Why did vegetarian Abel tend a "flock" on a tropical earth?

by M.J. 30 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  peacefulpete

  Chapter 9 is again by the priestly author of the first creation story and again he is insisting that vegetables were the only approved food before the flood.

  
  

  
  You lost me there--isn't the vegetable sacrifice rejected, while the animal sacrifice is approved? How would this cause the reader to conclude that vegetables were the approved food?

  Its in priestly post flood story in chapt 9 that God is said to give flesh as food as he had earlier given vegetation. Notice that blood is the issue

  3 "Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, (B) as I gave the green plant.

  4 "Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, (C) its blood.
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  peacefulpete

  I guess my posts weren't clear. The priestly author is emphasizing the sacredness of blood by having animals reserved for sacrifcial use. Vegetables are for food in the mythic past but the realities of human diet compelled him to offer an explanation later in the story as to how Jews had become meat eaters.
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  under_believer

  TD--
  At that time (okay, at the time the legend is purported to take place) sheep weren't kept for wool but for milk, meat, and leather. This was the "original" breed of sheep referred to today as "hair sheep." Wool varieties as they exist today did not exist at that time.
• 

  TD

  This was the "original" breed of sheep referred to today as "hair sheep." Wool varieties as they exist today did not exist at that time.

  You're right of course. This is how sheep came to be domesticated. The original hair sheep had a softer undercoat that wasn't wool as we know it, but was used for a similar purpose by primitive man.

  From the standpoint of JW's, Milk and meat would have been taboo. Leather would have been a useful thing though.
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  Shazard

  Answering original question. How you suppose they would get snooker balls without animal bones?
• 

  funkyderek

  OpenFireGlass:

  weren't the animals needed for sacrifice to a pissy god?

  Not much of a sacrifice though, if you weren't going to eat the animal anyway. Even the work of being a shepherd had to be fairly easy with no predators, no rustlers and no rain. It would really be just sitting in a field all day - or not. No wonder Cain got pissed off, he had to work hard for the sacrifice he made.
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  vitty

  I always think this is funny , even though its been used a hundred times
• 

  Jeffro

  Not many wimmins on earth yet?

  I was just... um... helping it through the... dang, fences haven't been invented yet.
• 

  Jeffro

  
  Not really on topic, but this has just reminded me of one of those really lame Witness things...

  Occasionally they boast about having an answer for that oh-greatest-riddle-of-riddles: "Where did Cain get his wife?" After apparently no-one else can possibly think of the obvious, they proudly pipe up: "He married his sister/niece." Cue the banjo.
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  funkyderek

  Actually, now that I think about it, it probably was a sacrifice. There were only three men and at least two women on earth at the time. They had to make a living through subsistence vegetable farming, presumably with their hands or crude wooden implements as they really wouldn't have had time to develop metallurgy. And there's Abel, sitting in a field all day, minding sheep. If he was my brother, I'd have brained the selfish bastard too.