Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Wendell Berry
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Rupture and Re-membering
- 2 Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes
- 3 Seeing with God: Israel's Poem of Creation
- 4 Leaving Egypt Behind: Embracing the Wilderness Economy
- 5 A Wholesome Materiality: Reading Leviticus
- 6 Covenantal Economics: The Biblical Case for a Local Economy
- 7 Running on Poetry: The Agrarian Prophets
- 8 Wisdom or Sloth? The Character of Work
- 9 The Faithful City
- Postscript
- Notes
- Scripture Index
- Index
9 - The Faithful City
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword by Wendell Berry
- Acknowledgments
- Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Rupture and Re-membering
- 2 Reading the Bible Through Agrarian Eyes
- 3 Seeing with God: Israel's Poem of Creation
- 4 Leaving Egypt Behind: Embracing the Wilderness Economy
- 5 A Wholesome Materiality: Reading Leviticus
- 6 Covenantal Economics: The Biblical Case for a Local Economy
- 7 Running on Poetry: The Agrarian Prophets
- 8 Wisdom or Sloth? The Character of Work
- 9 The Faithful City
- Postscript
- Notes
- Scripture Index
- Index
Summary
Seek the shalom of the city to which I have exiled you, and pray on its behalf to YHWH, for in its shalom is shalom for you.
(Jer. 29:7)The Holy One, blessed be He, said, “I will not enter the heavenly Jerusalem until I can enter the earthly Jerusalem.”
(Babylonian Talmud, Ta'anith 5a)When hope sets out in its desperate search for reasons, it can find them now.
(Wendell Berry)CITIES OF FARMERS
Modern agrarians seek to “re-member” the land, but they cannot afford to forget the city, with half the world's population now living in cities. Certainly North Americans cannot do so, since four out of five of us (including myself) reside in metropolitan areas. Even with in the confines of the much less deeply urbanized world of the biblical writers, the city is never long out of sight. For Israelites, as for virtually all other residents of the ancient Near East (except perhaps the most remote desert dwellers), the existence of cities was a fact already established for millennia. Scholars often cite the biblical suspicion of cities, and there is some truth to that. No city has an entirely positive reputation among the biblical writers; no capital city, including Jerusalem, escapes prophetic denunciation and predictions of doom. It is telling that according to the account of the Israelites' entry into Canaan, they were content to burn Jericho, the world's oldest continually inhabited city, rather than take it over for themselves.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Scripture, Culture, and AgricultureAn Agrarian Reading of the Bible, pp. 155 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008