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3 - Seeing with God: Israel's Poem of Creation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Ellen F. Davis
Ellen F. Davis
Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina
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Summary

God's seeing protects the world from falling back into the void, protects it from total destruction. God sees the world as good, as created – even where it is the fallen world – and because of the way God sees his work and embraces it and does not forsake it, we live.

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

To preserve our places and to be at home in them, it is necessary to fill them with imagination. To imagine as well as see what is in them. Not to fill them with the junk of fantasy and unconsciousness, for that is no more than the industrial economy would do, but to see them first clearly with the eyes, and then to see them with the imagination in their sanctity, as belonging to the Creation.

(Wendell Berry)

READING GENESIS 1 AS A POEM

The first chapter of Genesis would seem to present an initial and perhaps insurmountable challenge to my thesis that the dominant mind-set expressed in the Hebrew Scriptures is agrarian. Ecologically sensitive readers, both professional and lay, generally take offense at the notion that God commands humans to exercise dominion over the earth. The attitude of Genesis 1 is “arrogant and narcissistic,” according to soil scientist Daniel Hillel, in contrast to the “more responsible role assigned to humanity in the second creation story.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture
An Agrarian Reading of the Bible
 , pp. 42 - 65
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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