An Observation on Adam and Eve

A few weeks ago I was thinking about Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave when I made an interesting observation.

To review, Toffler divided human history by three "waves." These three waves were the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and the Computer Revolution. (I would call this latter, the Computer/Internet Revolution, but the book was written before Internet was made available to the public,) The book goes into detail about each of these changes, and how each changed human life.

I will focus on the first of these, the Agricultural Revolution.

Before the Agricultural Revolution, people, who were as intelligent, or more intelligent, than people today (The brain was actually larger), knew how to plant vegetables, and how to herd animals, but they chose not to. The reason is that food was plentiful. I have seen one reference to the fact that people during this age probably worked at most for four hours per day, hunting and gathering.

However, the human population increased. The time came when it was no longer possible to support the human population by hunting and gathering. There just wasn't enough food. Therefore, the people found it necessary to plant crops and herd cattle.

This all took place around 10,000 years ago, according to The Third Wave.

Now I look at Creationism. The Creationist will state that the Earth is actually only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. What is done is to count the generations back to Adam and Eve, and assume that the creation took place in that general time.

That is about the same time as the Agricultural Revolution according to Toffler.

So I look at the story of Adam and Eve, and ignored the "magic" part of the story. That is, ignore the creation of Adam and Eve, the talking snake, etc. Then the story becomes interesting.

Adam and Eve start in an environment where all their needs were met, the literal Garden of Eden. They didn't work at all. This is where the story starts. This sounds a lot like the per-agricultural life I mentioned. A sequence of events happen, and suddenly Adam and Eve are kicked out of "the Garden of Eden" and Adam is forced to till the land, to raise crops. That is, the "punishment" that Adam and Eve get is to live in the agricultural age.

The time is right and the events are right.

Perhaps what happened is that Adam and Eve were living the way people had lived for a hundred thousand years, in a land east of Israel, perhaps Iraq or Yemen. They were, perhaps only children of 12 or 13. Their Garden home, however, may have been burned. In the story it says, "a flaming sword which turned every way" guarded the way to the Garden. Perhaps Adam and Even told their story to their children, and their children's children. This eventually this became a legend, added to by each generation, and is finally written down, probably by Moses.

If this is the case, then it may be that the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible is the only widely circulated first hand account of the Agricultural Revolution.