I love (biblical) Hebrew. It’s all Jewish-Friend’s fault – she stayed with me for a weekend and taught me the Hebrew alphabet song and I was hooked. Actually I love most languages and I’m especially addicted to the ‘linguist’s crack-cocaine’ moment when, thinking in more than one language at a time, a new level of meaning emerges from a familiar text. Now, imagine what happened when I first read Genesis in Hebrew… wow!
Genesis 1 starts by calling the earth ארץ (eretz), a word derived from a root meaning fragment, presumably in the way that nations fit together like fragments of pottery. It is only once creatures are created on the sixth day that we meet the word הָֽאֲדָמָ֖ה (adamah), upon which some of these creatures crawl or slither. Adamah comes from the root adam, meaning red – and this is related to the word dam, meaning blood. Oh, but it gets better: next, God makes אָדָ֛ם (adam), meaning a man, mankind or Adam himself. The levels of meaning here are explosive! From fragments comes blood, comes life, comes humanity – and that is how intricately entwined with our planet God made us.
If God is the Father who made and cares for us, giving us dominion over the earth places us in His parental role over creation just as He has dominion over us. Therefore, when we were given the commandment not to kill (tempered by the permission to kill in order to eat or to save life), surely this meant that we should not destroy anything that God created unless it is in order to provide sustenance or to preserve life? This would preclude polluting our environment beyond its own ability to heal, exploiting nature or other humans to make profit for ourselves or to raise ourselves above the basic equality afforded to us by creation itself. It seems to me that God did not give us dominion at all – what He gave us was a responsibility to ensure that we take no more from the earth or its creatures than we return to it.
At present, humanity is not part of that creation and equality – it is in fragments, each fighting for superiority. I pray that we may once again become blood that unites us as one creation to provide reciprocally for our earth as it provides for us.
Image from the recent Son et Lumiere at Exeter cathedral