Cursed Fruit

The Hebrew tradition is unique among ancient civilizations, in that it calls farming the oldest profession.  Most modern scholarship insists that humans engaged in hunting and gathering for thousands of years before permanent cultivation of land took place, but the Jews have it backwards.  In the beginning God created a Man, put him in a garden, and told him to work.  He gave him a wife, told him to “be fruitful and multiply,” and to “fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).  The job given to Adam and Eve was one to get fruit from the ground and fruit from each other, filling the whole earth with farmers.  This husbandry, wedded to the art of housewifery, was put to work in subduing the whole earth: land, plants, and animals.  

However, after the Fall, the ground is cursed.  Farming becomes difficult and the ground resists cultivation.  Weeds and thistles grow to choke out man’s food.  Man’s vain job becomes one of struggling with the earth from whence he is made his entire life, only to die and rejoin the soil.  In fact, Adam and Eve’s children reflect this curse when Cain the Farmer becomes the seed of the serpent when he kills his brother, Abel the Shepherd.  God chooses animals as a sacrifice, not the fruit of man’s own struggle with the ground.