The physical act of building the temple may have necessitated the planting of crops and the domestication of animals to feed the workers and worshippers gathered there. But to permanently settle, form, and modify the earth, to exert our will upon animals and utterly disrupt the way they are born, bred, and raised, to create artificial environments that mimic the natural world—all of this would have required a giant psychological leap in the way we think about the relationship between humans and animals, between people and the earth.
