Creation Stories
Gen 1:1-2:4a The Priestly story: cosmic creation
Gen 2:4b-25 The Yahwist’s story: ‘ādam created from ‘ădāmâ
Ps 104:10-30 The Psalmist’s story of ecological community
Covenant: a Gift and a Warning
Deut 8:7-19 “The Lord your God is bringing you into a good land … Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commandments …”
Deut 16:20 “Justice and only justice you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
Deut 30:15 “I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity … choose life!”
Laws of the Land
Exod 23:10-11 “Let the land rest every seventh year, so that the poor of your people may eat…”
Lev 23:22 “You shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest; … leave them for the poor and for the alien.”
Lev 25:2-7 “In the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land”
Lev 25:11-13 “[The] fiftieth year shall be a jubilee … you shall return, every one of you, to your inheritance … and to your family.”
Ancestral Land / Nahălâ as Sacred Trust
1 Kgs 21:1-29 Naboth refuses to sell the king his ancestral vineyard, because it must be held in trust for future generations.
Jer 32:1-15 Jeremiah buys his cousin’s field at Anathoth, to preserve the family land, even though Jerusalem was under siege and Jeremiah was imprisoned in the palace.
Jer 3:19 Covenant expressed as the sharing of God’s ancestral land.
Jer 32:37-41 “I will bring [my people] back to this place, and I will settle them in safety. They shall be my people, and I shall be their God … I will plant them in this land in faithfulness, with all my heart and all my soul.”
God’s Land / Kingdom
Mark 1:20, Matt 4:12-17, Luke 4:14-15 Jesus announces that the prophetic promise of once again living in God’s land under God’s rule, not Rome’s, is about to be fulfilled.