Self-reliance and the Garden of Eden

Written By Sheree Lear

The provision of God

I’m reading a book right now called Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers and Enough Food to Feed the World by Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I was struck by the authors’ prescription to increase “our welfare and sense of security.”1

To give you background, the authors’, prior to starting their farm, had been world travelers. They spent long periods of time with indigenous peoples in remote places - including the Amazon. They observed an Amazonian family wake up with no food and no money in their house, but to the authors’ amazement, they seemed to have no stress at all about how they will be sustained. The son went and caught fish, the daughter found some manioc and fruit and by 10 o’clock they were happily eating. He pointed out that these people only work about five hours a day and thus have time to enjoy life. Everything moves at a slow pace. People are happy and there is no (minimal?) stress - the people are in-sync with nature and know how to get food when they need it.

The authors note in contrast that in a consumer (Western) society

…[t]he fear of unemployment is ever present, because losing your salary means it is much more difficult to provide for the basic needs of you and your loved ones. Unemployment becomes a form of social death… Yet, our so-called advanced society doesn’t know how to contain this old atavistic terror: the fear of death by deprivation.2

What is their solution? They say that

[O]ur welfare and our sense of security will grow when:
  • The origin of the goods we need is as local as possible.
  • Our level of autonomy progresses.
  • Our skills and our ability to satisfy, by ourselves, a growing part of our vital needs increases.3

In some ways this sounds pretty good to me. Having lived in much slower cultures myself, I constantly wonder why it’s so hard to slow down and not be stressed in the United States. Self-sufficiency sounds so empowering! But, having read the beginning of Genesis over and over (and much of the rest of the Bible), I think it offers a different (indeed opposite) solution for our “fear of death by deprivation.”

Genesis 2:4–6 says

In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to serve the ground.4 But a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground—

There was no “plant of the field,” there was no rain (this only came in the flood story), and there was no one “to serve the ground.” Even though there was no rain, the ground was watered. Keep these things in mind.

In Genesis 2, God himself plants a garden (verse 8), forms a man from the ground and calls up trees and animals from the ground. The garden is a place from which life is sustained and given riches (four rivers, precious metals and stones). God sets Adam in this garden that God had planted (2:8). Skipping forward, Genesis 2:15 then clarifies what Adam was to do in this garden: God caused Adam to rest in the garden that he might serve and keep (or to worship and obey). Genesis 2:15 is a difficult passage to translate and so some people think the man was put in the garden to till the garden and cultivate it, others think that he was the serve and guard creation; Sailhammer suggests (with some rabbinic authors) that instead this is an allusion to future temple worship (as is both the creation narratives; see also BibleProject Temples).5 Based on context, that God caused man to rest in the garden, that then he gave humanity their first commandment to keep (Gen 2:16) and the language of the later curse on man, I’m inclined to think of Gen 2:15 as an allusion to temple worship - which is important for my point:

I don’t think man was placed in the garden to maintain it. God plants the trees that are good for food (2:9) and then tells man that he may eat from any tree (except one) - with no mention of them planting or “causing to grow.” God was providing them food to eat, and all they had to do was trust that his one commandment was for a good reason.

Fast-forward and humanity decides to not trust God and breaks his commandment by eating from the tree. And then we come to the “curses.”

1) The snake is cursed (3:14).
2) The woman is not cursed, but her toil will increase (same word as used for a man); and her conception will be accompanied in pain (I think this means not that she will have pain in childbirth, but that her children will bring pain through what they become - e.g. Cain).
3) The ground is cursed (3:17) because of Adam’s choices.
4) Adam is not cursed. Instead:

“And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.””

Note that now, instead of eating from the trees that God planted, man now will eat from the plants of the field (which hadn’t been there before - 2:4) in toil and with sweat amongst thistles and briars. He is sent out of the garden that God made, to “serve the ground” (3:23). I think that in this narrative, God had designed man to rest/be safe and to be provided for by God. BUT, when man chose to “be like God” he then had to begin to provide for himself from a ground that was cursed because of his choice.

Now, I don’t think this is a story about how farmers are cursed, or how working the land is a sign of the curse. Please don’t jump to that conclusion. I don’t think this story wants to make a point about how things are today, but rather the nature of man’s relationship to God. I think it is a story about man desiring to be self-reliant and because of his choice (think the punishment fits the crime per Clines), man’s consequence is that he gets to be self-reliant.

And this brings me back to the book that I’m reading. The Hervé-Gruyers argue that

[O]ur welfare and our sense of security will grow when:

  • The origin of the goods we need is as local as possible.
  • Our level of autonomy progresses.
  • Our skills and our ability to satisfy, by ourselves, a growing part of our vital needs increases.6

I disagree. I think probably even the Amazonians would disagree. They are not safe and well because they are self-reliant. I bet they would say that it is because the earth provides for them or some higher power. Autonomy and skills “by ourselves” will not increase our sense of security or welfare. Think of how a natural disaster, disease, enemies, etc., could come through and completely wipe out the tribe’s sources of food.

Rather, I think this passage in Genesis and indeed the rest of the Bible teaches that the ideal is that we trust God to provide for us. This idea is repeated in Matthew 6:26–34:

“Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”

It is when we take over and choose to rule ourselves that we become stressed because we cannot control the world. Only God can. Even though I love the idea of abundance from a quarter of an acre, it will not ultimately be security. Security is trusting in the Lord with all our hearts.7

  1. Perrine and Charles Hervé-Gruyer, Miraculous Abundance: One Quarter Acre, Two French Farmers and Enough Food to Feed the World (White Junction River, Vermont: Chelsea Green Printing, 2016) 30.  ↩︎

  2. Hervé-Gruyer, Miraculous Abundance, 30.  ↩︎

  3. Hervé-Gruyer, Miraculous Abundance, 30.  ↩︎

  4. This is normally translated as “till” but it is a word that just means “to serve” - which could mean tilling - but I wonder if another point is being made.  ↩︎

  5. John Sailhammer, The Pentateuch as Narrative: a Biblical and Theological Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing, 101). See this blog for an opposing view: I feel confident that I could counter his points to support the translation I choose.  ↩︎

  6. Hervé-Gruyer, Miraculous Abundance, 30.  ↩︎

  7. Please do not despair, reader. The difficulty of trusting God is a major theme throughout the whole Bible. Like the father of the convulsing child in the gospels, we cry out like the father: “I trust; help my lack of trust!””  ↩︎

Sheree Lear
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