The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel by Theodore Hiebert

The Yahwist's Landscape: Nature and Religion in Early Israel by Theodore Hiebert

By Theodore Hiebert

The current ecological challenge has created new curiosity in and feedback of biblical attitudes towards nature. during this booklet Theodore Hiebert bargains a accomplished exam of the ideology of a unmarried biblical author--the Yahwist (J), author of the oldest narrative sections of Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers.

Hiebert argues the significance of studying J in its historic close to japanese context. His research accommodates facts about the ecologies, economies, and religions of the traditional Levant drawn from fresh paintings in archaeology, background, social anthropology, and comparative faith. Hiebert reveals that regardless of the restrictions of J's international view (and the area during which it took shape), J's ideology is suitable to modern efforts to border a theology of ecology. fairly priceless are J's perspectives of truth as unified and non-dualistic, humanity as constrained and established, nature and humanity as interrelated and preserving sacred value, and agriculture as a context for an ecological theology.

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By separating nature from God and from society, the biblical view of creation began the "disenchantment process," as Cox called it, whereby nature was freed from its religious overtones and perceived in a matter-of-fact way. "33 With the appearance of the environmental crisis in the final decades of the twentieth century, this traditional conception of biblical religion found itself in an entirely new and less friendly world. What had been considered unquestionably admirable within it suddenly came under direct criticism and was for the first time characterized as seriously problematic.

According to White, the biblical stories of creation set humans apart from nature and pictured them as superior to it, sharing in large part God's own transcendence over it by being created in the divine image. The physical creation for its part was made solely "to serve man's purposes" 14 The Yaliwist's Landscape and was placed under human dominion. "35 While White demonstrates no knowledge of the history of biblical scholarship on the texts or issues he discusses, it is not hard to recognize the parallels between his critique and the results of biblical scholarship.

The kind of analysis needed to carry the discussion of nature in the Bible beyond the results of current work is the study of individual biblical authors in a comprehensive and systematic fashion. Such a study is narrow enough in scope to allow for a detailed analysis of texts and encourage attention to the distinctive perspectives of a particular writer, thereby avoiding the homogenizing of biblical views. At the same time, this kind of study is broad enough in scope to allow for the examination of a pattern of thought encompassing various dimensions of the human-nature relationship.

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