Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture

An agrarian reading of the Bible thus forces the de-specialization of one’s thoughts about agriculture. With equal force it de-specializes one’s thoughts about religion. It does this simply by seeing that the Bible is not a book only about “spirituality” or getting to Heaven, but is also a practical book about the good use of land and creatures as a religious practice, and about the abuse of land and creatures as a kind of blasphemy.

We Americans readily saw the parallel between the Israelites’ entrance into the land of Canaan and our own westward expansion. We adopted the simple nationalism of the old story along with its “promised land” idea of ownership prior to settlement – we called it “manifest destiny.” But we conveniently ignored the elaborate agrarianism and ecological stewardship implicit in that story’s insistence upon the land’s sanctity. The result, still continuing, has been desecration and destruction of the land, as well as the destruction, dispossession, and exile of the American Indians who, like the Israelites and unlike most white Americans, believed the land was holy.

From an agrarian point of view, the Exodus was a movement from the flat, easily tillable land of Egypt to “the narrow and precariously balanced ecological niche that is the hill country of ancient Judah and Samaria.” The people of Israel had to re-make their economic life to conform to a landscape that allowed “only the slightest margin for negligence, ignorance, or error.” Local adaptation, then, is authentically a scriptural issue and so an issue of religion. It is also the issue most catastrophically ignored in the economic colonization of American landscapes and in the industrialization of agriculture. Now in the presence of much destruction, we must ask the questions that this book makes obvious: Was not the original and originating catastrophe the reduction of religion to spirituality, and to various schemes designed exclusively to save the (disembodied) soul?

What would America be now if we white people had managed to bring with us, not just a Holy Land spirituality, but also the elaborate land ethic, land reverence, and agrarian practice meant to safeguard the holiness of the land?

The Holy Land did not become holy by a divine prejudice in its favor; it is holy just because it is a part of all the world, which is a divine creation. The good work accomplished by this book is to show forcefully and persuasively that the same principle applies to every land, and to every place in every land. And thus it exposes the falsehood of the idea that our ecological destructiveness is blameable directly on the Bible. It is blameable instead, and only within limits, on a misunderstanding and misuse of the Bible. The fault, clearly, is in the way the Bible has been applied. Applied religion, without a local orientation and a local practice, can be as irresponsible, as dangerous, and as sloppy as modern science similarly applied.

An urban world completely uninvolved in and ignorant of agriculture is a quite new phenomenon, and necessarily a transitory one.

How do these texts view the relationship between humans (or Israelites in particular) and the material sources of life as an essential aspect of living in the presence of God? If

In our present intellectual environment, Wendell Berry advocates amateurism as a corrective to the tendency toward overspecialization and abstraction that afflicts all disciplines. He suggests         widening the context of all intellectual work and of teaching – perhaps to the width of the local landscape…. To bring local landscapes within what Wes Jackson calls “the boundary of consideration,” professional people of all sorts will have to feel the emotions and take the risks of amateurism. They will have to get out of their “fields,” so to speak, and into the watershed, the ecosystem, and the community; and they will have to be actuated by affection.7

What the Bible can offer us are “vision and principle,” not solutions from the past. An agrarian reading of the Bible is not an exercise in nostalgia, although it is in significant part a work of memory, of imagination anchored (not mired) in the past.

Ezekiel reread the theological tradition in order to make sense of events that were literally unthinkable, in terms of Israel’s regnant theology. He charted those horrific events on the map of faith and thus opened a way forward. To him and through him, God granted a vision of life on the far side of disaster for the people and the land of Israel.

Only a thorough understanding of how Israel represents the human place in the created order can enable Christians to delineate a responsible vision of what participation in the renewal of creation might mean.

The mutually informative relation between ecological awareness and biblical study rests not only on the land-centeredness of the Bible but also on the nature of the ecological crisis, which is principally moral and theological rather than technological. That is, the problem does not stem in the first instance from technological errors or omissions that can be rectified by further technological applications. It is a moral and even theological crisis because it is occasioned in large part by our adulation and arrogant use of scientific technology, so that we make applications without rigorous critical regard for questions of compatibility with natural systems, of the integrity of the world that God has made.

the problem of our current technological practice in the information age, which, as he aptly observes, is “a technique of falsification” to the extent that it has reduced our ability to truly know the world. Information is often superficial since it appears in decontextualized, easily digestible bytes. The medium that increases our access to knowledge thus at the same time decreases our grasp of the world’s significance.

Should not the effect of our knowing lead to understanding, appreciation, affection, and care? Should it not train our minds into the sympathetic faculty that better (more honestly) places itself into alignment with its object?

I shall treat our lack of recognition as a failure of the religious imagination, an inability to imagine that this world could be significantly different, for better or for much worse, than we and every human generation before us have experienced it.

“I have seen” – is repeated four times here. Jeremiah is speaking to people who do not see,

What he has in view here is his own land of Judah, under threat of invasion, yet he represents its collapse as a global disaster.

So when Jeremiah sees the fruitful land become barren, the mountains undone, the birds of heaven fled – these are sure signs of radical social failure; there is no justice in the seat of power.

Standing and looking down on that mangled land, one feels aching in one’s bones the sense that it will be in a place such as this – a place of titanic disorder and violence, which the rhetoric of political fantasy has obstructed from official eyesight – that the balance will finally be overcast and the world tilted irrevocably toward its death.… Since I left Hardburly I have been unable to escape the sense that I have been to the top of the mountain, and that I have looked over and seen, not the promised land vouchsafed to a chosen people, but a land of violence and sterility prepared and set aside for the damned.

Many farmers who have lost their farms, or work them as employees of the corporations, now consciously claim for themselves the biblical identity of “exiles.” Jeremiah, the prophet who watched his people go into exile in Babylon and Egypt, speaks for those modern exiles also: “I have seen, and here, the garden-land is now the wasteland, and all its cities are pulled down.”

Yet, in George Caird’s words, “The prophets looked to the future with bifocal vision. With their near sight they foresaw imminent historical events which would be brought about by familiar human causes.… With their long sight they saw the day of the Lord” (a day of final reckoning); and they frequently “impose[d] the one image on the other,”

If we can hear it, Jeremiah’s shattering language will break through what Walter Brueggemann incisively terms “our achieved satiation,”14 the numbness carefully wrought by industrial culture and especially by its political and economic spokesmen. Prophetic speech is the antidote to the illness from which we are not eager to recover, namely, apathy – the inability to feel shock, horror, and remorse for our actions.

For normally “[o]ur sight is suffused with knowing, instead of feeling painfully the lack of knowing what we see.”21 That is the pain the prophets express.

Jeremiah and other prophets speak of and to the diseased imagination: “The heart is more perverse than anything, and it is sick… ” (Jer. 17:9). They seek to restore to the heart its proper function, which is often to assess the depth, scope, and causes of the tragedies that grip our world. In a word, the prophets aim to restore the tragic imagination, which, paradoxically, is essential to the health and ultimately the survival of any community, precisely because it is the faculty whereby we reckon with devastating loss. The tragic imagination is the faculty that, as Wendell Berry observes, “through communal form or ceremony, permits great loss to be recognized, suffered, and borne, and that makes possible some sort of consolation and renewal.” In the end, then, after and through suffering, the tragic imagination enables “the return to the beloved community, or to the possibility of one.”

the most salient point of connection – one on which the contemporary agrarians at least are often misunderstood – is that for none of them does a keen awareness of the past devolve into nostalgia, simple idealization of the past. Rather, as Orr notes: “Prophets are poised between the past and a better future.”

what we have heretofore assumed to be a “built-in” feature of the world is rather, in a world disordered by human sin, a mark of divine forbearance, an expression of God’s covenantal faithfulness. If we are now experiencing significant disruption of climatic patterns, then the divine promise itself condemns us, for it exposes the hollowness of claims that this is nothing more than natural fluctuation.

Whatever harm I may have done         In all my life in all your wide creation         If I cannot repair it         I beg you to repair it,         .…………… . .         And where there are lives         I may have withered around me,         Or lives of strangers far or near         That I’ve destroyed in blind complicity,         And if I cannot find them         Or have no way to serve them, Remember them. I beg you to remember them

In this chapter, I have tried to demonstrate that the biblical writers give us language, verbal images, to see what we are doing and the likely consequences.

But my point here is that it is not always possible to do good exegesis as a first step. Sometimes important aspects of the text are not visible to an interpreter – or a whole generation of interpreters – until there has been a reordering of our minds and even our lives, until certain gaps have been supplied in the sphere of our “active apprehension.”16 To put that in theological language, sin – lack of proper knowledge and love of God and neighbor – impedes exegesis.

So it may be that the human is charged to “keep” the garden and at the same time to “observe” it, to learn from it and respect the limits that pertain to it.

Adam comes to Eden as a protector, answerable for the wellbeing of the precious thing that he did not make; he is to be an observer, mindful of limits that are built into the created order as both inescapable and fitting. The biblical writer does not subscribe to the fantasy that our society has embraced as an ideal – that human ingenuity runs up against physical limits only in order to overcome them. Rather, the ambiguous verbs suggest a different orientation to reality. The land instantiates limits that God has set; we encounter it as a fellow creature to be respected and even revered.

hearers of the creation story were reminded not so much of how things might have been in a bygone age, but of the particular features of their distinctive social and ecological niche and of the blessings and responsibilities that pertained to it.

Norman Wirzba aptly comments:         There is an integrityto creation that depends on humans seeing them selves as properly placed within a network of creation and God. The drama shows us that neither God nor the creation itself can tolerate violence, manipulation, or shame. Instead of the hubris that characterized Adam and his descendents, Noah stands out as a beacon of the humbled adam who is faithful to the needs of adamah.29 The verbs ‘-b-d and š-m-r imply a humble recognition of the land’s primacy and its needs. The latter suggests also an element of vulnerability; anything that humans are charged to preserve, they are also capable of neglecting or violating. So the two elements of the human vocation stand in some tension as well as in complementary relation; each verb leads us back to the other. In order to live, we are obliged to “work” the land (lĕ‘obĕdāh) – manage it and take from it. In order to “live a long time” on it, we are equally obliged to “preserve it” (lĕšomĕrāh). Limiting our take, we must submit our minds, our skills, and our strength to serving its needs – the second sense of ‘-b-d.

Of the tension inherent in the biblical statement, Evan Eisenberg observes:         There is no escaping the need to manage nature. The best we can do is to observe the following rule: So manage nature as to minimize the need to manage nature…         We are destined to work our way across the globe, turning Eden into something else. And we are destined – in our better moments – to protect Eden against our own work. The command to protect puts upper limits on the scope of our work and lower limits on its quality. In other words, we must not try to manage too much of the world, but what we do manage – our cities, our factories, our farms – we must manage well.

botanist and plant pathologist Robert Zimdahl describes his own professional education as growth into an appropriate ignorance:         I recall learning as a student that metaphorically speaking science was able to shine light on human problems and solve them…. However, we also learned that as the area of light grew, the area of darkness surrounding it grew more. It seemed incongruous, but as our knowledge grew, our ignorance grew even more. But, that is how the world works. We learn through education what we don’t know.35

The idea that moral and spiritual health begins with the willingness to be “void of self-wisdom”37 is especially strong in the thought of the biblical sages:         Trust to YHWH with your whole heart         and do not rely on your own understanding.

the biblical writers’ willingness to accept and even highlight ignorance as basic to the human condition reflects, not laziness or despair, but their confidence that there is a wisdom worked into the very fabric of things:

For an agrarian reading of the Bible, it is instructive that the sages treat agriculture as a primary realm in which God’s wisdom is needed and utilized by humanity. Proverbs includes various instructions for farmers (e.g., 24:27; 27:23–27); moreover, the bad farmer is for the sages the epitome of ‘alût, “sloth,” the destructive quality that constitutes the antithesis of wisdom (24:30–4).39

A concern for scale in all uses of technology, for choosing a scale small enough so that the work matches the place, is for the contemporary agrarians one of the marks of wisdom. Conversely, “[w]e identify arrogant ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much at risk.”41

And yet to serve the earth,         not knowing what I serve, gives a wideness         and a delight to the air, and my days         do not wholly pass.

So they are all in a sense materialists: They prefer to write in concrete and specific terms rather than abstractions.43 But they are modest materialists. They do not claim that what we humans can (or theoretically, ever could) see or touch or make is exhaustive of what is, nor even that it constitutes the larger or more important part of what is. They simply insist, and model by example, that we “owe a certain courtesy to Reality, and that this courtesy can be enacted only by humility, reverence, propriety of scale, and good workmanship.

Among the most powerful and probably the most dangerous of its illusions is the idea that “science can solve all problems” – even though it is common experience that the efficient solution of an individual problem generates a host of new ones.46 That sort of trust in the omnipotence of science is of course a kind of faith stance, albeit a wobbly one.47 If it were to be found in a premodern society, we would unhesitatingly label as “magical” a kind of thinking that presumes to guarantee certain physical results and yet bears such a tenuous relation to empirical reality. For, despite its ostensible grounding in science, this form of materialism is strangely oblivious to what may be the most readily observable and nonnegotiable characteristic of our material world, namely, finitude. Those who work consciously and intelligently within material reality (as though we could work elsewhere!) are continually confronted with limits of time, space, matter, and energy.

The Tower of Babel story captures what may be the essence of all technologically induced disaster: the illusion that our cleverness will somehow deliver us from the need to observe the normative form of materialism that sustains life.

As a native Californian, I am acutely aware that real estate has a price, and it is a high one. To be overly dramatic, I am an exile; I could never afford to own property on the small island in the San Francisco Bay on which I grew up. So the agrarian principle most deeply challenging of my personal experience is this: In any economy with a long-term future, the price of land is not an essential matter. Indeed, any culture or people with a long-term future must understand that the value of land is not monetary; as Berry’s character Wheeler Catlett observes: “[W]hen you quit living in the price and start living in the place, you’re in a different line of succession.

The voices we hear in the Old Testament bespeak throughout an agrarian mindfulness that land – this particular land, my land, our land – is inseparable from self “before God.” Land is the earnest of the covenant, the tangible sign and consequence of God’s commitment to the people Israel.

With the ordered elegance typical of the Priestly tradition, the poet is inducting us into the practice of what the theologians of the early Greek church called “natural contemplation”: looking at the world with a view to discerning “the inner principles in accordance with which things were created and are organized.”21 Such contemplation is an essential stage of the spiritual life. It enables the transition from uncomprehending action to theology – the latter being genuine understanding of the creative will of God in Trinity, which makes it possible to use each created thing “wisely, in accordance with nature and with the proper science.”22 True contemplation can be achieved only by those who accept metanoia, a profound change of mind – what English speakers call (somewhat inadequately) “repentance” – “as a path and way of life.”23

Claus Westermann sees the first notice as an indication of how far the Priestly writer has departed from older mythic traditions of the Near East. Mesopotamian stories of origins, he argues, treat only those plants that are useful to humans for food or medicine, whereas the Priestly writer moves toward a properly scientific view of the world, by means of “processes of systemization or abstraction”:28

For most poetry – and certainly for biblical poetry – a significant aspect of a poem’s “surplus of meaning” tends to be confrontational. In its original context, this poem about a world of self-perpetuating fruitfulness must have served to counter the religious ideologies of Israel’s pagan neighbors. Likely the verbal sword cut in more than one direction. On the one hand, it challenged the power of the Canaanite ba‘alim, the fertility gods thought to inseminate the earth; against that ideology, it asserted that fruitfulness, activated by seed, is a built-in feature of the design created by the one Maker of heaven and earth.

Had the patent gone through, it would have been illegal for farmers to save seed from the previous year’s crops – a practice that dates back to the beginning of agriculture and remains indispensable to economic survival for many,

ago, St. Basil cited as already long-established fact the “ruthless cruelty” of humans that prevented “the voice of the earth” from rising to God in song. Sadly, the reports of these contemporary ecologists corroborate his confession of shame and indicate that our ancient style of domination continues unabated, and with accelerated effect, so that, in our time, land transformation is the chief cause of extinction for plant and animal species.

This translation is in several respects preferable to the standard “exercise dominion over….” The Hebrew preposition can mean “among,” and the verbal phrase as a whole may denote rule that is characterized by firmness rather than harshness (see Ps. 72:8). Koehler and Baumgartner observe concerning r-d-h that “the basic meaning of the verb is not to rule; the word actually denotes the travelling around of the shepherd with his flock.

This one sharp word k-b-š acts as a probe, touching the imagination of people no longer settled securely in their land – be it Judah or our newly vulnerable planet – and moving them (us) to a new evaluation of the situation.

The Priestly writers of Genesis and Leviticus would easily recognize the terms of Berry’s vision: divine gift, manifested especially as rain; human fidelity, discernible in both “sight and stroke,” perception and fitting action. Berry’s poem implies the experience of loss: “we join… our hope to what is left.” Reckoning with loss makes both fidelity and hopefulness more meaningful as the terms on which we live, and also more difficult to practice.

The positive aim of the agrarian critique is not that all suburbanites should be farmers but rather that they should move beyond romanticism – a mind-set that always includes a deluded and therefore potentially destructive element – to a realistic relationship with the land on which all our lives depend, a relationship of multigenerational commitment and nurture.

whole cities of silos to store the agricultural surplus that accrued to Pharaoh as the titular owner of all the land and ensured his absolute control over the lives of his people. Egypt’s

“From the tree – that I commanded you not to eat from it – you ate!?” (3:11).46 With that act they begin to separate human culture, our corporate way of knowing the world and acting upon it, from obedience to God. When the two stories are read together, it is evident that if an adequate and even generous food supply may provide the occasion to know God (Exod. 16:12), then accurate knowledge of God, the world, and our place in it – in short, wisdom – is available only to those who eat with restraint.

Authentic rest becomes possible, even in the midst of harvest time, because it is informed by the palpable, concrete understanding that God provides. The means of divine care, whether in plant and animal cycles of birth, growth, decay, and death or in the kindnesses of kin and community, are ample and clear for those who care to notice.49 It is hard to live that way; as Wirzba and Scripture imply, it takes courage and accurate memory, a memory that stretches back to the creation of the world. These stories point to elements of human character and experience that often make memory unreliable: intellectual pride (Genesis 3) and lack of trust in God (Exodus 16). Accordingly, the manna account ends with the creation of a visible reminder: a jar with an omerful of manna to be set “before YHWH as a keepsake for [the] generations… before the covenant [ark]” (Exod. 16:33–4). This note is often seen as an anachronistic appendix; the Priestly writer is thought to be retrojecting something belonging to settled life and temple worship back to the first weeks in the wilderness. It is more apt to say that the manna jar implies that there is an essential integrity to Israel’s experience both in the wilderness and in the land of Canaan.

The legal codes view the world, and especially a particular part of it, as well designed for habitation (cf. Isa. 45:18); they offer guidance for how the people Israel may order its life – including its work, its eating practices, and its worship – in conformity with the larger design of that place. I suggest that this part of the Bible is then especially worth reconsideration by home-comers, or those who are at least trying to come home – as Wes Jackson puts it, to become “native to our places in a coherent community that is in turn embedded in the ecological realities of its surrounding landscape.”14

Plants do favors for each other. In agrarian cultures in Mexico and northern Central America, farmers have traditionally interplanted “the three sisters”: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provides trellises for the beans, the squash leaves discourage weeds and retard evaporation, and the beans fix nitrogen that enhances soil fertility for all three crops. Polycropping and even the planting of diverse varieties within a species also help with pest control; the different crops create more habitational niches for beneficial organisms, and harmful organisms are unlikely to have an equally devastating effect on every crop.

The difference in productivity between small farms and industrial farms is not slight. In every country for which data is available, smaller farms are shown to be 200 to 1,000 percent more productive per unit area.15 Moreover, small farming is more productive because the quality and even the quantity of labor and land care is higher when workers invest themselves in their own farm and community. Farmers who expect their families to have a future on the land do not willingly mortgage that future by robbing soil and water of their long-term health. Productivity and cost-effectiveness are durative qualities, although the short-term “success” of agribusiness depends upon ignoring that truth.

The key idea – really a complex of ideas – is most often summed up with the Hebrew word naălâ. Throughout the Bible, this is the word that most often characterizes divine or human title to the land of Canaan, an entitlement “that has continuity with the past and ties with a sacred heritage.”27 Originally, Canaan is designated as YHWH’s naălâ, a claim that probably dates back to the beginning of Israel. It appears in Moses’s Song at the Sea, possibly the oldest poem in the Bible:         You will bring them in and plant them on your mount of possession [ har naălātĕkā],         … the sanctuary, O Lord, that your hands have established. (Exod. 15:17)

At the same time, if Jews, Christians, and Muslims in each of our communities were to place priority on land care and nurturance of the local economy, then there would be much less cause for war in every part of the globe. Economist Herman Daly (formerly of the World Bank) offers this prescription for our healing: “To avoid war, nations must both consume less and become more self-sufficient. But free traders say that we should become less self-sufficient and more globally integrated as part of the overriding quest to consume ever more. That is the worst advice I can think of.”31

The relevant category is religion: “It would be defilement/pollution [ālîlâ] for me from YHWH if I were to give my ancestors’ naălâ to you!” (21:3). This is the only sentence Naboth ever speaks, and it sums up forcefully the theology of covenantal economics. While he uses the first person singular, Naboth is speaking for the whole community-through-time of those who experience God’s blessing as they live on and work this one small piece of land, “my ancestral entitlement.” In complete contrast to Ahab, Naboth has a complex notion of property ownership, one that is well expressed in David Klemm’s description of “property as material grace”:         Property as material grace both is and is not one’s property; it is a possession that is not one’s possession. Moreover, I want to argue that the paradoxical experience of both owning and not owning one’s own property precisely signifies the moment at which the divine depth of meaning and power breaks into the structure of acquiring, using, and exchanging property. Property as material grace is given and received as a living symbol of divinity.45

Lavish spreads of food and wine were thus not just a form of indulgence: They were also an investment intended to yield social capital in both the domestic and the international spheres. The queen of Sheba had her breath taken away, not only by Solomon’s ability to tell her anything she wanted to know, but also by “the food of his table, and the seating of his servants, and the standing of his servants and their attire, and his cupbearers… ” (1 Kgs. 10:5), and the happy result of her breathlessness was a trade agreement. As MacDonald observes, those who can commandeer the food and wine for such feasts are the same ones “who will be able to participate in and profit from international trade, further boosting their power and prestige.”49 It is no coincidence that when Ahab defeated the king of Aram, in the story immediately preceding ours, the terms of the treaty included Ahab’s right to set up markets in Damascus (1 Kgs. 20:34). The treaty itself was a mistake for Ahab; an anonymous prophet condemned him for making an ally of a king whom God had proscribed, and “the king of Israel went to his house sullen and resentful” (20:43) – exactly as he would do after his encounter with Naboth, the second and final instance in which Ahab’s behavior elicits a direct prophetic condemnation. Both feasting and trade required the appropriation and redistribution of food commodities on a large scale, and thus the conversion of Israel’s economy from one focused on local subsistence to a state-controlled economy designed to generate surpluses of the key crops. Regarding the intensification of the economic conversion during Ahab’s reign, Tamis Rentería observes:         Pressures on Israelite peasants increased throughout Ahab’s 20 year reign and into the reigns of Ahaziah and Jehoram. Israel was on the downward swing of… the “adaptational cycle,” moving from expansion of production to depletion of resources with no sign that elites intended to heed negative feedback processes by changing their productive strategies.… Even when a severe drought hit Palestine during Ahab’s reign, the king, according to 1 Kings 18, worried about food for his horses, oblivious that the peasant masses were starving.

Let anger go and abandon rage;         do not become heated; it only does harm.         … Just a little longer, and there will be no wicked one;         you shall examine his place – and he is gone. (vv. 8,10) The psalm seeks to nurture hope in God while calling vividly to mind the elements of a traditional world that is threatened or eclipsed, namely, the world of the Israelite village. “One of the functions of the music or formality of poetry is to make memorable,” Wendell Berry observes;58 perhaps it is no coincidence that the form used here is the strictest available within Israelite poetry: an alphabetic acrostic, which lends itself to recitation and retention. Memory, imagination, faith – these are the common stock that remains to the endangered community.

Some of the most creative agrarian work now being done is the protection of farmlands, and especially smaller farms, so that they do not become housing developments or second homes for urbanites with ready cash. At the same time, those who live in cities and suburbs must have a stake in the countryside that is both emotional and economic. The common biblical metaphor for the relationship between a city and its surrounding villages is that of a mother and her daughters (Num. 21:25; Josh. 15:45, 47, etc.); it connotes mutual belonging, affection, benefit, and need.

That image should be embraced and promoted by those of us who, farmers or not, sense the “deadly impermanence”67 of the global economy and seek sustenance outside it, for ourselves, and even more, for our children.