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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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Hillel's analysis is based on a division of the Near-East into five distinct landscapes with their very different geographies, including the humid highlands (or what he calls the "rainfed farming domain"), the semi-arid steppes ("the pastoral domain"), river valleys ("the riverine domain"), the seacoasts ("the maritime domain"), and the arid zones ("the desert domain"). Beginning with the flow of Eden's rivers, Hillel walks the reader through Genesis and subsequent biblical narratives, following the ancient Israelites across these disparate landscapes while inferring the associated emotional, ritualistic, and spiritual impacts of the journey. |
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Along the way he points to myriad cultural and theological manifestations. For example, the Hebrew patriarchs' move from Canaan's drought-prone pastoral domain to the Egyptian riverine domain was driven by the food security provided by their southern neighbors' hydrological advantages. Hillel describes in detail how the Nile's natural ebb and flow both flushed salts off the land and was fortuitously timed to allow for planting of winter crops after summer heat had eliminated the weeds and aerated the soil. Among the book's more interesting insights is his contention that the distinctive Old Testament perception of divine reward and punishment constitutes a response to the climatic variability that brought huge uncertainty to Canaan's ancient agrarian economy and a demand for some kind of explanation |
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The trouble for some may be that The Natural History of the Bible is ultimately more a review of the biblical narrative than a book about natural history. Most chapters are taken up by an eloquent recanting of biblical tales or extensive passages with Hillel's translations (particularly good ones at that) of the original text. For those who have not cracked "the Good Book" for some time, such high level scriptural Cliff Notes may offer a welcome refresher and even prerequisite for understanding the accompanying environmental exegesis. Yet the asymmetric balance between "Bible" and "Natural History" may be excessive, as more time is spent on abstract of theological dilemmas than the tangible, physical reality of the "holy land" that so informed the lives and ideas of the Bible's protagonists. For those with an appetite for more ecological trivia, the forty pages of endnotes and the third appendix which catalogues environmentally inspired biblical passages are well worth the effort. |
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Hillel sticks to his professional expertise (soil and water) and offers relatively little in the way of zoological or botanic detail, with only modest mention of the many creatures of the Holy Land or their influence on the biblical perspective, although his extraordinarily comprehensive bibliography contains innumerable studies with descriptions of biblical flora and fauna. The book also suffers from less than friendly typesetting. While many engaging boxes on numerous subtopics enrich the text, the font is tiny. |
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In the final analysis, like his previous works, Daniel Hillel's Natural History of the Bible is a good read and deserves a place on the shelf along with its predecessors. The book will make for an excellent introductory undergraduate text about the Old Testament for a religion or history class that seeks a holistic or more ecological perspective. Readers are rewarded with an improved and more satisfying understanding of what really shaped the classic biblical stories and the accompanying precepts that still drive so much of our own perceptions and values today. |
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Alon Tal is an associate professor of environmental policy at the Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. |
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