These questions couldn’t be answered until I finally realized that these stories are mysterious to us because they didn’t come to us from people who share our view of the world, of humanity’s place in the world, and of divine intentions. They come to us from an ancient people whose worldview was profoundly different from our own. This is why their account of events in the Fertile Crescent, where our agricultural revolution began, is opaque to us (and even nonsensical).
