CROWN AGRICULTURE IN EIGHTH-CENTURY ISRAEL

In the widening circle of those who attend to the message of the new agrarians, it is common, almost instinctual, to characterize their message as “prophetic” witness the first chapter in this volume). Like the biblical prophets, the contemporary agrarian writers expose folly and idolatry, various forms of bad faith that are endemic to their (and our) society. Like the prophets, they express their grievances and hopes in terms that are inseparably economic, political, and religious. And further, they, like the prophets, alert those who can hear to the close or immediate threat of social collapse; they see and say that we are at a tipping point, either toward life on drastically different terms or toward death on a massive scale. Yet, if the message of the new agrarian writers may rightly be called “prophetic,” the more important fact is less widely recognized: The message of the earliest prophetic writers of the Bible was distinctly “agrarian.” The eighth-century prophets Amos and Hosea were probably the world's first agrarian writers, followed within a few decades by the Greek farmer-poet Hesiod, who resembles the biblical prophets in his complaints about corrupt judges and princes (Works and Days, lines 250–65), and also about the loss of ancestral inheritance (namely his own).