Debate between sheep and grain | Hacker News Reader

Debate between sheep and grain

en.wikipedia.org

47 pointsdiodorus18 comments

Brick and wood early, wheat and ore late.

Going all in on sheep with a sheep port is shooting the moon, and less reliable.

Wheat and Ore early isn't actually a bad strategy either, although a tad risky. It allows you to build your first two settlements into cities quickly, which allow you to gather resources quicker, or at least trade them into brick and wood (with the help of ports) to build roads and more settlements, which can easily be turned into cities since you're already on those resources.

Coming back to the topic at hand, :) It's not surprising how few Christians are aware of the influence of ancient near east literature on the formation of the creation story in Genesis. Pastors and theologians at more conservative and fundamentalist seminaries usually deny, ignore, or try to hide this from lay Christians in fear that they will leave the faith. This fear is actually probably a projection of their own fears, as I don't see this as some sort of evidence bomb that the Bible isn't "true", whatever that word means. It's totally expected that the ancient Israelites would be affected by the ANE literature of their time, and says of the author(s) of Genesis that they were using the stories that they know, and subverting them to tell their own (non-scientific) origin story of Yahweh and the Israelites.

>Pastors and theologians at more conservative and fundamentalist seminaries usually deny, ignore, or try to hide this from lay Christians in fear that they will leave the faith. This fear is actually probably a projection of their own fears, as I don't see this as some sort of evidence bomb that the Bible isn't "true", whatever that word means.

it undermines a fundamentalist or literalist reading of the bible. once you leave the realm of 'all of this happened exactly this way and god said exactly this', and enter the realm of 'well, this is figurative/you have to understand the historical context this draws from', things suddenly become much, much more nebulous and less authoritative. it's not that it entirely undermines any notion of 'truth' in the bible, but it's anathema to a particular worldview.

The literalist reading of an English language Bible always seemed a bit surreal to me.

Written by Jewish mystics, translated into Latin by Roman scholars, further translated by Scottish Protestants. What could possibly go wrong?

The part that always weirds me out is right at the start, when God/Elohim/whatever says let us create them in our image, male and female he created them, which makes very little sense with a singular God.

I'm sure sure there are/were whole sects based on how one interprets that division. A bigger one along the same lines is the holy trinity.

& , & . 🡒 & = & < ️.

HN apparently does not support unicode: https://imgur.com/a/Px2z5

There's a (10 year old) post saying it could support utf-8.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111100

Context if you're lost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan

Here's a link to the full text

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr532.htm

This seems like 3,000BC version of a rap battle, with rhyming put downs and brags.

Unlike apparently everyone else, I can't see any likeness with the story of Cain and Able, other than the involvement of plants and animals. https://www.blueletterbible.org/nlt/gen/4/1/s_4001

Cain offered grain (or at least produce) as a sacrifice. Abel offered a lamb (a living sacrifice). Abel's offering is deemed worthy, whereas Cain's is not.

I'd say the similarity between the two is that they both present an opposition of grain and sheep. I agree with you, that is not incredibly similar.

I'd wager that during the time that all these things were written, the common themes and archetypes would probably have been more apparently and obvious to the people, even if they seem kind of like a stretch to us.

Yep, I would bet that the reason the Cain and Abel story is referenced is because during that era, there was an inherent tension between the two types of sustenance, that is much deeper (societally and culturally) than today.

If you enjoy that, you could look up other https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyting & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_debate_poetry to read. There are also fun prose debates like the Islamic "The Case of the Animals versus Man Before the King of the Jinn".

Also the Lis Consonantium, in which the letter sigma sues the letter tau:

https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html

Had a fun read on those links, thanks for sharing.

There must have been lots of cultural clashes during the dawn of civilization between farmers and herders, because the Cain vs. Abel story seems to pop up in different forms fairly often.

Yes.

What's interesting is that although in both this story and the Cain & Abel story farming wins out, the value judgements are different. In this Sumerian myth, grain is to be revered; whereas Cain (the farmer) is reviled.

Perhaps that reflects that these two cultures experienced the same struggle from different sides.

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