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The Fall From Grace

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Robert Tulip

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The Fall From Grace

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Here is a sermon I gave at Kippax Uniting Church on Sunday 6 June, using the Old Testament lectionary readings from https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.e ... php?id=205

Out of the Depths
Robbie Tulip
Kippax Uniting Church
Canberra, Australia
Sunday 6 June 2021

Our readings today are from the Old Testament, from Genesis, Samuel and the Psalms. The theme that brings them together is the fall from grace.

The fall is a simplified mythological story told to explain why there is evil in the world. We hear in our readings of the expulsion of humanity from paradise, of the fraught decision of ancient Israel to put trust in a king rather than in God, and of the Psalmist’s profound voice of hope from the depths of our anguish that God will forgive our sins.

The Genesis text begins with a remarkably human depiction of God on earth, strolling around in the garden of paradise in the cool of the evening. God is wondering what has happened to Adam and Eve, who are nowhere to be seen. As we know, they are hiding from God because their mentality has been transformed by eating the forbidden fruit and they are newly ashamed of their nakedness.

This story imagines the presence of God together with humanity in a world of peace and plenty, a picture of our ancestors in easy communication and dialogue with our divine Creator. That picture of divine harmony, life in a state of grace, then contrasts with the harsh news of the Fall. God expels Adam and Eve from Paradise for their breach of trust when they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The surface story of the fall invites us to explore its deeper meaning about the nature of human existence and history. The surface story is entirely symbolic, and its meaning points toward a remarkable match to the real events of big history. Big history is the emerging approach that places written records in the context of the whole of history, putting traditional stories into the context of archaeological, geological and cosmic time. Biblical interpretation can be placed in the context of the scholarly scientific accounts presented by big history, to see how the stories relate to what accepted research tells us actually happened.

The fall from grace into corruption is a central idea of the Christian theology of sin. The story of the fall seeks to explain the pervasive depravity of the world, the sense that humanity has lost our connection to God and is on a trajectory toward destruction. Looking at the Biblical story of the fall against big history, we can compare the mythology of the fall to the slow historic shift over many thousands of years from the nomadic economy of the stone age to the settled agrarian culture of Biblical times.

For tens of thousands of years through the ice age, all humanity lived in small clans moving around large areas, hunting for food and gathering wild plants. However, as population grew, people found that growing crops offered a more secure life, as the romantic image of freedom and abundance in stone age life became impossible. Settling in one place enabled the growth of technology, with major innovations including metal, writing, housing and agriculture.

Economic progress brought discovery of how to smelt copper and tin, then to combine these metals into bronze alloys, and then to use the higher temperatures needed to make iron tools and weapons. There is an interesting paradox here. The technological advances of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age over the millennia before Christ are seen in mythology as bringing a moral decline, a fall from grace.

The widespread myth tells of a descent from an original long golden age through successive morally worse and shorter ages of silver, bronze and iron, characterised by steadily growing ignorance and violence. This combination of material progress with spiritual decline is a key element of Biblical theology, firstly in the expulsion from paradise and then in the story of God’s anger inspiring the flood, and then in the demand from Israel for a king. Analysis in terms of big history has also shown a direct correlation between these changes in social organisation and underlying drivers of natural climate change.

The Bible picks up on this mythology in stories such as the murder of the nomadic herder Abel by his brother the settled tiller Cain. These sons of Adam and Eve came into conflict over divine favour. Cain won through violence, reflecting how agriculture created economic power and social hierarchy.

The Bible story can be read as a parable of how progress came at the price of the loss of the freedom enjoyed by the earlier smaller mobile human clans of the paleolithic period. The social control required to manage an agricultural economy enabled a larger population, but it also opened the way to methods of slavery and war, with systemic inequality between classes generating power and wealth by inflicting suffering. The agricultural diet provided more food but at lower quality, which is why people today see the paleo diet as more healthy.

These issues around the fall from grace flow through into the story of Samuel and Saul, where Israel faces a political dilemma, whether to maintain its old traditions of rule by men of God or to follow the path of other successful nations and appoint a king to rule over them. Samuel points out the likely negative effects of this decision – that a king will use absolute power to oppress and enslave and tax the population in arbitrary and unfair ways. But the elders can see the military risks of not having a king. They see that the unity brought by a rigid social hierarchy will enable defence of the land against invaders, whereas the older informal reliance on the wisdom of initiated elders and social equality lacked the efficiency needed to run a national army.

The elders point out to Samuel that they trust him but not his sons, showing that the old ways of handing on knowledge to govern the society are failing. The source of power is shifting from the knowledge of the elders to the economy of the king, as metal and writing and agriculture overwhelm the old traditions, and practices with roots in nomadic culture had to be abandoned.

This story of the demand for a monarchy reflects how the social evolution from nomadic to settled life required a hierarchical state. This social evolution brought the victory of monotheism over polytheism, as societies organised in larger units, and also the victory of patriarchy over the older morality that recognised greater local autonomy for small clans which had allowed greater equality between men and women.

There are many stories in the Bible that reflect what we could call the tectonic forces of social evolution. The story of the fall from grace is the big shift, as the changing economy forced changes in belief and social practice, coming like an earthquake after the plates of the earth had built up enough pressure.

One remarkable example of this shift of thinking is the second set of Ten Commandments issued by God to Moses, described at Exodus 34. The first command is to cut down the Asherah worship poles that communities used to worship the divine feminine. In early times the God of Israel was known as El, and was married to the goddess Asherah, reflecting a belief in gender equality, or at least female autonomy.

The divorce of Yahweh from Asherah led to this commandment from God to Moses to smash the Asherah religion. The underlying causes included the pressures of military security, as the people of Israel found that national defence required social unity that was impossible with the older decentralised systems of gender equality. Like the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, the destruction of older religions came like an earthquake for the society of Israel.

The Old Testament and Mosaic Law supported the system of hierarchical patriarchal monotheism that came into power as a direct response to economic and social forces that can be equated with the fall from grace. As a small nation surrounded by large empires, Israel had no choice but to ensure social unity and political security through shared religion. This situation brought forth the call of prophets like Samuel that the national unity of Israel required the moral unity that could only come from faith in God.

The prophets taught that the only hope for national sovereignty was found in divine sovereignty, and that faith in God would enable friendship between Israel and the great powers based on moral standing and reputation and mutual respect. The story of the prophets is that the failure of Israel to generate moral unity – a failure caused by the fall from grace - was a major factor in its loss of national political freedom.

The Bible puts all this material into the context of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Second Adam. As Saint Paul tells us, in a powerful symbolic myth in Romans 5:12, death came through Adam and life and grace came through Christ. My reading is that this message of redemption through Christ is the central story of human history, but in an entirely symbolic rather than literal meaning.

I mentioned the myth of descent from a golden age. This story appears in the Bible with King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue with head of gold and feet of clay explained by the prophet Daniel. This story of a lost golden age of wisdom and peace originally came from India, with the descent over twelve thousand years from the golden age into an iron age of ignorance and war, followed by ascending bronze and silver ages to a new golden age.

Christ appears at the low point of this cycle, representing the spirit of eternal truth in the midst of darkness and ignorance. As the spirit of the golden age in the midst of the iron age, Christ shows a path to universal redemption of the world through his willingness to suffer death on the cross. The resurrection of Christ symbolises how goodness is stronger than evil and love will win over hate.

The Genesis story of the fall ends with God telling Adam and Eve that they must not be allowed to eat from the tree of life and live forever. The tree of life is a remarkable image appearing at the start of the Bible in Genesis and then not until the final chapter of Revelation. The tree of life symbolises the state of grace that existed in paradise before the fall, and also the expected future return to a state of grace, with the vision of a time of the healing of the world when God will again be present in the garden of the world, like in Eden.

As we ask now where our focus should be to somehow restore our lost state of grace, at one with the tree of life, Jesus tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that the key is to treat the least of the world as though they were him. The moral framework of the Bible cannot be used to validate traditional social hierarchy, with its separation of spirit from nature. Jesus tells us the return to a state of grace will require an inversion of the prevailing values of the world, placing human dignity and equality at the centre of an ethic of love. The Bible provides a wonderful and realistic story of planetary hope, explaining the source of our problems and a path to their solution through Jesus Christ.
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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Robert, I find this account interesting and coherent. My main comment would be that I have a vague sense that the Indo-European mastery of agriculture seems to have profoundly changed the status of women directly. Because babies could be fed cereal (porridge, essentially) at a rather young age, they were weaned younger and thus women could bear many more children. I have heard (sorry for the lack of sources) that a rather cruel social order emerged in which men actively pressured their women to wean the children younger and (risking their health) bear children again sooner. Think in terms of a child every year and a half, rather than every three or four years.

I don't think this came before chieftains and large-scale organized warfare, but there is at least some evidence that the land of the Hebrews was flooded by those resisting the growing militarism of SW Anatolia (the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, essentially) and, in the view of Mendenhall, these ethnically mixed anarchists may have resisted aristocracy until the time of the Philistines, who probably came from Crete and had iron weapons.

I would guess that the fall from grace was a mythological blend of the end of hunter-gatherer life with the rise of organized warfare. This is close to the way you present it, but with your separate stories you seem to be separating the two strands. I'm not sure that's entirely appropriate. However, I expect you have researched this stuff, where I have only a few random gleanings.

Probably the most problematic of your interpretations concerns the Tree of Life. The Genesis account preserves a remarkably primitive conception of God as one who fears the ascent of the human creatures to "be like us". Can this really be an evocation of Eden? Maybe in the Revelation, but I have trouble imagining it to be part of the imagery of the story of the Fall in Genesis.

Finally, I have been reading up a little on the prophets. It seems to me that two separate things are going on. One is the fight for monotheism, as symbolized by Elijah's life. This seems to have been a mixture of genuine monotheistic beliefs, focusing on the living nature of Yahweh by contrast with "graven images" and thus preserving a mystical tradition that Samuel represents, with a rejection of adopting foreign deities simply because they are foreign and represent domination by outsiders (who are not kindly and benevolent but domineering and cruel).

The second thing going on is what I think of as "getting compliant" in the face of threats from the growing empires of Assyria and Egypt. No doubt there was a sense of guilt already over monotheism, as reflected in Hosea's rants against "whoring with other gods." But it is intriguing that this was joined by rage against the merchants and landlords who use their riches to oppress the poor, including the rural nomads represented by Amos the shepherd. Injustice, such as the confiscation of Naboth's vineyard and the "false measures" used by wily merchants, must have been a major root of this sort of condemnation, which is not at all limited to Amos. You point out that it would have triggered a sense of a loss of solidarity, and thus an increase in vulnerability, and this makes sense to me. But I also feel there is a growing need to "behave" as outside threats loom, in much the same way that children often become more compliant when the adults are fighting. What might trigger God's wrath? Injustice. The strife between kingdoms, North and South, and the occasional bloody coup, may have added to the sense that the country had degenerated from some happier age when David at least honored God. I like the way you have represented this as a case of the theme of the fall from grace.
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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Hermann's meaningless comment looks like he is getting ready to spam the site. This sort of comment shows why the first few comments from new posters at Booktalk should go on moderation. It clutters up the site with junk. The site needs more moderators.

On edit: I deleted that post. Appeared to be computer generated nonsense. Chris is working on adding active mods. (You might want to delete this post later?)
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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I think that perhaps the fall from grace was the fall from being hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers. Think of the plight of the Native Americans. This land was at one time a paradise. People hunted, gathered, moved around, human populations were kept small which minimized inter-tribal warfare and ensuring enough food for everybody. The entire land mass was a paradise. Then came the white man turning Indians into unwilling farmers. Their lives have been misery since. And so have ours, we just don't realize it.

The question is, what was the impetus from hunter-gatherer to farmer? Why would anyone willingly give up hunting-gathering to be a damn farmer? Once again, the Indigenous People saw farming as women's work. They looked down on it so what would cause a society of proud hunters to decide to become farmers?

The answer you seemed to proffer was that it enabled larger populations but that answer seems to chase its tail. You only need larger populations if you are in a farming community. Hunter-gathering tribes didn't want large populations. Quite the opposite. Too many people slowed the tribe down. Hell, they would kick people out of the tribe if they couldn't keep up, Old members of the tribe were frequently exiled and left to fend for themselves where they didn't last too long. It sounds cruel but it was essential that the tribe not be slowed down. Either one died via exile or several, even dozens, could die trying to keep the old people safe. So, the elderly were cut loose. For the good of the tribe, it had to be done.

Are we to assume that suddenly tribespeople felt bad about exiling old or handicapped people and decided to change their whole lifestyle and become farmers? Well, that obviously didn't happen. But what DID happen? Who were the first hunters/warriors to say, "Hey, we're living all wrong! We should be farming the land not tracking game!" And how did they get everyone else to agree to it?

We know it happened about 12,000 years ago. We don't know why. That was about the time the Clovis Culture appeared in the New World and it marked the end of the last Ice Age. Is that the cause of the change from hunters to farmers? If it was, in what way?

I would posit that whatever happened 12,000 years ago, it forced hunting tribes to become farming communities. That couldn't have been anything a tribe would have done willingly. So what forced them or who forced them. I'm thinking it was a what rather than a who.

It gets even more complicated because in Genesis, God prefers the meat offerings of Abel over the agricultural products that Cain offered. God also maintained the Garden of Eden which was a paradise and so was untilled to any significant extent. Apparently, only by Cain. When the Fall occurs, God exiles Adam and Eve from Eden. So the Fall is intimately connected to the losing of paradise. Genesis 3:23 states, "...therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken." So, there we have it--Adam was removed from Paradise in order to farm. That was the real Fall.

What I can gather is that an Ice Age came to an end and brought a period of warming due to slight changes in earth's orbit. Then, came a cooling period whose origin we can't explain. We know that prior to then, there was a die-off of 35 mammal species including the mammoth. So, perhaps, the climate change killed off the game and hunting tribes were forced to adopt a new way or perish.

Around 2009, evidence was discovered that there may have been an exploding comet that struck earth and that it may have fragmented causing even more damage. This may have been the cause of this Fall. The comet hit earth 12,000 years ago, caused a mass die-off event that resulted in hunting tribes forced to become agricultural.
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am I think that perhaps the fall from grace was the fall from being hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers. Think of the plight of the Native Americans. This land was at one time a paradise. People hunted, gathered, moved around, human populations were kept small which minimized inter-tribal warfare and ensuring enough food for everybody. The entire land mass was a paradise. Then came the white man turning Indians into unwilling farmers. Their lives have been misery since. And so have ours, we just don't realize it.
I agree. This equation between paradise and nomadic life is a theme that can be seen in the comments of Sebastian Junger in Tribe, a Booktalk selection from a few years ago. Junger notes that the Puritan settlers of the US could see that indigenous people had higher quality of life, and had to use extreme religious indoctrination to conceal this fact, and to punish the numerous escapees from the penal colonial life into the freedom of indigenous life.

I also explored this in the opening post, where I commented that we can compare the mythology of the fall to the slow historic shift over many thousands of years from the nomadic economy of the stone age to the settled agrarian culture of Biblical times. For tens of thousands of years through the ice age, all humanity lived in small clans moving around large areas, hunting for food and gathering wild plants. However, as population grew, people found that growing crops offered a more secure life, as the romantic image of freedom and abundance in stone age life became impossible. Settling in one place enabled the growth of technology, with major innovations including metal, writing, housing and agriculture.
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am The question is, what was the impetus from hunter-gatherer to farmer? Why would anyone willingly give up hunting-gathering to be a damn farmer? Once again, the Indigenous People saw farming as women's work. They looked down on it so what would cause a society of proud hunters to decide to become farmers?
The answer you seemed to proffer was that it enabled larger populations but that answer seems to chase its tail. You only need larger populations if you are in a farming community. Hunter-gathering tribes didn't want large populations. Quite the opposite. Too many people slowed the tribe down. Hell, they would kick people out of the tribe if they couldn't keep up, Old members of the tribe were frequently exiled and left to fend for themselves where they didn't last too long. It sounds cruel but it was essential that the tribe not be slowed down. Either one died via exile or several, even dozens, could die trying to keep the old people safe. So, the elderly were cut loose. For the good of the tribe, it had to be done.
Evolution is not about what organisms or groups consciously want, it is about which path is more adaptive, meaning more fecund, durable and stable. As some Neolithic societies discovered that farming could support larger population, their societies evolved to become more hierarchical and less free. It is likely that even though farming produced lower quality of food than the old nomadic economy, it produced more quantity, with greater reliability. Social evolution meant a society of farmers could defeat a society of hunters, as in the Cain v Abel myth.
Farming was not in the interest of slaves but it was in the interest of kings. So the proto-kings and chiefs had to find ways to control the populace, through a change of religious values from honesty to lies. The more harsh and cruel the king, the greater their imperial power. Hence the fall from grace.
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am Are we to assume that suddenly tribespeople felt bad about exiling old or handicapped people and decided to change their whole lifestyle and become farmers? Well, that obviously didn't happen. But what DID happen? Who were the first hunters/warriors to say, "Hey, we're living all wrong! We should be farming the land not tracking game!" And how did they get everyone else to agree to it?
Nothing in evolution is sudden. The shift to agrarian life was gradual, over thousands of years. The biggest upheaval was the flood, with sea level rising by 125 metres over ten thousand years from the last glacial maximum. All that beautiful former coastal land that we now call continental shelves was where people mainly lived in the stone age. They now had to crowd into the uplands as the former coastlines disappeared beneath the waves. That migration forced the innovation of more intensive settled agriculture, justified by the greater security and certainty that regular food could provide for more people. In turn, that led some leaders to work out that enslaving the farmers could fund armies, traders and priesthoods, generating economic power and social conflict as a ruling class evolved. What the slave wants is secondary to the power of the sword and pen when a society is falling from grace.
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am
We know it happened about 12,000 years ago. We don't know why. That was about the time the Clovis Culture appeared in the New World and it marked the end of the last Ice Age. Is that the cause of the change from hunters to farmers? If it was, in what way? I would posit that whatever happened 12,000 years ago, it forced hunting tribes to become farming communities. That couldn't have been anything a tribe would have done willingly. So what forced them or who forced them. I'm thinking it was a what rather than a who.
There was a period of colder weather called the Younger Dryas, possibly caused by the breaking of the vast North American ice sheet due to the natural orbital climate cycle. But I think the bigger factor is the social upheaval caused by gradually rising sea level, producing the discovery of the greater political power available through farming.
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am It gets even more complicated because in Genesis, God prefers the meat offerings of Abel over the agricultural products that Cain offered. God also maintained the Garden of Eden which was a paradise and so was untilled to any significant extent. Apparently, only by Cain. When the Fall occurs, God exiles Adam and Eve from Eden. So the Fall is intimately connected to the losing of paradise. Genesis 3:23 states, "...therefore the LORD God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken." So, there we have it--Adam was removed from Paradise in order to farm. That was the real Fall.
Yes, that lines up with my comments about Cain and Abel in the opening post. The shift from nomadic to settled life provides the back story to explain the economic reality that supported the mythology of the Bible.
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am What I can gather is that an Ice Age came to an end and brought a period of warming due to slight changes in earth's orbit. Then, came a cooling period whose origin we can't explain. We know that prior to then, there was a die-off of 35 mammal species including the mammoth. So, perhaps, the climate change killed off the game and hunting tribes were forced to adopt a new way or perish.
I have studied the Big History context of the shift from the paleolithic in depth. The coincidence around the world between the arrival of humans and the extinction of megafauna suggests the cause was predation, not climate change. On the cause of the Younger Dryas, I highly recommend the extensive article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
DB Roy wrote: Tue Dec 28, 2021 12:26 am
Around 2009, evidence was discovered that there may have been an exploding comet that struck earth and that it may have fragmented causing even more damage. This may have been the cause of this Fall. The comet hit earth 12,000 years ago, caused a mass die-off event that resulted in hunting tribes forced to become agricultural.
The underlying forcing of the fall rests in the coincidence between the cultural fall from grace, seen in the shift from nomadic to settled life, and the orbital fall, defined as the annual date when earth is closest to the sun, the perihelion. Perihelion is the primary driver of Milankovitch climate cycles, with its date matching to the natural climate pattern, advancing by one day every 59 years, or one season every 5200 years. Perihelion was in northern autumn from about 5000 BC to 1000 AD, directly matching the period we call the fall from grace.
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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Evolution is not about what organisms or groups consciously want, it is about which path is more adaptive, meaning more fecund, durable and stable. As some Neolithic societies discovered that farming could support larger population, their societies evolved to become more hierarchical and less free. It is likely that even though farming produced lower quality of food than the old nomadic economy, it produced more quantity, with greater reliability. Social evolution meant a society of farmers could defeat a society of hunters, as in the Cain v Abel myth.

There have been quite a number of theories advanced as to how agriculture arose. Adam Smith, "the inventor of capitalism," felt that there was this tribe somewhere at some point in our past that was like any other hunter-gathering tribe except they were more enterprising. At first, each hunter made his own arrows and spears but, among them, was one more naturally gifted at producing spears and arrows and the other hunters in the tribe would give him some kind of wampum if he made spears and arrows for them. He agreed. Pretty soon, he was no longer able to hunt due to constantly making spears and arrows so he just becomes the tribe's arrowsmith and the hunters gave him goods and wampum so he could live comfortably. Another guy can do wonders with animals skins and soon the tribe brings him skins so he can make tepees and clothing and rawhide and soon he is doing nothing but fashioning animal skins for the tribe for which they pay him in nice wampum. And on this went, each finding his own talent and taking his place in the new tribal structure and so we see the birth of capitalism.

Sounded good but it was a lot of hooey. First, this idea of Smith's assumed that the natural inclination of hunter-gatherers was towards agrarian pursuits. This is exactly opposite anything observed by science. Never was a tribe ever seen to engage in Smith's natural gifted talent idea. In these tribes, each hunter makes his own bows and arrows and fashions his own skins. He might trade them later but he doesn't make them for the whole tribe. The reason is simple: it's demeaning to have someone else make your arrows for you as though you are too inept or lazy to make them yourself. A matter of pride. Smith's ideas have never been seen to happen in real hunter-gatherer societies because they can't happen.

Nor do primitive societies show any preference for the "civilized" way of life. They disdain it. Look at the Andaman Islanders. Set foot on some of their islands and you are dead. They despise us because we are soft, devious and unable to live correctly. There are people in the tropical areas who live as both tribesmen and "civilized" man but never at the same time. They have a foot in each culture but NEVER do they combine their two worlds. They are kept strictly separate to prevent the "civilized" world from contaminating the tribe.

While this idea of kings forcing the tribespeople into farming, that seems highly unlikely because it meant the end of everything they knew. I don't believe these kings could have forced this on their people. I don't believe they had the means (which was pretty much nothing) nor the desire. When whites first landed on the Americas, they saw many tribes with these kings being carried about in sedan chairs. Many of these tribes warred incessantly but none were seen to be transmuting into agrarian societies. They were either already agrarian or they were always hunters. None were attempting to build large armies. Those tribes that did plant were often looked upon with disgust by nearby hunting tribes who took pleasure in attacking them. There was no agrarian army to fight off the attackers. They too were just small tribes gathered together.

The only time we saw these tribes forced into farming was when the American govt forced it on its tribes. And that's what it would take: a huge, well-organized and merciless nation to force farming on another. It can't come from within the tribe. Since I see no sign of any kind of predator society as this, I have to go with a natural catastrophe.
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Re: The Fall From Grace

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BookTalk discussed this topic several years ago in reviewing Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari. Here's the link to the discussion of Chapter 2.
sapiens-part-two-the-agricultural-revol ... 29065.html
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