Hey, the Bible tells me so…After all, it was fruit (though not necessarily an apple) that Eve picked, causing all that trouble. (Just kidding.) But CNS’ Cindy Wooden, covering the Synod on the Word currently going on in the Vatican (see ZENIT and/or John Allen for comprehensive coverage, as well as CNS), takes the occasion to do a bit a closer-than-expected reading. Her exegesis? “Adam and Eve were vegans.”

My most recent trip back to the Bible, to the beginning of the Bible, was prompted by reading the new document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, “The Bible and Morality.” Basically, it says that God told Adam and Eve to be strict vegetarians — vegans, in fact – and that it was only after the Great Flood that God told Noah, and all humanity, that people could eat meat and fish.
Check for yourself. In Genesis 1:28-29, God tells Adam and Eve that he was giving them “every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit” to be their food — and that’s it. Then in Genesis 9:3-4, God tells Noah and his sons, “Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat; I give them all to you as I did the green plants. Only flesh with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat.” And, before setting the rainbow in the sky, God tells Noah that he is extending his promise to all living creatures.
The scholars, appointed by the pope to the biblical commission, cite the expansion of God’s covenant as part of their argument that respect for life in biblical morality “may well go beyond the interests of humanity alone to the point of warranting a new reflection on the preservation of animal and plant species.”

Pope picks fruit.bmpMy question now is, should we go back to our antediluvian origins in our culinary habits? Or is that a bit too much ressourcement? Indeed, is it usurping God’s commands and the march of history? Pope Benedict himself is an animal lover, though whether he eats only what he picks (as in this Reuters foto) is doubtful.