Epilogue

Prior to 1970, modern biblical scholars gave little attention to the role of the natural world in the literature of the Bible and in the religion culture of ancient Israel. Too often it was assumed that the religion of Israel was a religion of history, and that the Bible focused exclusively on the relationship between God and humans. The natural world was viewed merely as the stage on which the human drama with God took place. The creation was split into nature and history (the human realm) with God’s activity relegated to the latter. This approach is no longer acceptable. It is based on a modern conceptual dichotomy between history and nature that is foreign to the worldview of the ancient Israelites. Moreover, this approach, which was employed to articulate the relevance of Bible for the modern world (this was the agenda of the Biblical Theology Movement), proved to be myopic. In the context of the environmental crisis that began to attract wide public attention in the 1960s, numerous charges were made that the Bible not only fostered anti-environmental attitudes but was actually responsible for the current crisis. Suddenly, the Bible was labeled both irrelevant and dangerous, and biblical scholars scrambled to redeem the Bible from this assault.