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Book Review
| The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures. By Daniel Hillel. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Notes, appendices, bibliography. $32.50.
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| In 1938, the USDA sent a high-level fact-finding team to the Near East. Its mission: to boldly explore water and soil conservation practices in ancient lands like Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, and Palestine. Walter Clay Lowdermilk's resulting tome, Palestine—Land of Promise (1944), was something of a best-seller in the world of soil science though his conclusions were generally discouraging, reflecting a record of erosion, deforestation, and ecological deterioration. Even then, for over a century, European naturalists had been coming to the Holy Land seeking an environmental context and ecological explanation for the biblical narrative. |
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Daniel Hillel has emerged as one of the most thoughtful and prolific successors to this scientific/literary tradition and anticipation for Professor Hillel's most recent work, The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures was great. Professionally a world-renowned soil physicist, Hillel opens with the acknowledgement that some 123 years earlier, Henry Tristram, the legendary natural historian wrote a book with the same title which "made no attempt to define and interpret the cultural evolution of the Israelite people as influenced by their natural environment." Hillel's newer version enthusiastically embraces this challenge with the author's considerable erudition and literary skills (with a vocabulary that will quickly send readers scampering to the nearest dictionary!). |
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