I'm not sure if this has been done before, but since this is a religious forum everything has been done before, so I decided to give it a little introduction in case people missed it.

Daniel Quinn, author of books such as Ishmael and The Story Of B came up with the most unique and original interpretation of The Bible's Genesis that I've ever read. We've all heard St. Augustine's bit about original sin, we've all been over whether it was a metaphor for sex, or if it's merely a tautalogy about innocense, a test of obedience, and they all wind up spinning contradictory notions that people produce paradoxes with. If God knows this why did he do that, and all of that fun jive. What Quinn did was approach it from a different angle.

Who wrote Genesis?

One would be inclined to say the jews, but historically who are the jews? Where is their ancestory?

The Semites.

If you take a look at a map of groupings of peoples (tribes if you'd like) around the time of the Agricultural Revolution you'll find that the semites lived directly underneath the fertile crescent, and this area would have been some of the first people affected by the Agricultural Revolution outside of the Fertile Crescent. Now, the Agricultural Revolution did a number of things, when you read it in history books you read it as the dawn of mankind as we know it (despite the fact that, looked at historically, this is a very very recent devolpment 10,000 years in the making compared to the millions) It released us from our nomadic ancestory, having to count on nature to supply us with food, as, up until this point, mankind was primarily Hunter and Gatherers. With this surplus of food, however, comes a raise in population (ask any biologist) which does a few things. It makes the structure of civilization possible with government and power and all that ensues, it allows for technologies to develop as we conquer the world, and it means that eventually we'll have to expand our territories to allow more space to grow more food to feed all the more people.

So people expand out past the Agricultural Revolution and come into contact with the people outside who are still living as hunter gatherers. The problem is that the Agricultural Revolutionists need this land; they need the soil to till. The semites are nomads, and herders; they don't want to work the farms, and want nothing to do with the structure of civilization that is arising.

Anthropology will consistently show that hunter-gatherer cultures are egalitarian.

So what's to be done? The Agricultural Revolutionist need the land. Well thanks to technological development they slaughter everybody and take the land. Then they forever expand outwards, to this day, wandering and never satisfied. To Africa, killing cultures and planting; through Europe.

Need I talk about Manifest Destiny?

The knowledge that these Agricultural Revolutions have that the tribes didn't have was the knowledge that allows them to decide who lives and who dies, which is the right way to live and the wrong. The knowledge of Good and Evil.

Which one was Cain, and which one was Abel again?

This is an oversimplification, and I'm sorry, but I must leave it at that due to time constraints and fatigue, but I hope I've outlined it to an understandable degree, and that I can return after work, and maybe sleep, to a fruitful discussion. The main point is the irony that the people trumpeting the mode of living of the tillers of the soil are the same people claiming to be doing all of this in the God that Genesis talks about.

Screwy lil' ol' world, ain't it?

Nothing?

Seriously?

I make a post implying that christians, and the world of empires in general, are the biblical figure of cain still wandering the Earth killing abel wherever they go; that Adam is us as we decide who lives and dies in our complicated civilization of conquering the world, and I get nothing?

God can't make a rock too heavy for him not to life a bit more enlightening?

A list of nonsensical atheist stereotypes a bit more thought provoking?

I read it. Killed 4 minutes at work, and for that - I thank you http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif (http://www.totse.com/bbs/smile.gif)

I call the book of genesis war propaganda written by semite hunter gatherers, and all you say is thank you for killing time?

You're welcome, I guess.

I suppose, but how does the metaphore of obediance to God and the whole tree of life, forbidden fruit, etc. fit in to your interpretation? If humanity is Adam considering the state of the world as agriculturalists (Cain) kill off the nomadic hunter-gatherers (Abel) then doesn't that mean that Cain and Adam are the same person/group of people? Plus that would mean that agriculturalists are evil and that hunter-gatherers had it right about how to live. After all, Abel was the one who actually made an appropriate sacrifice to God and made all the right choices. Cain was the bad boy.

I would rather think that it was an early attempt to show that there are consequences for wrong actions and that sacrifices must be made for the good of the group, classic social requirements.

Adam, quite literally, means man.

I attempted to summarize as best I could Daniel Quinn's theory, and, of course, in the process I left out a great deal, and took short cuts in description that left other's a great deal of interpreting to do. I will attempt to elaborate but, like when I wrote the first post, I'm very tired; I seem perpetually exhausted. But I will attempt to clarify some of your questions.

The metaphor of obedience to God would only have to fit into this interpretation if I were taking this meaning as a starting point, but I'm not. What this interpretation is attempting to do is find out who wrote Genesis and just what they were trying to convey. Although it does speak of a defiant sort of behavior of mankind.

The tree of life v. the tree of knowledge is a good point though, and I think it may help better express the rest of the meaning put into it.

In the Garden of Eden, God's in charge, no? Adam and Eve don't have to plant anything, they don't have to worry about culture, government, enemies, war, infringement upon their freedom, people stealing their crops, etc. God's got their backs. It isn't until they eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil that they are expelled and have to fend for themselves, living by the sweat of their brough. Now, why is this?

Classic interpretation, that is St. Augustine's interpretation, is that this is original sin which is the root of all Christian Guilt up until this point. The emphasis being that human beings are flawed and that this world isn't the good world, not the real life, but the next one is.

What's different about this interpretation, that is to say Daniel Quinn's interpretation, is the sense of allegory within a historical context (or prehistory, as if the millions of years of human history before "history" were insignificant). What is Good and Evil? We can get into a huge argument, mostly over semantics, about this discussion, but let us use this in the extreme judgement kind of sense: the decision on who lives and who dies. Daniel Quinn uses examples of animals out in "the wild": If an Owl is hunting a mouse, if the owl catches the mouse than it's good for the owl but evil for the mouse, should the mouse escape than this is good for the mouse and evil for the owl.

What's unique about the agricultural revolution (what was occuring before the agricultural revolution caused a population explosion causing cain to expand, seeking more fertile soil to feed the swelling cities, namely: the apple part of Genesis) is that for the first time in history a species decides who lives and who dies, not for their own interest of simple survival, but for the prolonged surplus of their food supply. This means killing things not for the sole purpose of eating it.

Killing the fox because it is after your chicken; killing the weeds and the moles because they are after your crops; killing naturally occuring plants in favor of the plants you would like to eat, or to feed your livestock; etc. etc. etc.

This means that mankind takes the position of God, the possesor of the knowledge of Good and Evil: who lives, and who dies. We choose to take reigns over the world because, for some reason, we think that God (or the gods or whatever) weren't doing such a bang-up job before then: the billions of years prior.

So we disrupt the balance, we no longer find the "Tree of Life" good enough, we want to decide who lives and dies, we want to decide just what this world's destiny is, so we take control of our destinies and forever live off the sweat of our brough.

Naturally, hunter-gatherers would find this a bizarre way of interacting with the world as they have about 2-3 hours of what we might consider "work", (agriculture, on the other hand, is an extremely labor-intensive mode of living) live just fine, populations don't swell, governmental corruption is an abstraction they'll never imagine, etc. etc. etc.

The lesson to pick up here is that for the longest time mankind assumed that the way we live (agriculture spreading into cities, spreading into government, spreading into states, spreading into empires, etc.) is the natural way for us to live; as natural as bees making hives, and in many instances people have used the bible to justify this saying that we were born agriculturalist, civilization builders, the world is some 6,000 years old, and we, mankind, were put here at the creation along with everything else and are in charge of the world's fate because everything else here was put here for our use so who gives a fuck if 200 species a day are dying, this is the way life is.

You have to think differently about yourself, your culture, and religion in general. You can't think of it within the context of your culture, it was written in a much different time.

We've, essentially, chosen the path of achilles: an intense, short-lived life, rather than a sacred and a life that goes on indefinitely.

¨What have you done? Your brothers blood cries out from the earth!¨

Ishmael made a lot of sense.

Something Daniel Quinn doesn´t go into is the prophecy about the mark of the beast. I don´t know the exact wording, having not read it, but it talks about a time when all men who buy and sell will have to bear a number on their hand or forehead. Barcode implant?

I´d say the bible is one of the most misunderstood books that exists.

Quinn goes a bit into the mark of the beast (well, the antichrist anyway) in his book The Story of B, but I think it more a play on semantics, and find the bar code representation a bit more accurate. At least in the metaphorical stance, and probably only because it seems contemporary what with the world economy choking the life out of any culture not a part of it, and the more subtle complexities involved in the fast-paced world of contemporary commerce.

If you don't have your Social Security Number then you don't exist, at least as far as the world is concerned. How fucked up is that?

Quinn's take on the anti-christ is on the mission of whoever the anti-christ is. Basically what was christ's mission on earth? To save souls. Because in modern main stream religions the one thread that ties them all together is the interest in saving souls above all else: Christians teach that this life isn't the true life, and that the otherworldliness of heaven is what's most important in life, so the soul takes presedence over everything else. Bhuddists teach that reality is an illusion, and although there isn't really a 'soul' per se, the emphasis is still other worldly. Etc.

So what would the anti-christ preach amidst this amalgam of soul-first preaching? To save the world.

Of course this doesn't fit in to the rest of church doctrine as this would make the anti-christ anything but a doomsday bringer, which is why I find it a play on semantics, but the rest of the book goes into an excellent discussion on religion, and our role in the world.