The Israeli intellectual celebrity, Yuval Noah Harari, is the latest to blame the Bible. In a recent article for the Guardian, in which he argued for children to be taught history rather than myth, the author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind remarked: “In my home country of Israel, even secular schoolchildren learn about the Garden of Eden and see colourful images of Noah’s Ark before they learn about Neanderthals.”
Education has an impact, he wrote. “It’s possible to trace a direct line from the Genesis decree of ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ to the Industrial Revolution and today’s ecological crisis.”
Such a critique goes back more than 50 years ago to an influential essay written by an American professor, Lynn White, who contended that the Western tradition stemmed from a belief that man had dominion over nature and everything was created to serve his purpose: human beings were thus led to think they were free to exploit nature as they wished.
Since then, a growing stream of literature has tried to counteract the charge and demonstrate Judaism’s environmental credentials.
On the one hand, it can’t be denied that the primacy of human beings is established early on in the Creation story, and reinforced more ominously after the flood when the survivors are told that henceforth they are permitted to eat meat: upon the unfortunate animals who are “given into your hand” shall be “fear and dread of you”.
But there is another strand which modern commentators in particular draw out: the guidance given to Adam to “work and look after” the Garden of Eden, which balances and qualifies the freedom to “subdue”. Human beings are to exert their control as careful gardeners, stewards of the estate, rather than reckless developers. The medieval commentator Sforno glosses “subdue” as referring to the application of human intellect rather than brute force.
The climax of the foundational Genesis story is not the creation of human beings, however: it is the first Shabbat, the origin of a core religious institution which puts a brake on human activity. And later on in the Torah comes the shemittah, the sabbatical year, which entails the idea that “the land is Mine” (Leviticus 25:23): the Israelites are God’s tenants rather than outright owners, whose occupancy depends on following certain rules.
In its rejection of paganism, Judaism may have stood firmly opposed to anything that smacked of the worship of nature but that did not mean to say it did not appreciate its wonder, which in later biblical books reflects the majesty and creative power of God. Think of the extraordinary conclusion to the Book of Job, where God responds, “Did you endow the horse with his valour?… Is it by your wisdom that the hawk flies?” (Chapter 39).
To despoil nature is to defile a divine work of art.
In Psalm 148, which is recited daily as part of the morning service, human beings are depicted as part of a cosmic chorus comprised of angels, sea-monsters, birds and even creepy-crawlies, that in harmony sing praise to God.
In one midrashic passage often quoted today, God is portrayed as taking Adam on a tour of the Garden of Eden: “See My creations, how beautiful and exemplary they are. Everything I created, I created for you. Make certain that you do not ruin and destroy My world, as if you destroy it, there will be no one to mend it after you.”
It is a commentary on a verse from Ecclesiastes, which reads: “Consider the work of God, for who can make that straight, who has made it crooked?” (7:13).
So a case can be made that biblical tradition supports environmental responsibility rather than undermining it.
And while children learn the stories of the Bible, they may absorb an ecological message too. Noah is the first conservationist, entrusted with the protection of biodiversity by sheltering the animals in his floating menagerie.
The American rabbi, Arthur Waskow, the doyen of eco-Judaism, wrote of the “searing truth” of the second paragraph of the Shema where God warns He will “close the heavens” and stop the rain to punish disobedience. These days many of us may not read such texts literally but they serve to remind us that human actions have consequences for the earth.
Our moral universe has expanded in the sense that our ancestors could have known little of what was going on elsewhere in the world. But modern communication brings into our homes scenes of people in other continents uprooted by drought, or marooned on strips of land as flood waters wash away their homesteads, of riverbeds cracked and scaled like the hide of some beast.
And so when the secretary-general of the United Nations apocalyptically warns that we are on “a highway to hell”, our sacred texts can be enlisted as a call to action.
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