Introduction

GEN 2:5 refers to a time “when no plant [siach in Hebrew] of the field was yet in the earth and no herb [‘esev ] of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no man to till the ground.” If you take this verse as a chiasmus, tilling the soil goes with siach, and rain on the land goes with ‘esev. You might conclude that siach refers to domestic plants and that ‘esev refers to wild plants. However, if they are both “of the field,” that seems unlikely. In any case, we learn from GEN 2:15 that the man was expected to till the ground. Later, in GEN 4:2; GEN 4:3 Cain is described as “a tiller of the ground,” and he brought “the fruit of the land” to Yahweh as a sacrifice. Archeologists tell us that around 7000 B.C. in the area of northeastern Iraq, people were already raising two kinds of wheat, as well as barley and some pulses (beans, peas, or lentils). Carbonized grains of both wheat and barley, dating from the sixth millennium B.C., have been found by archeologists. However, agriculture may go back even earlier. In the 1960s researchers digging on the Turkish plateau unearthed an actual city, Catal Hüyük, dating possibly to 8000 B.C., in which they found bins for grain, mortars for removing the husks of the grain, and stone blocks used for grinding the grain. A dense population like Catal Hüyük would require some sort of agriculture.

In the Holy Land, excavations in Jericho going down to levels thousands of years old show that the farmers there probably planted and harvested a few types of legume (bean or pea-like plants).

Scripture References (4)