Matthew J. Lynch
I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions.1
Being Questioned by the Old Testament
It would be easy to assume that the problem of violence in the Old Testament faces only one direction. We look at the Old Testament, see its problems, and try to figure out what to do. But what if the Old Testament has a few questions or concerns about us?
I sometimes like to run a thought experiment. What if a representative group of Old Testament authors convened a symposium on the topic, “Facing the Problem of Violence in Twenty-First Century America”? What might they say? What would baffle them about us? What concerns do they hold about violence that seem to escape us?
These are questions I consider in my recent book on biblical portrayals of violence.2 I wanted to understand ways that Old Testament authors think about the problem of violence. I wanted to understand the categories they use to make sense of violence.
In the process of analyzing those ways of thinking about violence, I outline four “grammars of violence.” Each refers to a specific way of representing and talking about the problem of violence. One of these is an ecological grammar. In this mode of representation, biblical writers express the idea that violence tears the relational fabric binding humans and the natural world. It’s absolutely central for many Old Testament writers but receives only dim recognition in mainstream discussions of violence today. And this would baffle our symposium participants.
Our problem is a weak concept of the relationship between human morality and our physical environment. The ancients saw things very differently.
Violence Ruins Creation
The writers of Genesis 1–2 want us to envision the world in terms of a deep ecology—an ecology in which the moral and physical worlds are deeply entwined. The land is sensitized to the moral health of its inhabitants, and especially to human-on-human violence (both personal and structural). The land manifests the health of its inhabitants, breaks into a fever, and even vomits when humans are morally ill (Lev 18:28; 20:22).
According to Genesis, creation is hitched together by a web of life-sustaining relationships that are physical, moral, and theological. The lines of these relationships run not only between animals, plants, and the land, but between God, creation, and the world. This world was deemed tov, “good.” Goodness, according to Genesis 1–2, is about rightly ordered, properly functioning, life-giving, and aesthetically pleasing relationships. The climax of the first creation account in Genesis 1 affirms creation’s fundamental goodness in crystal clear terms: “God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was supremely good.”3 God’s creation is deemed fit for purpose, for life, and for divine enjoyment.
The tragedy of violence is that it damaged the relational goodness of creation, bringing it to a point of collapse and destruction. Violence not only impacted the physical world; it destroyed the life-sustaining web of relationships that bound it together. What was very good became ruined by violence.
Notice God’s assessment in Gen 6:11, after we read that the earth was filled with violence: “And God looked at the earth, and behold, it was ruined!” This is a direct inversion of the goodness affirmed in Gen 1:31. William P. Brown’s assessment is apt: “Violence and its accompanying effects make up the antithesis of creation’s ‘goodness.’”4 By this point in the story, the earth’s moral-physical ecology has collapsed.
Cain and Abel
Violence is the first named “sin” in Scripture (Gen 4:7). It slouches toward Cain, seeking to master him. And it does. Cain slays his brother Abel, whose blood cries out from the ground (4:10).
Most of us brush right past that last detail about blood from the ground. It sounds like a mere rhetorical flourish, artistic license. The story-writer wants to dramatize this be-sure-your-sin-will-find-you-out moment. But here’s where the biblical writers want to challenge us. Notice the next verse: “Now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s shed blood from your hand” (Gen 4:11).
In this ghoulish scene the ground opens its mouth and drinks Abel’s blood. So when we hear that Abel’s blood cries out, Genesis seems to be saying that it did so from the ground’s own mouth. The ground also suffers because of the violence it just ingested. And it begins to suffocate.
The scene continues, with these words for Cain: “When you cultivate the ground, [the ground] will no longer yield its strength to you” (4:12). Cain becomes homeless because the ground refuses to produce crops for Cain. In other words, the earth stands in protest with Abel, who had come from the ground.
Naturalist John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”5 The authors of Genesis 1–11 are at pains to help us see this very point. Humanity is made from the humus (2:7), just like the animals (2:19). We share a common day of creation, common food source (1:24–31), a common mandate (1:22; 8:17), and so on. Creation is profoundly interconnected. As Carol Newsom writes, “We share common ground with the Earth because we are common ground.”6
This commonality extends beyond physical origins. There is a deeper moral and theological connection between humanity, the land, and animals. The moral dimensions of the earth’s ecology are sometimes discussed by scholars using the language of “deep ecology.” Katherine Dell talks about deep ecology in terms of “nature’s complex interrelated processes and the interaction of human beings” with those processes and “with each other.”7 The deep aspect of this ecology refers to the moral and spiritual dimensions of this interrelationship that extend beyond exclusively physical and material understandings of the world.
Violence between humans affects the land in ways that cannot be explained in terms that exclude habitat. The ground revolts against Cain because there is no “pure” brother-against-brother violence. You can’t extract Cain’s immoral actions from the ground on which they took place. Violence is by definition ecocidal. I focus on “ecology” because the term helps us attend to the interconnection between living organisms, and to the way that those interconnections create a unified whole. While biblical Hebrew has no word corresponding exactly to the English “ecology,” its depiction of the land (Heb. ’adamah and ’eretz) reflects the kinds of relational and interactive concerns evident in the term.8
Ecological Solidarity with Victims of Violence
The moral solidarity between humanity and their broader ecology finds expression throughout Scripture. The prophet Hosea recognizes that the land’s health depends on Israel’s moral integrity:
There is no faithfulness, no love,
no acknowledgment of God in the land.
There is only cursing, lying and murder,
stealing and adultery;
they break all bounds,
and bloodshed follows bloodshed.
Because of this the land dries up,
and all who live in it waste away;
the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
and the fish in the sea are swept away. (Hos 4:1b–3)
Notice the causal link. As humans fill the land with bloodshed, the physical world suffers. The land becomes like a mourner. Human rebellion—typified here in bloodshed—manifests itself on creation’s body, which enters a state of mourning. Mourning in the ancient world was dramatized on the body. A mourner would wear sackcloth, put dust on their head, refrain from eating, and cry out.9 So too the land. While in mourning, the land and animals languish, along with plant life. Why? Because of their familial bond with humanity. Because land and animals share in humanity’s grief.
In his recent piece for The Atlantic, Jemar Tisby writes that “Black people feel the pain and loss of black life as if it were our very own blood that had been brutalized—because it easily could have been.” In a tribute to his friend George Floyd that Tisby cites, NBA player Stephen Jackson called Floyd his “twin,” even though Floyd was not technically his twin. It’s a claim of solidarity. Their shared experiences, memories, stories, and pain made Floyd not only his friend, but also his brother and twin. Tisby writes, “[B]lack people share a kinship of calamity. A brotherhood and sisterhood of suffering.”10
According to biblical writers, the land knows such kinship with victims of violence, because humans came from the humus. The land of Israel was co-victim of countless acts of violence. Some of that violence was domestic. Israel’s own leadership ruined the land, as when Manasseh “filled Jerusalem from end to end” with blood (2 Kgs 21:16). Some of it was from others. The land suffered horrific violence beneath the boots of Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman armies. It was literally stripped bare by oppressing powers.
But the land had its limits. It could only absorb so much blood before crying out for justice. The prophet Habakkuk recognizes the powerful bond between humanity and the land:
Because you have plundered many nations,
all that survive of the peoples shall plunder you;
because of human bloodshed, and violence to the earth,
to cities and all who live in them. (Hab 2:8)
The nation that destroyed the earth with indiscriminate violence would face ecological justice. They would be overwhelmed by their own violence against the earth:
For the violence committed against Lebanon will smother you,
and the destruction of animals will terrorize you,
because of the shed blood of humanity, and the violence against the earth,
against the cities and all their inhabitants (Hab 2:17).
An Ecological Critique of Violence
In his book The Songs of Trees, David George Haskell laments the double alienation from the natural world that characterizes modern life.11 Modernity set humans against nature through its utilitarian pillaging of “natural resources,” and apart from the earth through romanticized views of “pristine nature” that have little place for humans. Facing this alienation, Haskell yearns for a deeper ideal of “living community,” where humans belong in community with the land. Moving in an ethical direction, he wonders, “Can we find an ethic of full earthly belonging,” something “less fractured” than modernity offers? The answer depends, he concludes, “on the kind of Earth to which we think we belong.”12
Enter Genesis—and the prophets. If given a voice, we’d hear them plead their case for a reintegrated concept of humanity’s place in the living community. We’d hear it critique our thin account of the scope of the problem of violence that blinds us to the ecological fallout from human-on-human violence. The problem of violence is indeed social and moral, but it is also ecological. The inadequacy of our understanding of violence is rooted in our thin concept of our kinship with the land as an interdependent living community. Violence ruins creation. The kind of earth to which we belong is one where the land wears on its body the mourning clothes of grief in solidarity with humans’ and creation’s suffering. The land shares “a kinship of calamity” with its land-folk.13
Matthew J. Lynch is Assistant Professor of Old Testament at Regent College, Vancouver. For the last seven years, he was Academic Dean and Lecturer in Old Testament at Westminster Theological Centre in the UK. He’s the author of Portraying Violence in the Hebrew Bible: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge, 2020) and Monotheism and Institutions in the Book of Chronicles: Temple, Priesthood, and Kingship in Post-Exilic Perspective (Mohr Siebeck, 2014). His forthcoming volume is entitled First Isaiah and the Disappearance of the “gods” (Eisenbrauns). Matthew is also a founder and co-host of the OnScript podcast. He is married with two kids.
Image: Titian, Cain and Abel
- Anne Frank, Diary of a Young Girl.[↩]
- Matthew J. Lynch, Portraying Violence in the Hebrew Bible: A Literary and Cultural Study (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020).[↩]
- I draw the phrase ‘supremely good’ from the CEB Gen 1:31.[↩]
- William P. Brown, The Ethos of the Cosmos: The Genesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 54.[↩]
- Mentioned in Leah Kostamo, Planted: A Story of Creation, Calling, and Community (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), 7.[↩]
- Carol A. Newsom, “Common Ground: An Ecological Reading of Genesis 2–3,” in The Earth Story in Genesis, The Earth Bible Volume 2, ed. Normal C. Habel and Shirley Wurst (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 63.[↩]
- Katherine Dell, “‘Green’ Ideas in the Wisdom Tradition,” SJT 47, no. 4 (1994): 423–451.[↩]
- Discussed in my book Portraying Violence, 20–22. The term “ecology” was coined in the 19th century by Ernst Haeckel to reflect the growing interest in the mutually affective relationships between plants. Horrifically, however, Haeckel was a promoter of Social Darwinism, which had catastrophic effects on the lives of Jews during the Holocaust. For a discussion of the roots of a scientific interest in the unity of the natural world, see, e.g., Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Knopf, 2015), and before that, the religious and natural unity of the world received emphasis in the discipline of natural philosophy (Edward Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007]).[↩]
- Gary A. Anderson, A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991).[↩]
- Jemar Tisby, “The Familial Language of Black Grief,” The Atlantic, June 10, 2020, accessed June 12, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/06/familial-language-black-grief/612847/.[↩]
- David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors (New York: Viking, 2017), 21–22.[↩]
- Haskell, The Songs of Trees, 361–2. Similar discussions appear in Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 163 et passim, who emphasizes the need for an “interdependent” view of the relationship between humans and the land, one that reflects mutual gratitude.[↩]
- Tisby, “Black Grief.”[↩]