Violence in the Hebrew Bible (Part 2) – Ecocide- Brad Jersak & Matt Lynch

In my discussion in Part 1 on Old Testament violence with author and friend of CWR, Dr. Matthew Lynch, the biblical connection between human violence and damage to the environment came up. The word that Matt used for this was ecocide. Just as the murder of a human is homicide or the murder of a father is patricide or the murder of God is deicide, the word ecocide links ecology (the environment) with murder.

The striking thing about biblical ecocide that it is not simply the murder of the environment, but the impact of human-vs-human violence on the land and its ability to sustain life. Matthew offered the following examples:

Cain and Abel

In Genesis 4, when Cain murdered his brother Abel, there was an immediate, calamitous impact on his relationship with the land:

¹⁰ The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.¹¹ Now you are under a curse and driven from the ground, which opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. ¹² When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you. You will be a restless wanderer on the earth.”

The Great Flood

In Genesis 6, we read,

¹¹ Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.¹² God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways. ¹³ So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.

A surface reading of the story may fail to see ecocide here, but if I understood Matt correctly (he’s a wiz at the Hebrew language), the root problem was that human violence had corrupted the earth. That is, as a result of our violence, the earth itself was literally ‘ruined.’ I.e., uninhabitable, incapable of sustaining human life.

While verse 13, depicts God as destroying the world and everyone in it, a deeper look indicates that the Great Flood was less about God destroying people and the earth… it is how the sin of human violence has escalated to the point where creation collapses in on itself. Ultimately, the Jewish flood story is about how the world becomes so violent that God needs to give it a cleansing bath in order to preserve the human race.

Hosea and the Cycle of Bloodshed

Hosea chapter 4 offers a third instance of ecocide, when we read,

¹ Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites because the Lord has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: “There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land.

² There is only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery; they break all bounds, and bloodshed follows bloodshed.

³ Because of this the land dries up, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea are swept away.

“Bloodshed follows bloodshed” describes the cycle of human blood feuds where eye-for-an-eye vengeance is repeated and escalated throughout the land until the environment dries up, the land refuses to produce a harvest, and the beasts, birds, and fish disappear. It’s an ugly outcome rooted in human violence.

Matt explained that while human violence does cause ecological deterioration in ways we can observe from cause to effect (e.g., nuclear fallout), the Old Testament worldview goes further. Cain’s murder of Abel shouldn’t cause the earth to be barren, but somehow there is a spiritual connection between our violence to each other and its effects on the land. Is suspect this reality is more than just an ancient worldview that connects dots where there are none. It was an observable phenomenon that indigenous cultures are attuned to in ways that modernity is ignorant.

The Blood that Speaks a Better Word

All that said, I’m grateful for the testimony of Hebrews 12, where we read,

²³ …You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, ²⁴ to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

In other words, where human violence had polluted the land and Abel’s blood (and the land) cried out for justice, somehow the blood of Christ speaks a better word–mercy–that forgives the sin of deicide and has the power to heal the world of ecocide. Even though the NT preachers (Stephen for example) describe the crucifixion as a murder, the author of Hebrews reframes Jesus’ blood as a ‘sprinkling,’ recalling the OT sacrificial sprinkling rites that cleansed the temple and the people of the dust of death. Jesus’ murder is thus overturned into a saving act that undoes death itself and cleanses and renews the earth with divine mercy rather than global destruction.

Stay tuned for part 3 in this series where we further examine the theme of violence as a pollutant. You can also refer to Matt’s books (Flood and Fury and Portraying Violence in the Hebrew Bible) for a closer look at these themes.