Most of todays urban dwellers have a countryside family past, one way or another... :-)
But why did all those people shed their local origins to join the "Big City" ?
Agricultural crisis for one... But often the feeling that "things" couldn't be done in the village... (the Hollywood dream as of Norma Jeane)!

Before the Old Testament,  the "Epic of Gilgamesh" relates more accurately this shift in the society of that time (global warming or flood included)... When at the end of the Epic, Gilgamesh finds the Gods and asks for the immortality they had promised, they tell him to look behind him, on his recent progress and learnings he had to achieve to join them... And told him that it was better then individual immortality !

Somewhere in the text, Adam is a pub tenant with rooms and Eve the Madam of an army of girls to keep those rooms busy...! (He should have tried to keep Lilith, the first female of the species :-) )

This Epic was, as it seems the first "best seller" (from North of Africa to India) and the old testament has full chunks of it ( Esau and the lentils soup, Noah and the deluge, etc..)

As you can see, I'm a Gilgamesh fan... :-)

"What can I do, What can I write, Against the fall of Night". A.E. Housman