The Prophets and Our Resources

Preview of this post.

This post, post number 1 of 13, introduces the topic.

I. Introduction

A. How prophetic teaching from Biblical Times applies to modern society

While this essay will focus on the prophets, it should be remembered that one of the main, if not the main, overarching consideration of the Hebrew Bible is the threefold base of the story: it is the story of the people, their god and the land. It is the story of how the people arrived at a particular time and place with the guidance and assistance of their god. Place, is another way of viewing the land that was promised to the people by their god. The land was a sacred gift from their god promised to them and which formed the very basis and consideration of the covenant they entered into with their god. In fact, the very first episode in the Hebrew Bible describes God as creating the land. Hence, land, is one of the three pillars of the story; the entire story told in the Hebrew Bible can be related to how the people relate to, and use, the land^[1]. Many prophets, such as Amos, describe a direct relationship between God and the earth^[2]. The modern term for the relationship between man and the land is ecology. Therefore, under some view, it might be said that ecology is one of the three pillars of the Hebrew Bible.

However, with regard to applying the teachings of the Biblical prophets to modern ecology, it should be kept in mind that the concept of land may have been different for the Biblical people than it is to us, and may even have changed before and during the times of the Prophets. The topic of the changing concept of land is well beyond the scope of this essay. Additionally, there are some that would say it is an un-based stretch to apply Biblical theocentric ethics to contemporary society, and in particular ecology which is science based (and based on the empirical and experimental study of the relations between living and nonliving organisms within their ecosystems as compared to a theocentric approach where, for example, a wolf raiding a henhouse is viewed as God punishing the farmer for some sin, such as abuse of the less fortunate, or idolatry either by him as an individual or by the community as a whole, instead of a modern ecological view that the henhouse had been erected by the farmer and his family or community in the wolf’s natural territory and the wolf was merely seeking food^[3]), which is far removed in both time and space as well as in religious beliefs. However, the prophets were good observers of human nature and did have valid observations regarding how actions of humans in one sphere affected others, including nonhumans, in other spheres which makes many of their contentions relevant to today’s society because, as observed elsewhere in this work, human nature has basically not changed in spite of the many changes in technology and living conditions from Biblical times and human activity in one area still affects nonhuman activity in other areas (for example, destruction of rain forests by humans seeking farmland affects the balance of O₂/CO₂ in the environment of geographical locations far removed from the location of the rain forest being destroyed^[4]). The prophets innately recognized that there was a balance between nature and man that had to be maintained and thus while many, if not most, of their teachings were directed to God punishing humans for abusing this balance, those teachings might be relevant to a situation where nature, itself, punishes humans for abusing that balance (see, for example, Isa 32:16-20; Hos. 2:20; Isa. 24:3-6 and Hos. 4:1-3).

However, due to the observations of the prophets regarding human behavior and the interaction of human behavior and other systems in the world, it seems that the teaching that human behavior impacts other parts of creation, and vice versa, and the presupposition that this is part of the moral order of the universe as taught by the prophets, if properly understood through the lens of modern society, seems to be still applicable today^[5].

Preview of the next post.

The next post, post number 2 of 13, continues introducing the topic and discusses various attempts that use the Bible in the field of Ecology.

[1] See, Ronald A. Simpkins, Creator and Creation: Nature in the Worldview of Ancient Israel, paperback, August 1994.

[2] See, for example, Amos 1:2: “The Lord roars from Zion, Shouts aloud from Jerusalem; And the pastures of the shepherds shall languish, And the summit of Carmel shall wither.” It was quite common to analogize a crop failure or other natural catastrophe to the earth responding to God’s instructions.

[3] See, for example, Hos. 4:1-3 where the earth is withered, everything that dwells on it languishes, beasts of the field and birds of the sky, even the fish of the sea perish due to the evil ways of the people. See also Isa. 11:1-10, 32:15-20 and 35:1-10. In these theocentric views, God is punishing or rewarding the people using the environment as the vehicle.

[4] A particularly egregious example of rain forest destruction occurs as of 2015 when the Indonesian government is permitting the destruction by slashing and burning of vast amounts of rain forests to clear land for the production of palm oil (primarily for consumption by India and China because more palm oil is consumed by those countries than they can produce for various reasons). Trading rain forests for palm oil.

[5] It is interesting to note that, beginning with Noah’s animal sacrifice, it seems that the Bible recognized that the non-human entities existing on earth were regarded as a commodity for the use of humans; whereas, the prophets were the first to recognize that such non-human portions of the creation had value in and of themselves which had its own place and value that must be recognized and respected.