19“stony rocks for the conies”
Singing Ecology unto the Lord
nd God saw every thing that he had
made, and, behold, it was very good.” Not just “good,” as when “God said, Let
there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good.” Or
when “God called the dry land earth; and the gathering together of the waters
called he seas: and God saw that it was good.” Or when God made two great
lights for day and night, and let the waters bring forth living creatures, and made
the beasts of the earth, “and God saw that it was good.” Not just good but very
good, tov me’od, and so God rested on the seventh day, the Sabbath.
Strangely enough, after God “created man in his own image... male and
female created he them,” the Bible does not add, “God saw that it was good.”
But something else happened then and still reverberates for humankind. “God
said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue
it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Dominion. Long before the Israelites came into a land of milk and honey,
Eden may have existed within the Fertile Crescent in Mesopotamia. There
Gilgamesh, a Sumerian king “who knew the way things were before the flood,”
slew the guardian of the Cedar Forest and felled its trees for his city. A dominant
Sumerian culture flourished by channeling irrigation from the Euphrates, until
overuse and evaporation eventually left the soil poisoned by salt.
Dominion, from the same Hebrew root as “tyrant”: an ominous gift, like
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