Anyone who has read the Bible even a little can’t miss the many references to farming, livestock, and landscape. After all, Adam and Eve lived in a garden, their downfall involved eating fruit, and Adam’s body itself was mere soil into which God breathed. And that’s from just the first few chapters. Until recently I tacitly assumed God based so much scripture on these types of situations since the primary audience, ancient Jews, were themselves an agrarian people. If God’s chosen people had been the Phoenicians with their seafaring lifestyle, I assumed God would have used completely different scenarios to teach the same spiritual principles.
But lately I’m starting to wonder if the agrarian setting for scripture is itself necessary for what God is trying to communicate. Perhaps an agrarian based lifestyle and economy are God’s designed context for human flourishing and the deepest understanding of eternal, spiritual, ‘un-earthly’ principles. The scriptures I’ve studied for decades. Our own recent efforts at farming coupled with books and articles I’ve enjoyed from contemporary agrarian writers have led me to read many dear biblical passages with a new depth. Rather than attempting to extract a spiritual principle from a ‘earthly’ passage, I’m now beginning to wonder if such passages are truly a ‘whole’ that cannot be dissected without losing a vital element of their truth.
It was in this attitude of uncertain, investigative excitement that I discovered Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture – An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, by Ellen F. Davis. Dr. Davis is first an Old Testament scholar by vocation who then discovered contemporary agrarian writers....
