Part I - Violence and Ecology

Summary

William Brown writes that ‘every model of the cosmos [in antiquity] conveys an ethos as well as a mythos’.¹ That ethos provides a moral environment within which agents are meant to act rightly, in consonance with the ‘arc’ of the cosmos itself.² For Brown, the biblical writers insist that ‘the created world reflects certain discernible moral ethoses, or prescriptively sustaining contexts’.³ The sustaining qualities of the physical world work two ways. Human moral activity impacts the physical world, which in turn acts back upon humanity for good or ill. Biblical writers contend variously that the places in which they lived were directly and indirectly moulded by moral and immoral human action. It is not surprising, then, when turning to the question of violence, to observe in the biblical literature a deep and troubled relationship between humans and the land. This mutually destructive relationship between humans and the land because of violence is what I call the ecology of violence. Violence distresses, disrupts, and destroys the land. An ecology of violence refers to the way that violence tears at the moral bonds holding together humans and the land, and in some cases tears the entire fabric holding together God, humans, and the land. More precisely, bloodshed tears the fabric and violence (חמס) is the tearing itself. The ecological grammar is distinguished by its emphasis on the way that violence constitutes the destruction of the life-sustaining capacities of the land and cosmos, whether they be plant and animal life or the entire created order, as we see in Genesis 6–8.