²⁶ “Because you listened to your wife’s voice and took to eating from the tree concerning which I gave you this command, ‘You must not eat from it,’ cursed is the ground on your account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days of your life. And thorns and thistles it will grow for you, and you must eat the vegetation of the field. In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”​—Genesis 3:17-19.

27. Where were Adam and Eve to work out their death sentence, and for what reason there?

²⁷ As yet childless, Adam and Eve were driven out of their perfect home to work out the sentence of death.

28. Did that curse on the ground debar forever restoration of Paradise, and how long did the curse last?

²⁸ Instead of being a Paradise keeper or gardener, Adam now had to become a farmer. God said to him: “Cursed is the ground on your account.” This did not mean that all the ground outside the Paradise of Pleasure was to continue cursed forever, preventing any restoration of Paradise. Because Adam had been created in perfection and had just begun to mar it, he had tremendous physical stamina, and despite his hard work he lived to be nine hundred and thirty years of age, fathering many sons and daughters. (Genesis 4:1 to 5:5) During all that time the ground continued cursed on his account. He and his many offspring could not convert it into anything like a paradise. It appears that that cursed state of the ground outside the Paradise continued down through seven hundred and twenty-six years more to the global deluge of Noah’s day, Noah being the tenth man in line of descent from Adam.

29. Was the curse renewed after the Flood, and to what state has swarming mankind been unable till now to bring the whole earth?

²⁹ Then that earth-engulfing flood wiped out the unextended Paradise, and there was no longer a distinction between it and the rest of the earth. Noah, his wife, their three sons and the three women who had become their wives, eight persons in all, rode out that astounding cataclysm in a huge ark constructed according to God’s orders and design. When these eight human survivors let out all the animals and birds from the ark and themselves stepped out on the cleansed ground, God spoke as the Theocratic Ruler of mankind. He stated his theocratic laws for mankind. He caused the rainbow to appear and used it as a sign of his covenant or solemn promise never again to bring on a global deluge. But he made no mention of renewing his curse upon the ground. Yet, despite the absence of a curse upon all the ground, mankind that has swarmed over all the earth has been unable to bring it up to a Paradise state everywhere.