powerless. Then you can leave the garden and live off the sweat of your brow, just like humans should live."

The takers demonstrated that they believed they knew what was right, by forcing others to live as they do, to do what they do, what they believed to be the one, right way to live. There was nothing you could do to avoid the spread of this civilization, because once you were in it, you had to play your role even if you didn't want to. The only freedom would be through death. To play your role in this story of this culture that believed they knew who should live and die. It seemed simply to be their destiny.

Many peoples of the leavers practiced agriculture but they never had the delusion that what they were doing was right and that everyone in the world should be doing it. They didn't stop the hunter-gatherers from doing what they pleased because they did not decide if it was right or wrong. The only thing they knew was what they preferred. If they didn't like agriculture, they would give it up. They didn't keep going because they thought it was the right way to live. The leavers, being alive for 3 million years, had room to evolve because their style of life would never destroy the planet. The takers however...

The takers could not give up their way of life because they believed it was right. Giving it up would mean all along that they were wrong. it would mean they were not as godly as they had believed all along.

Now, according to the leaver's mythical tale of the origin of the takers, it occured in the fertile cresent. Obviously, they could not have seen it with their own eyes because that would mean they would be takers, in which case the story would be different. Among the Hebrews, this story was already ancient. So we know they did not write it. They had stepped into the world as takers, and wished to live just like their neighbor takers. The Hebrews kept this story of creation, though they didn't even understand it. The ones who understood it were ancestors of the Hebrews, the Semites.

When the takers came into the world, the nonagriculturalists were all over the map around them. According to the map (in the book I'm getting this from), The Semites were not eyewitnesses to the events in Genesis, in fact they lived hundreds of miles south of the fertile cresent. According to the map, the peoples from this land were not the Semites, but the Caucasians. The leavers were not even aware these people existed until a later time...

Now, in 4500 B.C., the Leavers were well aware of who these people were. By the time the expansion of the agricultural revolution had reached them, they were no longer hunter-gatherers but herders (pastoralists). So what is happening here? How did the leavers and takers interact?

(Next post... I know this is long but its worth a read)

[This message has been edited by Fuck (edited 09-10-2003).]

Refer to the story of Cain and Abel

Genesis 4:2 ...Abel kept flocks (herder, leaver) and Cain worked the soil (agriculturalist, taker)

Genesis 4:8 "Now Cain said to his brother 'lets go out to the field.' And while they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him"

What was happening was that the takers were killing off the leavers to make more land for cultivation. There, at the border that separates tillers of the soil from Semitic herders, Cain and Abel confront each other. This is why in the story God favored Abel over Cain. The Semites were passing onto their children "God is on our side, but hates those tillers from the north"

At this point, a person in "Ishmael" points out that the mark of Cain might be being caucasian, but Ishmael (another character in the book who is telling the genesis myth) shrugs it off and says "it could be, we dont known what the authors had in mind" The person points out that the mark meant "leave this man alone. This is a dangerous man, one whno exacts a sevenfold venngeance" and that people around the world have learned not to mess with caucasians. (look up the word "semites" on dictionary.com, and then "anti-semitic". According to the dictionary, "semites" does not only mean jews)

Eventually many of the leavers would be destroyed or have to follow the taker lifestyle, and get rid of their own. However, the agriculturalists were never completely able to overrun the semites. They simply rejected the taker's way of life, and that is how the story of genesis was not lost, among many other leaver stories that were. The Semites descendants, the Hebrews (who took up the taker lifestyle) preserved the story even though they did not understand it. And this is how it happened that, through the spread of Christianity and of the Old Testament, the takers took the story of their enemies once told to denounce them.

The theory continues (if you're still reading this, I'm terribly sorry it's so long, it's a whole chapter I'm trying to shorten here)

So why the tree of good and evil? When the spread of agriculture began, the semites looked at their brothers from the north and wondered "how the fuck did they get like this?" they weren't simply baring their teeth at you when you came near their territory, letting you know they were there (as many leavers did). They weren't doing this, they were saying the leavers have got to die. It was something new and the semites just couldn't understand it. "They're not just killing us, they're killing everything. They're saying EVERYTHING has to die. They're saying 'okay lions, you're dead. Get out.' They're saying nobody eats besides them. Everything belongs to them. They decide who lives and who dies, what is good and what is evil They're acting as if they were the God's themselves, as if they eat from the God's own tree of wisdom. Yes, that's what happened. They found the tree of wisdom and stole it's fruit. That's why the Gods got pissed at them and kicked them out, and told them to work the soil (agriculture) by the sweat of their brow. This is why they came down here and decided to kill us."

What indicates this story is from the enemies of agriculturalists is that in it agriculture is not a choice, it is a curse. they didn't think anyone would WANT to live by the sweat of their brow.

Speaking mythologically and not chronologically, Adam means "man" (in Hebrew) and we already know both Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam. The relationships in the story have to be looked at metaphorically though...The semites didn't believe they were descendants of man. As they percieved it "The fall of man" (story of Genesis) divided man into two, herders and tillers of the soil. Also, when you have a father and 2 sons, almost always, the firstborn is the unworthy one in the end, and he favors the second son more.

You have to ask yourself why the agriculturalists were pushing through so much. The need for land, more food was because their population was growing, where population control was always an important issue among leavers. After they ate from the tree, symbolically, mankind (adam) decided he can say "yes" to life (The name Eve means Life) and grow without limit. Adam would say yes to Eve when it came to spreading and not controlling population. When there were more people, they would just kill off more leavers and make more land for themselves. You can see this in many instances of history. Whenever a taker couple (people of the human race today) look forward to having a baby and a family, they're reenacting the scene of Genesis. They decide they can have as many kids as they want, as long as they have enough to pay for it, as long as there are enough rainforests to die for their school paper, as long as enough animals die to feed them. It is not an issue because they don't think of these things, or put them in the back of their mind, or just not care because these things are NORMAL to taker culture.

However, this story doesn't work out in our present knowledge because agriculture was taking place in many other parts of the world, not just the fertile cresent where the Leavers who wrote this story wrote about. They didn't know this. For all they knew, that little corner of the world they lived on could have been all that existed. The story remained. This story is known in the West but as in the East as well because of Christian Missionaries. Takers seem to be attracted to this story everywhere, because it tries to explain what went wrong here, and how things came to be the way they are in the world.

The book goes on, but I'll let you all go read it on your own rather that type it all out. Needless to say, it's quite interesting.

(I'm not sure if I'm breaking copyright law, but this isn't copied exactly from the book, in fact I don't think there's even one sentence that is an exact quote from the book. If there is a problem with this thread, mods feel free to close it. I just thought this idea was interesting after I read this book, and wanted to see what you guys thought of it...at least those of you who had 4 hours to read it all)

The Leavers learned to ride horses and, eventually, fire a composite bow at full gallop. They henceforth set upon civilization every century or so, killing, raping, pillaging, and generally destroying the proceeds of the Takers' honest work. This continued on for thousands of years, until pastoral raids reached their crescendo with the campaigns of Chingis Khan, and then petered out.

I cannot describe to you how much I fucking hate this book. It's completely riddled with logical and historical errors, and the ridiculous portrayal of Leaver societies as peaceful and tolerant is just one of his most glaring trespasses. Seriously, dude, primitive peoples, and the Leaver tribes that survive to this day, were not and are not nice people. The !Kung have a murder rate higher than New York's. The Yanomamo of Brazil measure the greatness of their men by how many sexual assaults they've committed. And of course there's the Scythians, Medians, Cimmerians, Mongols, Huns, Magyars, Dorians, and all the other pastoral nomads that repeatedly assaulted the decent, hard-working folk of the world.

Sorry for the rant, but that book is just stupid. What really stung is that everyone else in my Humanities class completely fell for it. Morons.

Just to let people know, I have not done my homework on this idea of leaver/taker culture in the book. I was simply interested in the metaphorical view of Genesis. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with any of it, just food for thought, ya know? Anything metaphorical, even if it's totaly shit to some, makes people look at things commonly known (like genesis) in a different way than usual (believing it literally).

I guess I'm trying to say this post was more aimed at having metaphorical views of the bible...I'm very bad at history and I'm sure there are probably plenty of errors here, some you have pointed out. know what I mean? I'm also interested in seeing a total opposite opinion of Quinn regarding who wrote the chapter of genesis.

Food for thought, nothing more.

That's the thing - nobody knows who wrote the Book of Genesis. Including Daniel Quinn. It's pure speculation, and nothing more.

God, just talking about that book is pissing me off. I need a cigarette.