Abstract
In the Bible’s first chapter, God commands earth to “bring forth vegetation”—and it does (Gen. 1:12). Earth is the subject of the verb (√yṣ’); grammatically at least, it is an agent. According to some scholars, however, the animacy of earth goes no farther than that. Life as such doesn’t truly begin until a few days later, when God creates air creatures and sea monsters and land animals and humans (56). Only as a turn of phrase, then, a metaphor, does earth sound person-like in a text like this one.
And yet, other nonanimal creatures in this first chapter, too, are endowed with personalistic characteristics. God makes lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night. This could sound inert enough, except for what follows: these heavenly bodies also “rule over” the day and night (Gen. 1:18), “a root [that] usually refers to humans or God exercising authority over other humans” (51). The sun and moon seem to be, not “inanimate lamps” but “responsible persons, created by and subordinate to God” (ibid.).
“What is this all about?” Mari Joerstad asks. “What view of the world underlies these texts?” (2). Her monograph, which began as a “tree-hugger dissertation” (vii) written under the direction of Ellen Davis at Duke University, supplies a sustained answer. The biblical texts in question are, according to Joerstad’s nomenclature, “personalistic nature texts”: passages where “nonanimal nature” such as trees, lands, mountains, and rivers act “as persons” (2–3). Three chapters at the heart of the work survey the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings, making brief exegetical forays to draw out the “bellicose rivers, frisky mountains, fields draped in mourning” (2). Each one is artfully developed: Joerstad’s presentation is compact and lucid. Her observations are fresh, even surprising; she frequently frames her own insights about the personality of nonanimal creatures against a backdrop of extant scholarship that downplays or obscures it. And her chapters are additive: survey treatments risk repetitiousness in structure or detail, but Joerstad’s chapter on the Writings self-consciously changes its approach by honing in, for example, on the “articulateness of nonanimal nature” in the Psalms (157), or on Job’s protestations of innocence addressed to Yhwh and to the land as arbiters (171–84).
Many of Joerstad’s individual remarks on various texts have lingered in my memory and migrated into my teaching (with due credit!). But her “methodological” chapters made an even deeper impact, and I suspect they will yield the more lasting contribution to biblical scholarship and eco-theology. Joerstad’s introduction already signals her argument: the “writers [of the Hebrew Bible] viewed nonanimal nature as active and alive, that is, as persons” (2). In filling out this concept of “person,” Joerstad adduces resources from within the Christian and Jewish traditions: a poet, Christopher Smart and a theologian, Martin Buber, who proposes that a tree can be a Thou (6). But she also turns to animists, or rather, to commentators on animism, who, like herself, are alert to the strangeness and challenge of learning from animists while remaining outside of their way of life. Joerstad offers that reading “personalistic nature texts” can help to bridge the imaginative gap and tutor modern westerners in a more respectful practice of relationship with nonhumans.
The subsequent chapter adds theoretical richness to these basic moves. Joerstad introduces “new animism,” a field of study within anthropology that seeks to make the densely-populated world of animist societies “legible within Western academic discourse” (16). Animists are “people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human” (21). Joerstad claims that much the same view applies to the Hebrew Bible. Research on animism emphasizes the importance of land; the responsibility and reciprocity between humans, land, and animals; the construction and maintenance of humanness through bodily disciplines. Joerstad points to parallels between each of these and the Hebrew Bible; her bibliography will be unfamiliar to most biblical scholars, and her fascinating and readable précis renders a vital service. Joerstad also calls on metaphor theory to complicate easy or flat dismissals of personalistic biblical texts. Of course, talk of trees clapping is metaphorical (Isa. 55:12). But what conditions and concepts made “such language sensible and important” (40)? Literature on metaphor may be better-known within the theological academy, but Joerstad’s use of it is nimble and set to distinctive ends.
Joerstad’s closing chapter identifies three avenues for further research—theological anthropology, architecture and artefacts, and iconographic exegesis—and it reprises her constructive claim: that engaging personalistic texts can help to recover lost ways of thinking about and living with earth, which are urgently needed in our time of deepening climate crisis.