Ishmael: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

When the narrator returns the next day, he’s surprised to see Ishmael waiting for him on the other side of the glass window (the narrator’s side now), sitting on some cushions. This sight makes the narrator realize how important the glass between them had been. As he sits down near Ishmael, the narrator feels a little wary, but he notices that Ishmael seems to look at him in exactly the same way as before.

Ishmael begins the lessons by drawing a simple diagram. The diagram shows the timeline of human history, beginning three million years ago. For the Leavers, life is virtually the same now as it was in the past. For the Takers, however, the Agricultural Revolution, which occurred approximately 10,000 years ago, changed the quality of life enormously. There is no specific end to the Agricultural Revolution, Ishmael concludes. It’s still spreading all over the world.

Ishmael moves on with the lesson. About 2,000 years ago, he says, the Takers began to believe in a story. This story had been told by the Leavers for many thousands of years beforehand—in fact, the original purpose of the story was to explain why the Takers left the Leavers behind. The narrator says he can’t imagine what Ishmael is talking about. Ishmael seems annoyed, and says that he will tell the narrator a different story until the point is clear.

Ishmael explains that Takers believe that they have a special knowledge of how to rule the world. They also believe that the Leavers do not have this knowledge—this is precisely why they don’t rule the world. The story that the Takers tell themselves unites Takers, Leavers, and, most importantly of all, gods.

Ishmael tells a story about man and the gods. The gods created a vast, complicated world, full of diverse species. One day, the gods were surveying their work, when they noticed a fox hunting for food. Some of the gods wanted to send a quail in the fox’s path, feeding the fox. Others wanted to save the quail from death. The gods began to argue among one another. They realized that no matter what they did to manage the vast world they’d created, some animals would live and some animals would die. There was no way to please everyone.

Eventually, Ishmael continues, the gods found a way to rule their world. They found a Tree of Knowledge, containing a special fruit. When the gods ate the fruit, they gained the knowledge necessary to run the garden: the knowledge of who lives and who dies. The next day, they sent a quail to be eaten by the fox, but as the quail died, they told it to be calm—the gods were looking out for it. The day after, they sent no quail to the fox, and the fox went hungry—nevertheless, the gods consoled the fox and told it to continue believing in their power. In this way, the gods ruled the world, pleasing some species one day and other species the next day.

Ishmael continues with his story. One day, a creature named Adam was born in the gods’ world. The gods weren’t sure what to do with Adam. Some feared that Adam, too, would eat from the Tree of Knowledge. If Adam were to do so, he wouldn’t gain any real knowledge of who lives and who dies—worse, he would falsely believe that he had this knowledge. As a result, he would conquer the entire world the gods had created, killing off other animals. With this in mind, they decided to tell Adam not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge.

The narrator has been listening to Ishmael’s story, fascinated. He notices a Bible sitting on a shelf behind him, and opens the Bible to Genesis. He points out to Ishmael that the Bible says nothing about why the Tree of Knowledge was forbidden to Adam. Ishmael says that this isn’t surprising: Takers have never been able to figure out why knowledge of who lives and who dies is anything but beneficial to them. The Adam and Eve story was originally written from the point of view of the Leavers—those who realized why it was wrong for mankind to decide who lives and who dies. If the Takers had written the story, they would have called the Fall the Ascent or the Liberation.

Ishmael makes an important clarification: the Takers don’t have a monopoly on agriculture. There were, and always have been, Leavers who practice agriculture. The Agricultural Revolution did not merely consist of the discovery of agriculture, but rather the Takers’ insistence that everyone of the planet must also practice agriculture. There was a Native American tribe, the Hohokam, who once practiced advanced agriculture, but eventually gave it up. Such an action is essentially forbidden among the Takers. For them, everyone must practice aggressive agriculture, now and forever.

Ishmael asks the narrator where the story of the Fall comes from. While the authors of the story might appear to be Hebrew, Ishmael insists that the story of the Fall was already well known long before the Hebrews wrote it down. The narrator says that he has no idea who wrote the story. In response, Ishmael dismissively tells him that it was the Semites, the ancient ancestors of the Hebrews, and the narrator feels a flash of annoyance.

Ishmael draws the narrator a map, showing the Arabian Peninsula at the dawn of the Agricultural Revolution. In the Fertile Crescent, there were agriculturalists (the Takers), while surrounding this area there were nonagricultural peoples (the Leavers). Ishmael then draws a second map, showing the same area a few thousand years later. By this time, agriculture had spread throughout the continent. Nevertheless, it had not yet spread to the south of the Arabian Peninsula, where the Semites, the ancestors of the Hebrews, lived as herders.

Ishmael makes his point: the Biblical story of Cain and Abel is a thinly veiled metaphor for the first clash between Takers and Leavers: the agriculturalist Caucasians and the Semitic herders, respectively. In the Cain and Abel story, Cain, a farmer, made God an offering of agricultural products, while Abel, a herder, offered livestock, animal pelts, and other objects common to the herder lifestyle. Because God preferred Abel’s offering, Cain was jealous. Thus, he killed Abel, his own brother. As punishment, God made Cain wander the Earth. The fact that God chose Abel’s offering over Cain’s, Ishmael argues, suggests that the Cain and Abel story was originally a piece of Semitic war propaganda, designed to show that the gods favored herders over agriculturalists.

The narrator suggests that the “mark of Cain” refers to the white, pale faces of the victorious Caucasians. Just as Cain was forced to wander the Earth, so the Caucasians, since defeating the Semites, have spread across the globe. Ishmael seems strangely indifferent to this information. He concludes that the Semites’ story of Cain and Abel was passed down to their descendants, the Hebrews, who recorded it without fully understanding it. Thus, a Leaver story became a fixture of Taker society.

Ishmael goes on to explain how the Takers took up the Leavers’ version of history. In the story of the Fall, the acceptance of agriculture isn’t presented as a free choice, but rather as a horrible curse: God expels Adam and Eve from the garden of terrestrial paradise, forcing them to turn to farming and agriculture to survive.

The narrator asks Ishmael where Eve figures in to the story of the Fall. Ishmael replies that Eve’s name means “life.” In general, he goes on, men and woman have markedly differently roles in population growth. This suggests that Eve is a symbol of the temptation that challenges all Leaver cultures. In a nomadic tribe for example, the population is always in danger of growing too large, to the point where it won’t be able to support itself. In a Taker culture, on the other hand, it’s supposedly feasible to have a large family with many children, because advanced agriculture and aggressive expansion provide the necessary resources for such an undertaking. In this way, the narrator realizes, Eve symbolizes the temptation of life itself. When Adam eats from the Tree of Knowledge, he gives in to the temptation to have many children, certain that his knowledge will make his decision possible.

Together, Ishmael and the narrator sum up what they’ve found. The Adam and Eve story, quite simply, does not make sense: the Christian explanation is that Adam was in a state of blissful ignorance before he ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and afterwards, it was knowledge itself that made him miserable. Neither the narrator nor Ishmael finds this convincing. The truth about the story of the Fall, they agree, is that it was written by Leavers, about Takers. From the perspective of the Leavers, the Takers sacrificed stability and peace because they believed that their knowledge of agriculture and technology would allow them to break the laws of life.