Earth Day – Spiritual Background

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.

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