Thursday, March 11, 2021

Interesting Insight from Trent Dee Stephens, The Infinite Fall (2021)

 

 

The book of Moses provides much more detail than does Genesis concerning the conditions into which Adam and Eve were placed after they left Eden: “And it came to pass that after I, the Lord God, had driven them out, that Adam began to till the earth, and to have dominion over all the beasts of the field, and to eat his bread by the swat of his brow, as I the Lord had commanded him. And Eve, also, his wife, did labor with him” (Moses 5:1).

 

Tilling the earth suggests agriculture, and the earliest agriculture so far discovered began around 11,500 years ago with eight “founder crops”: emmer, einkorn wheat, bitter vetch, barley, flax, lentils, peas, and chick peas; mainly in what is now Syria—some 5,500 years before Adam (K. Kris Hirt, “The Eight Founder Crops and the Origins of Agriculture”). Fig trees were first cultivated around the same time (Mordechai E. Kislev, Anat Hartmann, and Ofer Bar-Yosef, “Early Domesticated Gif in the Jordan Valley,” Science, 312:1372-1374, 2006). Rice was first domesticated in China around 8,200-13,500 years ago (ricepedia.org/culture/history-of-rice-cultivation). Plants were not domesticated in a single generation but required many generations of selective breeding to obtain suitable plants with suitable growth and high yields. Furthermore, agriculture involves a very sophisticated set of skills, not developed by a single individual. Was part of the “knowledge” obtained by Adam taught to him by someone who had been employing agriculture over a considerable period of time?

 

God commanded Adam and Eve “that they should . . . offer the firstlings of their flocks, for an offering unto the Lord” (Moses 5:5). “Their flocks” suggested that Adam and Eve also had domesticated animals. Ancient domestication of animals has been identified in at least eleven separate, independent places in both the Old and New World (G. Larson, et al., “Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 111:6139, 2014). Wild boars were changed into domestic pigs in Europe and Asia around 10,500 years ago (Greger Larson, et al., “Ancient DNA, pig domestication, and the spread of the Neolithic into Europe,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 104:15276-15281, 2007). Sheep and goats were domesticated just north of the fertile crescent around 11,000 to 13,000 years ago (M.E. Ensminger and R.O. Parker, Sheep and Goat Science, Fifth ed., [Danville, IL: Interstate Printers and Publishers, 1986]). Wild aurochs were domesticated into cattle in Turkey and Pakistan around 10,500 years ago (E.J. McTavish, J.E. Decker, R.D. Schnabel, J.F. Taylor, and D.M. Hillis, “New world cattle show ancestry from multiple independent domestication events,” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., 110:1398-406, 2013).

 

The term “flocks” specifically suggests that Adam and Eve were herding domestic sheep and/or goats. Domestication does not occur immediately but requires many generations of animals. It is very likely that Adam and Eve emerged into a society where domestic sheep and goats had already been around for several thousand years. (Trent Dee Stephens, The Infinite Fall: A Scientific Approach to the Second Pillar of Eternity [Springville, Utah: CFI, 2021], 128-29)