______________________________________ Keith Watkins writes on American religion, bicycling, and the environment.

Posted on keithwatkinshistorian.wordpress.com June 14, 2017

Keith Watkins

A Biblical Ethic for Using Land and Water

Reviewing Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, by Ellen F. Davis; Foreword by Wendell Berry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Throughout the Bible references to the natural world abound. Although mountains and deserts, fertile fields, wind and thunder, floods, drought, and fire are men-tioned frequently, readers tend to overlook these pas-sages while studying the Bible. We pay more attention to early religious history and teachings about doctrine and social ethics. Ellen F. Davis’ book, Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture, urges readers to give more serious attention to these texts so that the allusions to the land, agriculture, and water become the primary focus for study.

Davis also recommends that readers revise their method of interpreting the texts they read, especially the prophetic and poetic portions of the Bible. Our normal approach is to figure out what a text meant in its original setting, but our presuppositions often lead us to misun-derstand what those original meanings actually were. Be-

fore we can even move into exegesis, therefore, we should pay attention to how our own life experience skews our ability to read literature from another time and place.

Davis then proposes that modern agrarianism can serve as a major line of thought about what should be normative in social systems long ago and in our time. Agrarianism, she writes,

is a way of thinking and ordering life in community that is based on the health of the land and of living creatures. Often out of step with the prevailing values of wealth, technology, and political and military domination, the mind-set and practices that constitute agrarianism have been marginalized by the powerful within most “history-making” cultures across time, including those of ancient Israel” (p. 1).

2ABiblicalEthicforUsingLandandWaterDavis frequently refers to contemporary agrarians, especially farmer-philosopher-poet Wendell Berry, and she understands her book as a continuing dialogue with these writers even though most of them have given little attention to the Bible. It is generally recognized that much of the Middle East, the world of the biblical writ-ers, has been arid land throughout human history. The four ancient hydrological societies that Steven Solomon discusses in his book Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization depended upon controlling water to maintain human life in these very dry lands. Two of them, Egypt and the region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, were in the world of the patriarchs and prophets. Much of the narrative in the Hebrew scriptures re-volved around water-related issues in the narrow strip of rocky, thin-soiled land that was the biblical Land of Canaan. In contrast to the irrigated economies of the desert empires, the natural economy of this small section of the Middle East was mixed agriculture “of rain-fed crops (‘the grain of the field’) and small animal husbandry, sheep and goats pas-tured on the ‘shrub of the field’” (p. 31). It is important to note that western Europe and most of the United States east of the Mississippi is this same kind of agricultural world, a world that can maintain vibrant human communities that are free from the highly cen-tralized and controlling economic-political systems of hydrological societies. (Davis helps me recognize the lingering agrarianism that I experienced during my boyhood in rain-fed parts of the rural Northwest and during my early Indiana years, especially the three years in Wabash County from 1953 through 1956.)

Recognizing Overlooked Meanings

In the first two chapters of her book, Davis demonstrates how an agrarian reading of texts can help readers of the Bible recognize meanings that previously may have been overlooked. An example is Deut. 11:17–17 and 28:24, which present a summary of the law that God gives the people as they go into the land “flowing with milk and honey.” It is “not like the land of Egypt…where you sow your seed and irrigate by foot like a vegetable garden.” Instead, it is “a land of hills and valleys, watered by rain from the sky, a land that the Lord your God looks after.” God gives a covenant that if they “heed his every commandment,” loving and serving “the Lord your God,” then the rains will continue and they will eat to their fill. If they do not keep this covenant, however, the Lord’s anger will be kindled against them, the rains will dry up, and the ground will no longer produce. In the climax to a similar passage later in Deuteronomy, the prophet describes what will happen if the people fail to honor God’s commandments. “The sky over your head shall be bronze, and the earth under you iron. The Lord will change the rain of your land into powder, and only dust shall come down upon you from the sky until you are destroyed” (Deut. 28:23–24). Reading the Old Testament with this agrarian perspective can help some readers re-vise their understanding and appreciation of passages that decry Israel’s sinfulness. The stumbling block is the apparent cause-and-effect theology, a system of rewards and pun-ishments that explains and justifies Israel’s and Judah’s successes and failures in battle and politics. The prophets seem to understood God’s message to be: If you do this, then I will do that: good behavior will lead to good crops, success in battle, and political inde-pendence and power. If you refuse to honor and obey me, then I will punish you with crop failure, defeat on the battlefield, and vassalage or slavery.

Davis proposes that a better way to understand the relationship between our actions and our well-being is to pay attention to the “land-centeredness of the Bible” and to the

ABiblicalEthicforUsingLandandWater3nature of the ecological crisis, “which is principally moral and theological rather than technological.” In this understanding, there still is a relationship between what we do and what happens in the larger world, but it is not a tit-for-tat system. Instead, it is one in which human actions gradually lead to the upsetting of nature, which causes God’s ever stronger anger. The world falls apart, thus showing our disregard for the commandments; in time we suffer the inevitable consequences. Our sinful behavior does not consist pri-marily of technological errors that can be rectified by “further technical applications.” Ra-ther, we experience a “moral and even theological crisis because it is occasioned in large part by our adulation and arrogant use of scientific technology, so that we make applica-tions without rigorous critical regard for questions of compatibility with natural systems, of the integrity of the world that God has made” (p. 9). Jeremiah 4 and Psalm 72 are two more texts that Davis highlights. In the Jeremiah passage, the people of Israel and Judah are in deep trouble politically. They probably are also facing weather-related distress. The main force of these prophetic passages is to pro-vide a three-part explanation of the distress that people were experiencing: (1) the cove-nant God has made with the people has promises and threats; (2) the people have been engaging in sinful behavior by sacrificing to foreign gods and engaging in actions that contradict the way God has set things up; and (3) political disaster and defeat in battle and natural catastrophe are the consequences.

Undermining the Earth’s Solidarity

Some contemporary readers dismiss much of this literature because we focus attention upon the cause-and-effect logic. The prophets seemed to have been saying that God de-liberately manipulates politics and the weather in direct relationship with the religious practices of the people. Davis’ exposition opens up a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between political and environmental well-being and the way that people, in-dividually and corporately, live their lives. She calls attention to Jer. 4:8ff., with the strong use of the image of formlessness. What is happening to the people whom the prophet addresses is that their actions are undermining the earth’s solidarity and the result is that it is returning to the state it was in at the beginning of creation in Genesis. “As is fitting, the first thing to go is the primordial light. Then the mountains, the bone structure of the earth, come loose…Now the birds are gone, the creatures that God made and blessed on the fifth day with the words ‘Be fruitful and multiply’ (Gen. 1:21).” Then go other crea-tures, and then human beings. “Finally, in the absence of humans, garden-land reverts to wasteland…, and the cities collapse” (p. 11).

Davis’ conclusion is a message that can be understood by people today. Illustrations appear and reappear throughout the history of human culture, and wastelands resulting from human action can be seen everywhere. The message can be appropriated in our time, too. The weather-related phenomena that we encounter do have an arbitrary character that seems to transcend anything we can do. Forces in the heavens, the oceans, in the earth itself, and in all the connecting links do have broad independence from most of the specific actions that people do. The people in our time who claim that climate change is episodic, pushed by natural forces and little influenced by human action, do speak part of the truth. Yet, there is more to the discussion as can be seen in Davis’ firm claim that “The prophets’ messages are ineluctably political; they speak to the ingrained habits of a society and its leadership then and now” (p. 11). I’m convinced that this is true and that responsible, biblically centered teaching and preaching will emphasize this conviction.

4ABiblicalEthicforUsingLandandWaterDavis links this passage in Jeremiah with Psalm 72, which she refers to as “a royal

psalm, a prayer that the king may exercise God’s own justice.” While the political charac-ter of this psalm is clearly its leading characteristic, the use of agricultural and natural imagery is a strong feature. “May he [the king] be like rain that falls on the mown grass, like showers that water the earth” (72:6). Another example: “May there be abundance of grain in the land; may it wave on the tops of the mountains; may its fruit be like Lebanon; and may people blossom in the cities like the grass of the field” (72:16). In Chapter 2 of her book Davis provides the key for revising our approach to inter-preting the Bible, especially the Old Testament. Referring to a book by Richard Hays, she lists four “critical operations…that overlap and interpenetrate one another: (1) exegesis, (2) reading in canonical context, (3) drawing the connection with the contemporary situa-tion, and (4) ‘living the text,’ which means ‘to explicate in detail the message of the indi-vidual writings in the canon’” (p. 27).

The Productionist Mentality

Davis contrasts the agrarian mind-set or ethic with a second—the productionist mental-ity—that prevails in our society today. She quotes botanist and plant pathologist Robert Zimdahl that the sole imperative of this mind-set is “to produce as much as possible, re-gardless of the ecological costs and perhaps even if it is not profitable to the producer.” The “chief value operative in our industrial food system,” Davis writes, “is monetary, and it is measured by the profit margins of large corporations.” Again, following Zimdahl’s analysis, she lists three “interrelated forms of damage that can be traced substantially, if not wholly, to agriculture. They include: Depletion of water resources by irrigation, along with waterlogging and salinization of soil through overirrigation…Desertification and soil ero-sion, both results of the removal of forest and moisture- and soil-retaining plant cover…Fertilizer and pesticide contamination of water sources (from local streams to the Gulf of Mexico), food, and animal feed; atmospheric contamination by ammonia and methane” (p. 23). The agrarian mentality or ethic, both in biblical times and our own, has four features. The first is the primacy of the land. Early in her own reading on this subject, Davis came across the phrase “meeting the expectations of the land,” which she explains: “agrarians know the land, not as an inert object, but as a fellow creature that can justly expect some-thing from us whose lives depend on it” (p. 29). This phraseology led her immediately to creation accounts and other early narratives in Genesis that to her mind express a closely parallel understanding of our relation to the land that sustains us.

Davis calls the second feature of agrarianism wisdom and informed ignorance. She quotes Wes Jackson’s assertion “that the ecological crisis is the result of a ‘knowledge-based worldview founded on the assumption that we can accumulate enough knowledge to bend nature pliantly and to run the world.’” The contrasting attitude is to acknowledge that as our knowledge expands new areas of darkness, of things we do not know, become evident. Modern agrarians like Jackson and Zimdahl reject “the modern conceit that hu-man behavior is invariably ameliorated by more knowledge.” Our problem, according to Jackson is not “simple ignorance but rather sin,…a culpable pride, a destructive lack of humility” (p. 34). Davis finds this mood amply expressed in scripture. A modest materialism is the third component in the agrarian ethic that Davis affirms. Biblical writers and modern agrarians all acknowledge the materiality of our life in the world. This recognition is coupled with a sense of limitation, living according to the will

ABiblicalEthicforUsingLandandWater5of God in the language of the Bible, meeting our material needs without inflicting damage as agrarians express it. This modest materialism contrasts sharply with the modern view, denoted by the term “materialistic scientism.” The mindset that is widely present today, Davis writes, in two forms. The more obvious is “our addiction to the acquisition and eventual disposal of vast quantities of unnecessary stuff.” The more serious version is the idea that “’science can solve all problems’—even though it is common experience that the efficient solution of an individual problem generates a host of new ones” (p. 37).

The fourth component of the agrarian mind-set is value beyond price, which has to do with the way that value is assigned to land. Rather than a commodity to be bought and sold at will, valued for its immediate cash value, land is the possession of a family to be held in trust from one generation to another. In the Old Testament people live in a three-way covenant, “a triangulated relationship among Israel, the land, and YHWH.” A more recent example in human culture is the deep connection with particular places—with the land—that is still held firmly by the First Peoples in the United States. How can the people really be the people unless they are living on the land from which they came, which they care for in proper ways, and which sustains them year after year?

Hopeful Signs

From an agrarian point of view, prospects for years to come are discouraging. The pro-ductionist ethic and scientific materialism seem inescapably dominant and are pushing the world into ever-deeper distress that seems to be leading toward apocalyptic disaster. Davis gives one example of a movement that offers a modest degree of hope: The Land Institute based in Salina, Kansas. Currently directed by Wes Jackson, the scientists here are “developing a new agriculture based on perennial grains grown in polyculture.” While tall-grass prairie agriculture cannot be used everywhere, this venture is based on twin principles that are suitable wherever people are appropriately connected to the land: “local adaptation and learning from natural systems” (p. 33). An interesting example that moves in a similar direction although it is still driven by the productionist ethic is in a column by Mark Bittman published in the New York Times (November 18, 2014). The state of Iowa was once 85 percent prairie and now is 85 percent cultivated land, most of it planted to row crops of corn and soybeans. The industrial farm-ing that takes place is heavily dependent upon chemicals. “This near monoculture, for the most part, fails to replenish soil, poisons water, increases flooding and erosion, spills car-bon, robs indigenous species of habitat and uses fossil fuel resources at unnecessarily high rates.” Bittman reports that despite these problems, farmers have felt the pressure to in-crease their plantings, extending even to marginally productive land. There now is “a scientifically informed, direct and effective planting tactic that can mitigate much of this.” By planting strips of indigenous prairie plants in the fields, using only 10 percent of the crop land, remarkable results can be achieved: “soil loss can be reduced by up to 95 percent, nutrient loss by 80 to 90 percent, and water runoff by 44 percent.” There are dramatic improvements in biodiversity, pollination, and pest reduc-tion. “And, unlike some ecological management techniques, the process is not expensive.” Although the main assumptions and techniques of conventional (industrial, chemical) farming continue, even this modest change significantly improves agricultural practices in the American farm belt.

Davis’ last chapter is especially important because it deals with the reality of cities, which for people today are a dominant factor of life. Cities and their hinterlands were in

6ABiblicalEthicforUsingLandandWaterclose, reciprocal relationship, with many of the people inside of the city actually caring for their land outside, which meant that they went back and forth day after day. This pattern was basic in the early period of the founding of New England, carried to the new continent from the old. There were rifts among the people, but not between urban and rural. Rather, rifts were between “the general populace and the very small ruling stratum that controlled the royal and administrative cities” (p. 159). Davis emphasizes that praise and blessing were essential components in the ongoing relationship of the people and God. They blessed God for the goodness of the world—its beauty and productivity—and God in turn blessed them by the continuing process of pul-sating creation with energy. It was, in fact, a form of continuous creation with Blessing as the characteristic enterprise. Much attention was given to Jerusalem, to Zion, where both the temple and the royal establishment existed. Their purpose was to be the centers from which the divine blessing radiated into the lives of the people throughout the entire inter-locking complex of city and hinterland. Because this function of representing the divine order was often diminished and frequently subverted, one of the major features in pro-phetic utterances was to call attention to these failures, insisting that both economic and political distresses were the direct result of the failure to honor the covenant with God and one another. Whereas Jerusalem was heralded as the icon of the world operating in the way that God intends, Babylon was lifted up as the icon of the world organized by principles that violated the covenant. Davis draws upon Frank Frick’s description of the intertwining of the Tower and Babel in Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Jeremiah. Davis then summarizes the idea: “Babylon is doomed as the arrogant city that claims all for itself and thus lives as a parasite on both its own soil and on distant vassal states. Babylon the Devastator is the diametric opposite of Zion, conceived as the source of blessing flowing to its hinterland. That image of Babylon stands in opposition also to the second and related icon, that of Zion as the nurturing mother-city, mētro-polis in the true sense” (p. 166). Davis closes her book with an extended discussion of the way that Detroit is trans-forming itself. With the decimation of the industrial base that once made this city power-ful, Detroit has become a terribly decimated place. Emerging out of the ruins, however, is a new kind of community that is learning how to feed itself again. She acknowledges that we don’t know how well Detroit can be transformed nor how cities can be made fully livable. She lists three features that she believes to be essential for urban survival: (1) The “interpretration of city and countryside through the revival of urban agricultural prac-tices”; (2) “widespread community cooperation” in education about these practices, sys-tems of distribution, and active participation by municipal and faith-based entities; and (3) “the initiative, inventiveness, and commitment of the most economically vulnerable members of the community” in recreating urban life (p. 178). In his Foreword to this book, Wendell Berry writes that the “Bible is not an easy book to read. It is often hard—if not, when it apparently contradicts itself, impossible—to un-derstand” (p. xi). He believes that Davis’ book can help readers come to overcome this difficulty and thus understand it more fully. “Reading it is a pleasure and a help” (ix). While I agree with Berry’s assessment, I found myself struggling at times as I worked my way through her text, with my Bible close at hand. It is a struggle worth our time.