Creation and Ecology

The Political Economy of Ancient Israel and the Environmental Crisis

Ronald A. Simkins

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781532698743
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

In this book Ronald A. Simkins addresses the current environmental crisis and what the Bible might contribute in response to it. The environmental crisis includes loss of biodiversity, degradation of the soil, and especially climate change. If left unchecked, these trends will bring about the collapse of human civilization. These environmental problems are interrelated and share a similar cause: the exploitation of the natural world through an economy structured by capitalist relations of production and powered by the burning of fossil fuels. Through our economic relations, we have depleted natural resources, polluted natural environments, and altered natural processes. These problems are a product of our political economy, which entails not only our politics, ideology, and religion, but primarily our economic system. Because the crisis is economic at its core, Simkins first sets the Bible within its own economic context, exploring how the biblical ideas of creation--an understanding of the human relationship to the natural world--were the product of the ancient Israelite political economy. Then Simkins places the biblical tradition in conversation with the current environmental crisis. The result is a far richer view of creation in the biblical tradition and a better understanding of what is at stake in the current environmental crisis.

Part I

Creation

1

Creation and Gender

The Household and Its Divisions

The fundamental social and economic unit of the political economy of ancient Israel was the household—the bet ab (“house of the father”) in the Hebrew Bible (Bendor 1996; Hardin 2011; Wilk and Rathje 1982). It consisted minimally of a married father and mother and their children. But the household was not an ancient version of our nuclear family, for it generally also included other family members such as the father’s widowed mother, a younger brother and his wife, an unmarried sister, and a second wife or concubine.10 If the father’s son was married, he and his wife and their children would also have been included in the household. All of these people would have lived in the same dwelling—typically, a three or four room pillared house—or perhaps in multiple attached dwellings sharing walls and a courtyard (Stager 1985). The household included domestic animals, primarily sheep and goats, and maybe a cow or an ox; if the household was well-off, servants and a resident alien also may have belonged to it. Together, the members of the typical household contributed to its production—farming, herding, and cultivating fruit trees and vines—and its reproduction—bearing, raising, and educating children, processing and preparing foodstuffs (e.g., grinding flour and making bread), and weaving cloths and making pottery for household usage (see Meyers 1988, 128–38). Although there was a clearly recognized division of labor, the production of the household at times obscured the boundaries, with everyone contributing where labor was needed, especially during peak labor-demand periods such as the harvest.

The members of the household can be divided into hierarchies of age and gender.11 Children, youths, and young adults, for example, owe honor to their parents and other elders, both male and female. This may take the form of deference, but also obedience and the granting of prestige because of the knowledge, skill, or wisdom that comes with age. Age would appear to represent an uncontested hierarchy because everyone moves up the hierarchy through the reproduction of the household: children become parents and the younger become older to be replaced by newly born children. Yet, the Bible admonishes the young to honor their parents (Exod 20:12) and warns those who would strike or curse their parents on penalty of death (Exod 21:15, 17), suggesting that the age hierarchy, even if contested, was non-negotiable. The age hierarchy, however, did not exempt children from labor; they contributed to the production and reproduction of the household as soon as they were physically able, each according to his or her own gender. And the elderly continued in their household labor until they were no longer able—there was no age at which one could retire.

Gender, rather than age, was the basis for the household division of labor.12 Men and boys engaged primarily in the production of the household and women and girls in its reproduction (see Meyers 1988, 139–64). By working in the field with their father, tending the sheep and goats, and pruning the vines and fruit trees, Israelite boys learned how to become men. Similarly, Israelite girls learned how to become women by helping their mother with younger children and preparing meals. It was primarily through their labor in the household that boys and girls were socialized into their gender roles. Gender is not natural or biologically determined, and so one of the implicit functions of the household was the reproduction of gendered men and women. Indeed, the labor of the household was determinative of the construction of gender in ancient Israel.

Although social roles or activities are an indication of gender, gender is not simply a set of roles or identities but rather a pervasive ordering of relationships based on the perceived differences between men and women. Gender is a process that extends beyond the household to encompass social structures and institutions. It is a way of signifying relationships of power (Scott 1986, 1067). “Gender is present in the processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power in the various sectors of social life” (Acker 1992, 567). Gender is thus evident not only in household relations but also in extended kinship relations, patron–client relations, and in the relationship between the king and his subjects, though gender may be masked by the age hierarchy. Gender also depicts the relationship between Yhwh and his people. It is characteristic of social interactions such as hospitality and acts of generosity, service and servitude, and especially warfare. The political economy encompasses all of these social relations and interactions, and so is gendered by them. Thus, our investigation of the political economy must begin with gender, which marks the fundamental social relations of production in ancient Israel.

Gender, Sex, and Ambiguity

Understanding the construction of gender has a notable history over the past few decades (see Scott 1986; Moore 1988, 12–30). Previously, scholars defined gender as the culturally specific patterns that are imposed on the biological differences of sex. The biological distinction between male and female was assumed to be a natural, given trait of all persons, whereas gender was an identity that was culturally assigned, based on one’s sex, and into which one was socialized. Thus, according to Simone de Beauvoir, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (1973, 301; see Butler 1986). The same could be said of a man.

Although this distinction between a biologically-given sex and a culturally constructed gender proved useful—for example, in reconciling the culturally diverse expressions of gender with an assumed universal gender asymmetry (see Ortner 1989–90)—the distinction could not be sustained, either empirically or theoretically. At the empirical level, the distinction between sex and gender assumes that, biologically, the world displays a clear sexual dimorphism, populated by distinct males and females. But biological sex turns out not to be as binary as the distinction assumes. Rather than occurring as a sexual dimorphism, male and female forms are simply the end points on a continuum of intersexual human forms, with the male pseudo-hermaphrodite, the true hermaphrodite, and the female pseudo-hermaphrodite being the most recognizable (see Fausto-Sterling). Moreover, at the level of sex chromosomes, which would presumably determine biological sex, over 70 combinations have been detected (Gudorf 1994, 4). Sex determination—whether someone is a male or female—turns out to be an effect of gender (see also Hood-Williams).

At the theoretical level, the distinction between biological sex and constructed gender suggests the possibility of a radical discontinuity that does not seem to play out in the real world. At most, biological sex only supplies “a suggestive and ambiguous backdrop to the cultural organization of gender” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981, 1), yet biological males are usually associated with masculine concepts of gender and biological females with feminine concepts of gender. This is unexpected, given that the cultural construction of gender would seem to sever any necessary link between a given sex and a particular gender. “When the constructed status of gender is theorized as radically independent of sex, gender itself becomes a free-floating artifice, with the consequence that man and masculine might just as easily signify a female body as a male one, and woman and feminine a male body as easily as a female one” (Butler 2006, 9). But such is not the case. Instead, given that sex turns out to be an effect of gender, the cultural construction of gender, in relation to sex, is dialectical: one becomes a gender within the constraints of the deeply-held, cultural norms of gender (Butler 1986).

Rather than understanding gender as a cultural construction of biological sex, gender is better understood to be the discursive origin of sex and to be performatively produced—“that is, constituting the identity it is purported to be” (Butler 2006, 34). Gender is not an essence or substance, but a series of acts that produce the effect of an identity, or a self-understanding, which gives the appearance of a natural state of being. Gender is always a doing: “Doing gender means creating differences between girls and boys and women and men, differences that are not natural, essential, or biological. Once the differences have been constructed, they are used to reinforce the ‘essentialness’ of gender” (West and Zimm...