[bgroat]

I'm not a historian, archeologist, or any sort of relevant expert.

But I've long had the pet theory that the Green Sahara is the origin of the Eden Myth.

Homo Sapiens origin, lush vegetation, turns to dessert for some reason beyond our comprehension...

[raylad]

I've always interpreted the Eden myth as a memory of the development of agriculture.

Before agriculture, people lived as hunters and (mainly) gatherers. The life of a Hunter-gatherer is, surprisingly, mostly leisure, because of the abundance of food and the low population density. Even Kalahari Bushmen, who had been forced to live in the dessert, were found to average only about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours of productive labor a day in a study [1].

In the bible, God's punishment is [2]:

  “Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from 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.”

Which seems very clearly to indicate that being cast out of Eden means that people now must work in the fields and do agriculture. Agriculture ends up requiring much more labor for worse quality food, but it generates more calories. This enables classes to develop and enforces an end to nomadic life, because the fields must be tended and the harvest stored and protected.

[1] Stone Age Economics by Marshall Sahlins (https://archive.org/details/StoneAgeEconomics_201611)

[2] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=genesis%203&ver...

[agent327]

I've always thought that being cast out of Eden was not so much a punishment, as merely an unavoidable consequence: having eaten from the tree of knowledge, we now also have the ability to appreciate suffering, and thus no longer experience paradise. That would make paradise a state of mind, rather than a place.

After eating the fruit God lists a number of consequences, which sounds somewhat like a punishment, but that could just as easily be interpreted as "well, I didn't want this to happen to you, but now that you got to this point, you'll have to deal with the following". That includes increased pain in giving birth (a consequence of having larger brains), and the rise of agriculture. Eve is also only named after eating the fruit, not before.

The snake gets cursed for what it did, and so does the ground, but not Man. God even goes so far to provide them with clothes, and acknowledges their growth.

[anonporridge]

Yes.

The tree of knowledge of good and evil is basically just the spark of consciousness. Humans are unique in our ability to consciously foresee and plan for the future.

On the one hand, that's a blessing because we've made tons of progress towards alleviating objective suffering and scarcity.

On the other hand, it's a curse, because we always have to be aware of the impending inevitability of our death. We can't ever completely live in peace and paradise ever again, because we have become conscious of our existence and the context our life experience exists within.

Would it be better to not have gained that spark of consciousness and live the paradise of ignorance as animals in the wildreness? Lives at peace except for occasional bursts of pain and terror.

[yakubin]

The snake always seemed to me to be a Promethean figure in this story. It brought us knowledge, like Prometheus brought us fire, and got punished for it by a god.

[antiatheist]

Thats why should use electricity to free all camels from the servitude of the desert plains.

[antiatheist]

That's about camels eating cactus.

[bennyschmidt]

Think it was a different green area - the Fertile Crescent, not the Sahara. Eden would have been where modern day Kuwait is. As for ancient towns in Sahara, for a long time people wondered how the desert people lived in such a harsh area - but it turns out they've just been there since it was lush. They didn't move to the desert and learn how to survive there, they're just what's left of those populations from the Sahara, and adapted to the changing conditions.

[Terr_]

I dunno, I mean the myth doesn't say "Then The Lord Smote the Garden Unto Sand", it says that Eden (and the plants) persisted in the same spot as before... Humans were just being actively blocked by an angel with a flaming sword.

[rokkitmensch]

I do not struggle to see echoes of an oral tradition recalling receding greenery. I can quite imagine a cult feeling expelled from Eden as the productive grasslands walked away.

[deafpolygon]

Hey, that's Aziraphale! Good guy.

[Terr_]

> Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.

[christkv]

I think the general consensus is Mesopotamia that at that time was a lush green area. The myths after all probably originate from the city of UR.