“What is striking in the ecological subtext of Genesis is its sense of bitterness about the arrival of agriculture. Farming here isn’t the sacrament of later Western Christianity, in which ‘to plough the fields and scatter the good seed on the land’ was seen as a metaphor of God’s sowing the earth with righteousness. For at least one group of disgruntled Assyrians their farming labour seemed sufficiently cursed by literal and metaphorical weeds to be seen as a punishment or a poisoned chalice, and certainly no substitute for the freedoms of the hunter-gatherer’s life.”