Tag: Palestine

Power and disaster

In Greek and Roman Antiquity extreme weather events and natural disasters like droughts, earthquakes and floods were a frequent occurrence. They also offered important stages for the display of political power. Political leaders would rush to the occasion to help the population out of their hardship and make sure that other powers and posterity notice. In fact, according to historian Holger Sonnabend, political power was recognized mainly by the ability to help and rebuild. This was even sometimes used by suffering cities to get as much support as possible from rivaling politicians.

Accompanying the imperative of help was the public display of grieve. Compassion was expected of those in power and it was common for leaders to require historians to write up their grieve in dramatic ways. Here is an example from the 7. Century CE by Georgios Kedrenos, who describes in retrospect the expression of grieve of emperor Justinian upon the earth quake in Antiochia in May 526.

“He threw aside his crown and his imperial clothes, and, dressed in dirty rags, wept for several days, and even on feast days he entered the church in pitiful robes because he could not bear to put on any signs of his power.”

The educator and historian Libanius (314 – 392 CE) on the other hand wrote in an eulogy on emperor Julian that the earth itself mourned with an earth quake and several tsunamis in the Mediterranean in 365 CE the loss of this great emperor the year before.

“Earth truly has been fully sensible of her loss, and has honoured the hero by an appropriate shearing off of her tresses, shaking off, as a horse doth his rider, so many and such great cities. In Palestine several; of the Libyans all and every one. Prostrate lie the largest towns of Sicily, prostrate all of Greece save one; the fair Nicaea lies in ruins; the city, pre-eminent in beauty, totters to her fall, and has no confidence for the time to come! These are the honours paid to him by Earth, or if you choose, by Neptune himself; but on the part of the Seasons, famines and pestilences, destroying alike man and beast, just as though it were not lawful for creatures upon earth to enjoy health now that he has departed! What wonder then is it, if such being the state of things, many a one, like myself, deems it a loss not to have died before!”

(full text in english)

For the disaster of 365 in the Mediterranean see also this post.

A covenant to keep the forces of chaos at bay

The book of Jeremiah in the Hebrew Testament discusses at large an ecological crisis around 600 BCE in the so called “Fertile Crescent” (a region encompassing today’s southern Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, and parts of Turkey and Iran). According to Michael S. Northcott in his book “A moral Climate” the crisis was brought about by agricultural over-exploitation of the land. The book of Jeremiah can thus be regarded as another climate narrative. The peoples of the Fertile Crescent were river peoples, their culture thrived on the waters of three rivers: Euphrat, Tigris and Nile. The ocean on the other hand was “seen as the primeval source of chaos, and this perhaps presents a cultural memory of prehistory in which the oceans had covered far more of the land than they have since the end of the last ice age,” writes Northcott. “For Jeremiah, the covenant that Yahweh made with the Israelites after their release from slavery in Egypt was therefore a cosmic covenant in which human work on creation ought to recognise the sustaining creative powers of the Lord of the earth in keeping the forces of chaos at bay:

Do you not fear me? says the Lord;
Do you not tremble before me?
I placed the sand as a boundary before the sea,
a perpetual barrier which it can not pass;
though the waves toss, they can not prevail,
though they roar, they can not pass over it.
[Jeremiah 5:22]”

In this passage from the ancient text, the sand on the beach is seen as the creative invention of the deity to keep the ocean where it belongs and the land with it’s human habitats where it belongs. It’s part of a greater deal, so to speak. In 600 BCE the ocean did not rise over the beach. In the present however, humans have not only begun to destroy beaches worldwide by extracitivist exploitation, the seas also rise. How do we then read the current situation from a Jewish, Old Testament perspective?