The Natural History of the Bible
A BOOK ABOUT the Bible written by an environmental scientist? Some
may find that an anomaly. In an age of fragmented and compartmentalized
disciplines, we have come to expect that, with the possible exception
of journalists, only those who are academically or professionally certified as
bona fide specialists are qualified to write authoritatively on their respective
disciplines. One may venture to deviate from that norm only at great risk of
opprobrium.
Mainstream biblical scholars have written voluminously and continue to
do so, and many of their works are profoundly insightful. But if conventional
wisdom mandates that a book on the Bible be written by only a certified biblical
scholar, I hereby challenge that stricture. To paraphrase Georges Clemenceau’s
dictum regarding war and generals, the Bible is too important to be
left exclusively to those who are officially designated its academic gatekeepers.
Rather, the Bible is such a prodigious mother lode of abiding cultural and
historical interest that it can and should be reexamined by scholars of differing
perspectives. Like a diamond with many facets, each of which exposes
but a single aspect of the whole, the Bible should be viewed from various
angles to appreciate more fully its timeless richness of content and nuances
of meaning.
As an environmental scientist and an ecologist, my quest is to explore systems
in which physical, biological, and human factors operate conjointly and
interactively. My discipline attempts to reintegrate what specialists tend to
segregate.
An ecologist’s reading of the Bible is likely to differ significantly from that
of a “standard” biblical scholar. The latter’s main concern is generally with the
text, whereas the former’s is more likely to be with the context, the milieu, or
(why beat around the burning bush?) the original environment of the Near
East, within which the biblical events reportedly occurred. That environment
was both diverse and labile. It included several domains that differed from
one another in climate, topography, soils, vegetation, and human habitability.
Defining those domains and determining the differing ways ancient societies
evidently adapted to them are tasks that call for enlisting sources of knowledge
additional to those brought to bear on the subject by traditional biblical
scholarship. In particular, insufficient attention has been given to the ways the
disparate ecological domains that the Israelites experienced in the course of
their turbulent history influenced the development of their culture.
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