NYT: The Word of God, as Shaped by Nature

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

The natural world is not given sufficient credit for inspiring human tyranny. A society can manage itself only if it can also, in some way, manage nature, and it can manage nature only by also managing itself: controlling the damage from floods or fires, ensuring that food can be grown or water found, maintaining order in the face of cataclysm and uncertainty. That requires power, over both place and people. Ancient societies that faced regular flooding and required irrigation systems, for example, developed what the scholar Karl A. Wittfogel called "hydraulic societies," with strong central authority and rigid hierarchies.

But has nature also helped shape other forms of society? What are nature's effects on human culture? There may be a new discipline developing around these kinds of questions, a form of ecological sociology. Jared Diamond examined some historical examples in "Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" (W. W. Norton, 1997). The historian David Blackbourn has written "The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany," which Norton will publish this spring.

What happens, though, if we look closely at one of the most well-documented accounts of cultural evolution in the ancient world? This is the project undertaken in "The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures" (Columbia University Press, 2006) by Daniel Hillel, a senior research scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. The Hebrew Bible is examined not for its literary, religious or historical meanings, but for its accounts of how societies develop in relationship to the natural world. Mr. Hillel argues that in its invocations of mighty waters and roiling seas, of droughts and floods, of desolation and scorched wilderness, of fallow fields and seasonal harvests, the Bible may also reveal something about the peoples shaped in that ecological cauldron.

The results are fascinating. The Bible's story, Mr. Hillel argues, traces a series of encounters that the ancient Hebrews had with a wide variety of environments, ranging from the rugged hills of Canaan to the flooded plains of Mesopotamia.

In the beginning, he proposes, was the riverine ecology of Mesopotamia, in which the annual spring floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were the sources of all fertility. The names of some Hebrew months stem from Mesopotamia; the Epic of Gilgamesh contains a counterpart to the Bible's flood tale. Perhaps, too, the very idea of exile from Eden was connected with the need to abandon Mesopotamia. Mr. Hillel points out that periodic flooding had troubling consequences: silt could clog irrigation canals, while seeping salination could decrease soil's productivity. Settled populations (and conquerors) would move on to other pastures.

Then came a pastoral, seminomadic period in Canaan, Mr. Hillel suggests, represented in the stories of the Patriarchs, in which shepherding is the preferred profession. A pastoral society cannot rely on a large governing social authority: no residence is permanent, grazing areas are too dispersed. So the clan becomes the dominant power; elaborate customs develop, encouraging both hospitality and vengeance.

But inevitable droughts would also require migrations to riverine regions, particularly Egypt, which is where Abraham goes for assistance during a famine. So do his descendants, with more lasting consequences. The Bible, Mr. Hillel shows, gives a clear picture of the kind of planning the Egyptian ecology required. Because all agriculture depended on the late summer flooding of the Nile, there could be great variations; years of drought required planning for the years of plenty.

The first of the plagues visited upon the Egyptians, in which the Nile turns to blood, may well be, as Mr. Hillel (and others) have suggested, a consequence of the silt-saturated river becoming stagnant and polluted, as it did during periods of low flow (leading, in turn, to other plagues).

Mr. Hillel argues that the Hebrews eventually experience a sequence of distinct ecological "domains": the pastoral, the riverine, and then the desert domain in Sinai, the rain-fed domain of Canaan's hills, the maritime domain of the northern Canaanite coast (where the Phoenicians and Philistines were encountered), and finally the urban domain, as king and cult converge in Jerusalem. Each domain led to a different relationship with the environment, a different social structure and different notions of divine power.

Some familiar interpretations, Mr. Hillel suggests, might even be altered when these domains are examined more closely. Consider later rabbinic prohibitions against mixing milk and meat at a meal. They derive from biblical prohibitions against cooking a kid in its "mother's milk" (in Hebrew: halev imo). But actually, Mr. Hillel argues, this restriction is implausible for seminomadic pastoralists who rely on milk and meat for sustenance. (Abraham serves both to his guests.)

The biblical prohibitions may postdate the pastoral period, of course, but Mr. Hillel proposes that perhaps the tradition is based on a misreading: the vowel-less biblical text may not be "halev imo," but "helev imo": hence, you shall not cook a kid in the fat (or tallow) of its mother. This is more consistent with other biblical prohibitions regarding fat (which can also turn dangerously rancid). It would even be ethically and ecologically more sensitive, Mr. Hillel adds: cooking an animal in its mother's fat means that two generations had been simultaneously slaughtered.

Such interpretations show the wide range of Mr. Hillel's approach, but his primary argument is still more ambitious. He suggests that these encounters with a series of labile ecological domains gave a distinctive character to Hebraic monotheism, particularly when, during exile, sense had to be made of this varied experience.

In the Bible's form of ethical monotheism, Mr. Hillel says, the natural world reflects the people's moral and religious status. But the world is too diverse, its ecological domains too complex, for simple formulas: there must be interpretation and reinterpretation, a continued quest for understanding. It is no accident that Mr. Hillel, an environmental scientist, sees the spiritual and cultural development of the ancient Hebrews not as a result of Mosaic law or divine revelation, but as a product of ecological experience: nature's gift to a particular culture.

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