Agrarian Ideas

I've been doing some reading and thinking about agrarianism, and thought I would post a bit of it.

Farming is, quite literally, the oldest profession, Jewish history tells us that the first Man was commanded to be a one (Genesis 2:15).  His job was to care for the Garden of Eden, as well as to look after the animals that populated it (Genesis 2:19-20).  Farming was, once again, the profession of the man who re-populated the world, Noah (Genesis 9:20).  In fact, Noah is called a “husbandman,” which in Hebrew means literally, “a man of the ground.”  Much later, when the Hebrew people left Egypt through the Exodus, Jehovah brought them out from under a cruel tyrant who forced them to work his land, to a land that they owned, that was “flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8).  He even gave laws guarding private property and ensured that family farms would be handed down throughout Israel’s generations (Leviticus 25).

The classical world also had a high view of farming, but one with more revolutionary connotations.  The Greek poet Homer spoke of farmers in exalted terms and only barbarian monsters, like the Cyclops, did not farm (Odyssey IX. 113-124).  Hesiod, another Greek poet of the same period, says that only warriors, or “Men of Ares” do not work for their bread and that the gods look more kindly on those who make their living from the soil (Works and Days 147).  The Romans, under the tribune Tiberius Gracchus, enacted forced land re-distribution, giving the government the right to take land from the wealthy and re-distribute it amongst free Roman citizens.  This law was called lex sempromia agraria and is where our term “agrarianism” originated, along with its socialistic connotations.