Bible filled with agrarian themes

The Bible is imbued with agrarian references and themes. One need look no further than the first book of the Bible, Genesis, to find them. "Some people say that if you read the creation stories of Genesis that there's a real agrarian sort of feel to it," said Greg Hitzhusen, assistant professor of professional practice at Ohio State University's School of Environment and Natural Resources. "If you think about the period where that literature was being crafted and shaped and edited over time, that would have been a period of time where the reality of an agricultural livelihood was evolving somewhat or becoming more of a potential mainstream way of life." In Genesis, Chapter 2, God formed man from the dust of the ground. The Hebrew for man — adam — sounds like and may be related to the Hebrew for ground, soil or farmland — adamah. "It's like humans are soil creatures," Hitzhusen said. "So there's something interesting about that story telling humans that they are fundamentally made of the soil. Adamah is the arable soil, the part that we plant in." Agrarian themes turn up elsewhere. In John's Gospel account of Jesus' resurrection, Mary Magdalene, the first person to see the resurrected Jesus, initially mistook the resurrected Jesus for the gardener. "Just note that; being mistaken for the gardener: The gardener is the one who tends the garden. The original vocation of humans being placed in the Garden of Eden is to till it and to keep it. That's the words from Genesis 2:15, is that God placed the adam to till it and to keep it," Hitzhusen said. "The original vocation of the human being is the tender of the garden, is the keeper of the garden, to be the gardener, to be the farmer. " So for Jesus to be resurrected and to be mistaken for a gardener in John's Gospel is at least probably a play on the theme from Genesis 2, he said. "If Jesus is sort of the new Adam, if you will, then it harkens back to the original Adam in the garden. 'This is now the resurrected gardener,' that kind of thing," Hitzhusen said. "That doesn't say that humans are supposed to be farmers or something, but there is a little interesting play there on the sense of, that the original human vocation is to tend the garden." While not himself stating any conclusions, Hitzhusen suggested that garden reference could have implications for some people. "You might say — if you were someone who favors an agrarian way of life — and if you're someone who goes so far as to suggest that, you know, maybe farming does make it easier to believe in God or maybe farmers have a little bit of an advantage over others in being close to God because their profession almost demands it, someone might go so far as to say, well, that's why if you're having a rough time as a human, maybe you should take up farming because it might help you get back to your original humanness or something or back to your original goodness," he said. "Gardening is healing. Farming can be very healing," Hitzhusen said. "Maybe there's something to that." For Catholics, the Mass is filled with agrarian themes farmers immediately recognize and relate to, said Jerry Freewalt, director of the Office for Social Concerns for the Catholic Diocese of Columbus. Holy Communion, celebrated each week, is a meal, the Eucharistic meal. The host, the Communion bread, comes from wheat; and the wine, of course, comes from grapes. Many of Jesus' parables have agrarian symbols because that was what people knew in that society, Freewalt said. "So farmers again see their connectedness with their faith, with their daily vocation," he said.