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exploring plant-based nutrition as an ancient biblical ideal

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Blog #14: Tree on Fire on a Mountain

by rambler on category , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My wife was telling me about a podcast she was listening to while coming home from work one day, She Explores, which in general highlights stories of women’s experiences in nature and how these relate to life experiences in business, equality, family, etc. This particular piece was about the Cairn Project, who in their words, “expands outdoor access by supporting community-based wilderness and outdoor education groups around the country through a small grants program for girls and young women.” One of the groups they support, Embark, is involved in providing outdoor mentorship to refugee girls who are resettled within Utah. Through exposures to the mountainous natural world, whether it be camping, rock climbing, or other wilderness adventures, the organization gathers recently resettled girls from various countries around the world, including from Asia and Africa, and provides an avenue to test themselves, learn new skills, and develop self-confidence. Their idea is that learning to conquer physical challenges in this environment will give them the belief that they can also conquer the numerous other challenges that come with being a resettle female refugee. Having to learn a new language, a new order to basic community infrastructure, a new way to travel and collect daily items is something most of us have never had to do. Hopefully, challenging oneself in the shared outdoor environment, in physically difficult situations, will lead toward growing resilience and leadership skills that many of their participants have yet to uncover in their life journeys.

Since moving to western North Carolina 13 years ago, I have called the mountains home (excluding a year living in northern Ghana). Between the Blue Ridge and the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, our back doors have been the first step toward individual and family adventure, whether it be running or cycling on the Blue Ridge Parkway a few miles or a few tens of miles, hiking the narrow trails in the crevices of the Hoh River rainforests towards Mount Olympus, or taking one of the numerous trails at either place for a day outing. Among my first memories of northwest Washington is the mountain range on Vancouver Island sitting atop the Strait of Juan de Fuca and hovering beneath a clear blue sky. Later memories include the same mountain range peaking out from low fog over the strait, as well as those tops covered in clouds and the green bases staring at us across the water, dwarfing the freight lines headed for the ports of Seattle and Vancouver. There never seems to be a shortage of fun and inspiration from our local environments, no matter the season. As summer approaches, the return of tourists on the Blue Ridge Parkway will be a reminder of the draw to the mountains, for vistas, fresh air, physical activity, serenity, challenges, etc.

We are drawn to mountains for several reasons. The grandeur of them towering above all surroundings is breathtaking and can make us feel small and in awe of their massiveness. The different ecosystems they house provide delicate complexity to the balance of the greater environment and draw curious souls to come observe them meticulously and artistically. The ways they affect local climates draw people to live under their rain shadows. The ways streams and pools interact with rock and slope create some of the most beautiful and dangerous meetings of earth and water on the planet. We are drawn to them for their beauty and their challenge. A level of physical strength and endurance is required to explore and intimately learn these places, whether it be through scaling peaks, crossing glacial fields, or hiking on primitive trails. Several mountains are easily accessible with day hikes on tamed paths, but by far the majority demand a deeper commitment and focus to get to know. We often go to them to test our mettle, to build strength, whether it is mental, physical, spiritual, or social.

Burning man?

It should be no wonder that these places feature frequently in the Hebrew Bible, as places of challenge, places to meet the divine, places of uncertainty. In the first reboot of creation, the ark that contained all the preserved land animals comes to rest upon Ararat, which also hosts the first burnt sacrifice on an altar. Mount Moriah is where Abraham takes his son to offer as a sacrifice, only to have a provision in his place, hence passing his test. The story of Elijah calling upon Yahweh to ignite a water-soaked sacrifice and prove His power to the Israelites happens on Mount Carmel. The transfiguration of Jesus of Nazareth is said to have happened on Mount Tabor, and the Mount of Olives is where Jesus has his final test in the Garden, where the Jewish scholars and Roman soldiers seize him.

All the above stories have an element of danger in them, points of uncertainty of what is happening and what is coming next. Symbolically and physically, mountains represent danger, places where the weather can change lethally and without notice. Add the presence of God in the mix and that aura is increased exponentially. In three of the above stories, fire is present, just as on Mount Sinai in the tree where Moses first speaks with Yahweh.

While Eden isn’t explicitly stated to be on a mountain, we can surmise that the garden is in fact on the top of a mountain. Four rivers flow forth from Eden in Genesis 2: the Tigris, Euphrates, Gihon, and Pishon. Scholars debate the location of the ancient Gihon and Pishon Rivers, with several believing the Gihon flowed through Ethiopia, making it physically impossible for all four rivers to come from the same source. Again, reading the Bible in its context, the point of this description is likely to say that all of life, all of civilization, flowed forth from this cosmic mountain. In the metaphor of all life-giving rivers flowing from a single source, that source would have to be higher than everywhere else, hence a mountain. Several ancient religious traditions have the idea of a cosmic temple mountain, like Eden.

Many modern Christians probably think of Eden as a lavish, peaceful, perfect resort garden where everything was at its pinnacle. I wrote earlier how this was unlikely the case in reference to human work being part of our calling. If Eden is a cosmic mountain, where God lived, would its presence in the garden appear as a peaceful, serene singularity? Or would it be expressed more so how it was elsewhere in the Bible, as fire in a tree, a storm cloud upon Sinai, or fire raining down from heaven onto an altar? This brings us to the point in the garden where the presence dwelled: the Tree of Life. God-Elohim commanded humans to eat from every tree in the Garden, including the Tree of Life, and not from one specific tree. Why did Eve and Adam not eat from this tree, which was right next to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? The latter was “good to the eye”; was the former not?

Ironman Tulsa

The burning bush (s’neh tree) on Mount Horeb was fear-striking to Moses; the entire mountain (s’neh  Sinai) was fear-striking to the Hebrews. Could the Tree of Life have appeared similarly to the Adam, as a tree radiating with fire, striking fear into the hearts of humankind? God’s presence must have appeared impossibly powerful and challenging. It didn’t appear safe in their eyes, and the alternative tree did. Likewise, the Tree of Life on top of the mountain garden is not safe in our eyes. It will strike fear in our hearts. Its future revelations in the Bible appear equally deadly, even shameful, whether it be on Sinai, Mount Carmel, or on Golgotha where Jesus of Nazareth hung from a Roman execution rack, also referred to as a tree by some Christians. Synonymous to eating from the Tree of Life, approaching God and submitting to his wisdom appears counter-intuitive and treacherous. It means exchanging our version of prudence for one that is hazardously foreign to our comprehension of the world. It is here, on top of a mountain, where humans can come near to the spirit and decide whether to take from the tree that appears perilous but ultimately leads to the vision of the same tree in Revelation 22, which provides fruit continuously and medicine for the world.

Humans have looked to mountains for millennia in search of something, whether it is God, themselves, or nature. I have yet to climb a mountain and see a tree on fire. Odds are I won’t. Not physically. Recently I participated in an Ironman race in Tulsa. While not known for mountainous terrain, the last mile was an uphill shot to the finish line. Lucky for me I didn’t see a burning tree at the end, otherwise I would have questioned a turn I took somewhere on the course (Tulsa was busy that weekend with several events going on. There may have been a gathering of folks burning trees to celebrate or denote something). But I did get a rush of joy and satisfaction at finishing the event. It reminds me of all the Eden hot-spots around us all the time, whether at the finish lines of grueling athletic events, in personal or community gardens with veggies percolating under the soil to create life for several organisms, or sharing coffee and conversation with someone. Somewhere in all those places perhaps is the semblance of a tree on fire.

Blog 7: Backward vs Forward?

by rambler on category , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Is the Genesis story meant to cause reflections and lamentations on the world as it was, in the “good old days”, and nothing more?  We often tend to read these stories as reflections on human history, stories to listen to in church or Sunday school, maybe memorize some characters from them for treats at the end of the lesson, then move on to Monday.  My general experience in American church is that these stories are reviewed briefly, but almost all focus of teaching is on the New Testament.  Maybe that is not ubiquitous in the USA, but I have noticed that.  Subsequently, I had fallen into that mindset as well, not really thinking much relevance of the Torah.  I would read it as part of a pursuit from the first to last page of the Bible, mostly without thinking of what it may be trying to say.

farmhouse

As Spencer points out, the idea of an era that is void of conflict and violence is common to religion, and that this is suggestive of an era of veganism or vegetarianism, in which life does not have to kill other life in order to ensure its survival.  He shares an opinion that this thread comes from a historical memory buried within the make-ups of early humans, who perhaps unknowingly inherited such a history.  These legends are meant as a reflection back toward that period of peace and tranquility, and the roles of them in religion are to allow us to have self-soothing visions of such a time and place in the middle of a bloody, aggressive world geared toward taking out animals for food.

I would venture to say that some people brought up in religion might see the texts of Genesis similarly, as a reflection to a better time.  It is how we are taught to read stories written in the past, as narratives that happened then, separated from us in our present context.  It is how I read the Bible for years, which caused me to feel pretty disengaged.  But is this the correct way to read it?  Might it have something to say in our current day situation, more than just a memory of old?

Perhaps we should view the creation account as a prospective possibility rather than a retrospective history.  There is some idea that the myths of the Ideal Age in many cultures are stories of a paradise never realized rather than a description of a past that is lost.  As I stated earlier, God puts people in the Garden to work it, to create something from what already exists there into a better state.  We may think that Eden was perfect and complete as it was made, but this isn’t the idea behind it.  The mission of God was to rule with humans to progress toward something bigger and better than what they started with.  In the intended progression of time, this theme would have continued into the future had humans not fallen.

We take for granted our ability to perceive information as infinite and beyond face value, evidenced in that we see situations, assess them, and inflict an external force into that situation to bring about a new, desired reality.  We constantly receive and process data, then we come up with a response that may totally change what we found, often through experimentation.  We do not accept our knowledge base as intrinsically bounded.  If we did, when we came upon some unexplained phenomenon, we would simply accept it without thought.  This likely describes Homo erectus, as the evidence suggests they themselves didn’t change much in their million-year existence.  By accepting the world at face value and taking what they could to survive, they remained essentially a stagnant species.

Interpreting knowledge as beyond the immediately observable, something to be discovered with a little forethought, is a big step in the evolution of Homo sapiens.  The production of better tools enabled humans to experiment with and exert control over their environment, thus allowing for the acquisition of new knowledge from experimentation.  This ability to manipulate the environment, to coerce it to do what one wants it to do, is a game changer in the evolution and extinction of species.  Humans now would have been able to cultivate the earth, providing a more reliable food source than a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would have provided.  Hence Homo sapiens was moving toward becoming the dominant species, and Homo erectus was moving toward extinction.

That’s not to say that the only thing humans did with technology was cultivate the earth.  Obviously, early bands of humans used tools to kill and eat larger animals that they would never have been able to take down on their own physical abilities.  What is interesting is the manner in which many groups approached the hunting and killing of animals for their consumption.  Growing up in the USA, we learn about Native Americans in school.  Most of us may remember that they always used every bit of the animal that they killed (bison is the typical example) for food, clothing, and shelter.  They never killed (or gathered) more than they needed to live.  Many people have romantic memories of Native Americans and thoughts about that kind of kinship with the ecosystem, using only what you need and leaving the rest to flourish. 

With the various crises in our ecological world today, we often question whether the earth can sustain life as we know it, whether the world holds the resources to house all of us.  Life has mechanisms of controlling a level of homeostasis, whether it is in sustainable populations and ratios of species, the food chain, or intermittent epidemics or natural disasters.  With our ever-progressing technologies beyond simple hunter-gatherer tools, humans have intervened in the stabilizing life cycle, i.e. vaccinations, protective measures against certain natural disasters, best efforts to prevent wars, etc.  It appears that the pessimistic answer is the most accurate, that the earth cannot sustain us all.  That is probably true if we feel we own the right to ravage it of all resources, above and beyond what we need to survive and thrive.  In our current world of overabundance and materialism, it is easy to subscribe to this attitude of “having it all”.  If we were to follow a similar wisdom of some of these ancients, taking only what we need, our answer to the question may change.  We may find ourselves in a more generous world that can sustain us.  Eden represents an abundant world that is enough, but only if we decide that we won’t pursue wisdom on our terms, and rather opt for the Tree of Life.

Some of that sounds like the takeaways from Sunday school, that the world used to be such a great place, and now it isn’t.  Like with the Genesis narrative, we can look at Native American history, ruminate over it, and return to our original worldview.  In line with the anthropologic purpose of legend, we can take these images and soothe ourselves with them, have a break in our otherwise mundane existence.  But, rather than treat these stories passively, what if we approached them as another tool to use toward our evolution?  What if they represented what could be in our world today?  And now we have the other “nuts and bolts”, both physical and digital tools, to more effectively make that happen.  I would hope that our desire is that we as humans are progressing toward something better that what we were.  We all have periods of regression, individually and societally.  We can choose, in various circumstances, whether we will exert the Genesis 3 human idea of our wisdom in our lives, and dwell in the desert to scrounge out a living, thus finding that our earth, despite all its generosity, is in fact a desert in our eyes.  Or we can use our developed brains and tools to mold our world in the reflection of the wisdom superior to our own and maybe begin to realize what was initially intended for us: an abundant world that becomes evermore abundant.

Blog Post 4: Garden Temple

by rambler on category , , , , , ,

The idea of a place from which the divine uniquely emanates into the world, where God’s space and Human’s space intersect, in the form of a garden bursting with life and abundance, is a very old and common idea throughout the ancient world.  Cultures surrounding the ancient Hebrews had their own mythologies concerning the dwelling places of deities in gardens.  Ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians are some of the people groups that had “garden temples” incorporated into their heritage.  In this part of the world, known for arid deserts and scarce pockets of water and plant life, gardens must have had a special reverence, places of restoration, nourishment, and healing.  It is no wonder that we associated these life-bursting locales with divinity.

In concert with their neighbors, the Hebrews held the garden of Eden in similar esteem: a place where God touched the earth to create ordered, bountiful life that would self-perpetuate, creating more energy and beauty.  It represents the ultimate temple imagery in the three dimensional world (the Sabbath rest represents the garden temple in the fourth dimension of time), an image that was recreated by the Hebrew people after their release from Egypt in the form of a transportable tabernacle, then a stationary temple in Jerusalem.  Interestingly, the parts of the tabernacle have corresponding parts to the Garden of Eden.  The large surrounding courtyard of the tabernacle corresponds with the region of Eden; the holy place within the courtyard, with the Garden inside Eden; and the holy of holies within the holy place, with the tree of life within the Garden.  The tree of life is the most special place inside the garden, as it contains the gift of ultimate communion between divinity and humanity, that of eternal life in some form.  It is the place where God and humanity meet, where the worlds intersect, and where humans can experience the life they were intended to know.  It was the perfect overlapping of heaven and earth.  This is an idea that moderns may correlate with our cultural idea of “heaven”, whether that is a historically accurate notion of heaven or not.

This place of abundant life and beauty was not an absolute idea that had always been in existence.  The wording of the start of the Genesis 2 creation narrative indicates something missing.  “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up.”  The plant life made on day 3 of creation in Genesis 1 is yet to appear on the Earth for apparently two reasons: 1) God had yet to send rain on the earth and 2) no one was available to work the ground.  Why are both considered reasons for a lack of fauna on the Earth?

Concerning the first necessity, the same sentence describes water already present.  “…but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.”  So water was available for the creation and propagation of life, but apparently it wasn’t good enough to actually create and propagate life.  There must be something unique in the water that comes from the sky that permits growth that water from the surface does not.  The idea of life-giving water coming from the gods above is also seen in neighboring cultures.  An example is the Egyptian sky goddess Nut, who nurses the earth from her breasts, which produce life-giving water.  Similarly, God, living in heaven, gifts the earth with his own living rains to nourish and renew the land.  This water from above is different from the water below.  The waters in Genesis 1, from which land arises on day 3 of creation, were previously described as part of the formless and void earth, part of the chaos that was the world before God intervened.  Throughout the Bible, chaotic waters carry an evil symbolism for the Hebrew people (i.e. Egyptians in Exodus 15, the story of Jonah).  In Genesis 2, one may conclude that the waters coming up from the ground are part of those same chaos waters from which the earth arose and on which it is essentially floating.  So the waters from God above are very different from the waters below.  One is life sustaining, the other life taking.

 After rain, the second requirement for plant life is the lack of a worker.  Every material thing now exists for life from the ground to flourish, except for the action of organizing those things into a form that starts the process of life.    This must mean that, in order for trees and shrubs to exist, a partnership between humans and God is essential.  This is what the original destiny of humankind was: God and humans in the garden ruling together, working to continue the work that was started after creation, a partnership between the deity and his image-bearers.  We often think that the Garden was perfect as it was, and that our role was to simply occupy it.  This notion does not honor the vocation we were given to be workers of the Garden, to take creation and work alongside God to make it into something more complete and beautiful than it originally was.

In a primarily agrarian society, it would make sense that a description of the intended state of partnership between God and humans be centered around farming.  This would have resonated more with ancient peoples in their environment than with moderns.  When we think of creating culture, we don’t primarily have reflections around plots of land sprouting herbs and fruits.  We tend to think more about cities, cafes, and museums.  We can certainly consider that the story is more about the idea of God and humans getting together to progress toward some greater collaboration than original creation, not just how plants are grown.  But the story could have described the partnership established to raise animals for eating, but it doesn’t.  Typical of the Hebrew Bible, we are seeing several meanings and points of reflection in a single story.  We can likely take meanings of both generalized order and nutritional order from the narrative.

It was only after both rain and workers were in place that God created the Garden Temple, the ideal meeting place of heaven and earth.  “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.”  Like any good cosmic temple of the ancient Near East, the Garden occupies a high space, a mountaintop, one origin from which life-giving waters flow forth.

In the Genesis account of the ancient world, the four rivers listed in Genesis, the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates, all emanated from a single river flowing through Eden.  While the locations of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers are well-established, the historical locations of the Pishon and Gihon are not.  Many ancient and modern scholars have proposed various theories as to the identifications of these rivers, from Ethiopia representing the Nile River, even south of that to Zimbabwe, to various locations in the Middle East.  Whatever the designation of the Pishon and Gihon rivers may be, all of these rivers of the ancient world were essential to the development of civilization, humans coming together to create ordered societies where people could survive and flourish, using the resource of fresh flowing water to farm the land for sustenance.  The significance of these major ancient life sources starting from a singularity in Eden, flowing from there and encompassing the known world at that time, may be the idea that this points to a single origin of Order, the co-mingling of God and Human space in which the sustaining Life Source starts in its perfect form, and is so abundant in life-giving energy, that it makes its way throughout the land, spreading out and providing welcoming homes for the incubation of human development.  If the Garden of Eden is the perfect co-mingled junction of God-space and Human-space, and from it flows identifiable river landmarks of the ancient world that also generate life, might that say something about our current situation outside of Eden and its relationship to this co-mingled point in space-time?  A potential point of the writer may be that all of our societies have their roots from this origin, all sharing some part of the DNA of the origin, and are to some degree a reflection of the origin.  Despite the terrible, hideous, unjust things we create, in our root there is a perfect idyllic purpose from which amazing things also come.

This is the kingdom of heaven in effect, more of an action of events than a place far away.  Being brought up in a scientific, physical world of reality, we tend to have in our minds that heaven is a physical place in a physical space somewhere away from where we are.  We are generally uncomfortable with ambiguity, and this idea of heaven lends to ambiguity.  It seems the Bible is putting a different emphasis on what and where heaven is.  If it is more of a state of being, a mindset to which we can conform, following the wisdom laid out for us, this will allow us to begin experiencing heaven now, in our present forms, with the mental and physical acuity that our bodies were meant to experience.

The Relationship

by rambler on category , , , , , , , , , ,

After recognizing the pattern of the Genesis 1 creation account of paired days and themes, evidently there is a special connection between the seed-bearing and fruit-bearing plants and trees on the land (the final creative act of day 3), and the humans created in the image of the gods (the final creative act of day 6).  What is the connection?

Genesis 1:29 gives one straightforward response to the question: all seed-bearing plants and trees that produce fruit are meant to be food for humans.  That is our nourishment in the ideal, pre-fallen state.  All acts of creation have aligned to set up this perfect homeostasis of life-sustaining energy.  We are intricately connected to the plants both in the creation patterns and in the time following the story.  If we are to believe that Genesis 1 is a story of the world set up the way God intended it, and that all the pain and suffering that we see today originated at the choice of humankind to pursue its own wisdom represented by eating the forbidden fruit, then we must recognize that everything that was put in place prior to that event was at perfect form and functionality, one aspect of which is how humans eat.  By no means is this the only notion to be drawn from the passage.  The idea of humans and trees sharing a functional commonality is another.  But it is one.

Immediately following the proclamation of seed-bearing trees as food for humans, God commands the green grasses and plants be as food for the beasts of the earth, birds of the sky, and…

The connection of seed-bearing plants and humans are actually one of a few intimate relationships established by God on day 6. Immediately following the proclamation of seed-bearing trees as food for humans, God commands the green grasses and plants be as food for the beasts of the earth, birds of the sky, and creatures moving along the ground.  This doesn’t match up as nicely in the creation day mapping scheme as fruit trees and humans, as the plants are still the second creative act on day 3, but birds were created on day 5 and the beasts of the earth were the first creative act on day 6.  Nevertheless, the plan for animal kind, everything that has the breath of life (God’s ruach, Hebrew translated spirit, in animals and humans), receives the gift of plants as food.  So people aren’t the only ones for whom this is an ideal, but animals are also included.  This obviously comes into contradiction with what we simply observe in the animal kingdom: some animals can only eat other animals to live, i.e. felines.  I will get into this later, but we do know that humans can make a choice to live according to this principle and live well.

Another established relationship in this story is that between animals and humans.  In Genesis 1:28, we are told to rule over the animals and subdue the earth.  On initial reading, to us this seems like a green light to utilize all of creation as we see fit.  Several critics have cited this as the reason the Western world has made a habit of using and abusing our planet: it is both permitted and demanded by our religious tradition.  We seem to have a knack for, with the aid of modern technology, manipulating the earth to accommodate us and our desires, to the point of wreckage.  The same may be said for the animals.  If we need them to meet our nutritional needs by being a direct source of calories, so be it.  That is why they are here. 

We practically can already see some problems with this mindset in our current place on Earth.  As we manipulate our technologies for our liking, we see the detriment this is having in our environment.  Climate change has become a pretty complex issue, but it does appear to be at least in part due to human activity.  It is well established that the harvesting of animals for human consumption also leaves a larger carbon footprint than the harvesting of plants.  Science has established this data recently, but we should have recognized that disaster would happen when we interpret Genesis 1:28 as a free reign for our desires.

We may make the assumption that the relationship between humans and animals is only vertical.  We rule them, case closed.  Looking at the creation patterns, this doesn’t appear to be the case.  We also have a horizontal relationship with animals, as we were created on the same day as they.  We are creatures just as they are, made on the same day as the land creatures, sharing that day of creation with them.  All life forms, unicellular or multicellular, plant or animal, sea swimmer or land rover, fall under the auspices of creation and the physical laws that govern it.  After the animals were created, God stated that what he created was good, just as he did after all other creative acts in Genesis 1.  This suggests that all of creation was already good in and of itself before we showed up.  That should remove some entitlement we may feel as the only important part of creation.

But rather we are intimately connected with the earth as evidenced by the Genesis 2 creation account.

We are not separated from the earth, dropped down here from some other realm to make use of what we find.  But rather we are intimately connected with the earth as evidenced by the Genesis 2 creation account.  This states man was formed from the dust of the earth and had life breathed into him, hence the name of the first man as Adam (from the Hebrew adamah, “of the ground”).  Mankind is formed as the weird combination of “dirt and divine breath (Hebrew ruach)”.  That should make us rethink our relationship with the earth, that we are intimately connected with it, and that anything we do to it, any means of disrespect and negligence we exhibit, will come back to affect us accordingly.

So our relationship with the rest of creation is not a simple linear pattern of one entity above the other.  We are told to rule the animals, but at the same time we are on something of equal footing with them.  Both animals and humans share a relationship with the botanical creation of day 3, assigned to use those resources as our food.  And humans have a specific relationship with the earth, commanded by God to subdue it.  Reading Genesis in its ancient context, subdue most likely refers to farming the ground, as the ancient Near Eastern cultures reading or listening to this narrative were primarily agrarian.  In Genesis 2, the second creation narrative, humans are put in a garden, where their food source is fruit-bearing trees, and told to “work and care for” the garden, in other words farm the ground.  In fact, no plants had yet showed up on earth until humankind was created because, in part, there was no one yet created to work the ground.  But while we are told to subdue the plant-producing earth, we see that if by subdue we mean abuse and disrespect, following our own wisdom and working toward our idea of what is right for us, our intimate connection with the earth will cause us to feel the effects, however welcoming or catastrophic they may be.  The effects of treating the earth in this way can be expressed in God’s curse to Adam in Genesis 3 after he decides that God’s wisdom is secondary to his own by eating the forbidden fruit:

Cursed is the ground

Because of you;
Through painful toil you
Will eat food from it
All the days of your life
It will produce thorns and thistle for you
And you will eat the plants of the field

By following our own wisdom, making our own choices for ourselves and our rule of the earth, suddenly what should be existence in a harmonious garden in which life cannot help but sprout up the best of what the plant kingdom has to offer, becomes a struggle against the earth to strangle from it life-sustaining nourishment.

We are also made aware by God in Genesis 1:30 the relationship between animals and the earth, not directly involving humans.  They are to have the green plants as food.  Why should we care what they are given to eat or not?  We know that we have the fruit-bearing trees.  This is likely a warning to humans from God concerning our stewardship, as subduers and rulers over earth and animal, that that relationship between the animals and green plants is sacred, and part of our responsibility in ruling alongside God is to make sure the relationship is preserved and allowed to flourish.  We are not to utilize the whole earth for our own immediate good, but to reflect, as image-bearers carrying out God’s rule on earth, the care God gives to all of creation by helping protect this other sacred relationship.  Therefore, we are not to ransack the earth for all its resources, but rather to use what we need in order to live, trusting that God has created a generous space capable of taking care of all creatures.

After every creative process, the end of every day of creation, God sees that what he has created is good.  This is repeated six times in Genesis 1, all immediately after the acts of creation: light, gathering of the seas, vegetation, heavenly bodies, sea creatures and birds, and wild land animals.  However, he doesn’t say this right after humans are created.  Rather, after humans arrive, God proclaims humans’ role, and the role of plants and seed-bearing trees for animals and humans, and after that proclamation does God say that this is very good, clearly a more emphasized statement from what he has previously said.  While all of creation had been proclaimed good up to this point, apparently the final statements of order at the end of the chapter, statements laying out the functional relationships among living creatures and the earth that houses them, have added exponentially, not just summarily, to the quality of creation.  I think this means we are not to take these final statements lightly.  We may want to really consider what they mean for our purpose and symbiosis with the world and with God.

The Cosmic Landscape

by rambler on category , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the entirety of the structure of the world and our relationship with it can be found on the first three pages of Genesis.  Everything that happens forward from there, from the stories of the first ancient peoples, to those of the Hebrew nation starting with Abraham, to a resolution for Christians in the form of Jesus of Nazareth, can draw roots from this introduction.  I never realized this until recently, thanks to The Bible Project Podcast, which I cannot recommend highly enough, whether you are religious or are curious to know more about the basis for Christianity.  This understanding has revolutionized the way I see the entire story of humankind and the earth.

Before any word of creation is spoken, Genesis narrates that the world was Tohu wa-bohu (translations include formless, void, wild and waste).

We find the initial structure of creation, including time and space, as God turning disorder into order.  Before any word of creation is spoken, Genesis narrates that the world was Tohu wa-bohu (translations include formless, void, wild and waste).  There are many different interpretations of what was actually there, but the wording suggests that the earth did exist in the beginning, at least before God’s first act of speaking, though it was in a “nothingness” state.  That changed the way I looked at the creation story as traditionally taught.  We like to have definitively established boundaries in describing our world, and are uncomfortable when boundaries get blurred.  It is much easier in our minds to comprehend the universe starting at an instant, the beginning of time.  We want to think that at some point there was nothing, then suddenly something appeared.  This isn’t a bad thing, but it is a bias we should recognize, the need for a firmly established order of events.  It is what the singularity of the Big Bang attempts to explain.  The same holds true for those of us wanting the creation narrative to say the same thing: a fundamental starting point, a sequence of events, then here we are.

Reading the passages of Genesis 1, I think the story expresses something more about the process of turning chaos into functionality, not specifically the start of something out of nothing, but more so the ordering of material that was already there.  In an already existent realm of “wild and waste”, God’s first act of order is the separation of light and dark, our most recognizable form of energy and the lack thereof, of visibility and blindness.  A stubbed toe on the foot of the bed in the middle of the night makes it clear to me that the two are separated!  More comprehensively, we see different worlds come out whether it is day or night.  Take a walk outside your house during the night and day and the sights, sounds, environment, and inhabitants of each time vary extensively.  Most notable of the differences may be the sources of light that rule each time period, as described on day 4 (the coinciding function of days 1 and 4 is another fun pattern to talk about later).

Repetition is also a form of order that is established right at the story’s beginning by establishing a recurring pattern of evening and morning.  It starts right after the initial proclamation of light and dark and continues throughout the first creation narrative.  All that happens from here on out through Genesis 1, happens within the confines of repeating organized days.

The first creation day appears to establish order around the functional concept of time, rather than the start of something material out of nothing, as the watery abyss was already present before the first word in Genesis 1:2.  The second day of creation is more concerned with the first ordering of the space that is present, namely waters.  Waters above, heaven, separated from waters below, on Earth.  Just as day 4 bore the inhabitants of day 1 creation, day 5 bears the inhabitants of day 2 creation, the waters below to be filled with sea creatures and the waters above to be filled with birds.

Day 3 focuses the ordering of space more narrowly toward the waters below, that area which we occupy, rather than the waters above, or the heavens.  On day 3 we see a 2-fold origin sequence.  From the waters below that have been separated from the heavens, comes forth 1) dry land out of the sea; from the dry land comes forth 2) seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees.  Day 6 repeats the pattern of the creation of inhabitants for the day 3 world as day 5 did for day 2.  Day 6, like day 3, contains a two-fold creative process: God makes 1) the animals which come forth from the land and 2) humans.  Unlike day 3 on which plants come forth from the land, there is no specific statement that humans came forth from animals on day 6.  That would fit the creative pattern seen on day 3, and those of us who wrestle with trying to make scientific knowledge and faith congruent may see this as pointing toward an evolutionary process for the creation of humans.  I don’t think that is a question that this narrative is concerned with.  Perhaps a connection more likely than animals from humans would be between trees and humans as the final acts of creation on days 3 and 6, which is another path of contemplation that could be related to nutrition as well.  Either way, as 21st century scientifically minded people, we need to be cautious of the presuppositions we bring to the text, the notions of what questions we think the Bible should answer for us, rather than letting it speak to us on its terms in its context.

At this point we can see the pairings of creation days: days 1 and 4 (light/dark and the inhabitants of both domains), days 2 and 5 (waters above and below, and the inhabitants of both domains), and days 3 and 6 (land bursting with green vegetation, and the land’s inhabitants).  I was certainly never taught this growing up in an American church environment, which is disappointing to me now that the story of Genesis 1, reading the patterns in this way, has a suddenly new significance for me that is so much more beautiful and purposeful in describing our world and the functionality of it!  Understanding these patterns has brought to light a new concept of the order of the creative process, one that is more nuanced and dense in imagery than I could have imagined. 

I wonder if part of missing these patterns has to do with the contemporary way we learn and interpret our world.  As I stated earlier, as moderns we look for literal, black and white sequential events or points in time from which to tell our stories, whether it is creative fiction (though the magical realists may differ on this one), guides for assembling Ikea furniture (that seems a pretty practical reason for such story-telling), or the origins of our place in the universe.  Genesis 1 refuses to comply with this world-view.  How can green plants thrive on dry land before the arrival of the sun?  But by reading Genesis on its terms, understanding the design patterns from which it originates, we find an incredible world of wisdom that can open our minds to the structure and purpose of the created world.  This in turn may help us begin to comprehend the Order behind it all, the Order which resides in us as image-bearers, that which has established an ideal existence for all living things.

For further reading on these ideas, The Lost World of Genesis One by John H. Walton is a great book that discusses this subject in more detail. It is very accessible for us nonscholars and challenges the approach many of us have taken to these ancient scriptures to provide a rich interpretation of the first book of the Bible.

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