You would do well to visit an amish community such the one in Lawrence county, TN. They market a lot of vegetables. After primary and secondary tillage (done by the men with draft horses) mostly the women and children take over, planting, weeding, and harvesting.
Being a shepherd isn’t all posing with a staff and walking around. There is wrestling (body slamming to shear wool, and also castration (can’t have a bunch of rams fighting each other all the time), and dealing with predators.
Assuming age guarantees physical superiority is sketchy. When I turned 18 my next younger brother was 14 and wearing my clothes. A quiet, mild-mannered kid, he never intimidated me until a year later, when I heard he leveled one of the school bullies with one punch. I stopped in at the local small town cafe (Alexis,Il) one evening, and a classmate of his couldn’t wait to tell me what my brother had done, “.... he bloodied Brian’s nose AND mouth with ONE punch!”
The principal called my mother to say he had to suspend my brother for a day. She said, “Good for him!” And the next day baked him a cake, and let him watch tv all day. Lol
You sound like you take the Old Testament’s Genesis literally. That’s fine. I don’t.
For instance, Genesis says Adam lived to be 930 years old. Do you actually believe that?
I’ve been reading Mark Twain for more than 60 years; he is my favorite author.
His summation of the Old Testament is pithy: “The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”
He’s right.
Twain also wrote this, a criticism of the authors of the Old Testament for the God THEY created; not the God who created THEM. He writes that literal belief in the entirety of the Old Testament is an impossibility:
“Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell; mouths mercy and invented hell; mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
You see? Such a God as created by the authors of the Old Testament could only exist in fiction, because that God is a contradiction.
The God I believe in is not the one described above.
But the Old Testament has value as a foundation, as a guide. In that regard, it is essential.
Oh, I’m sure I’m going to get slammed. So be it.