Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

LAND

The prominence of land in biblical thought has been underestimated in much 20th-century scholarship because of its strong emphasis on the historical character of biblical religion. According to this emphasis, biblical religion is about human redemption, and its God is revealed and recognized in mighty acts within the historical experiences of God’s people. The natural world and the biblical landscape are consequently reduced to the stage upon which this divine-human drama takes place, or they are identified as the arena in which the pagan deities of Israel’s neighbors are active. Thus land, together with the sphere of nature of which it is a part, has been considered at best a marginal domain in biblical thought and at worst a pagan realm from which Israel’s historical religion dissociated itself.

Such an understanding of biblical religion has been challenged from several quarters, including those who consider the historical lens in and of itself too narrow for viewing the richness of biblical experience. Modern developments have also contributed to a new interest in the biblical landscape. Among these are the creation of the modern State of Israel and the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians concerning historical and religious claims to the lands of the Bible; new struggles worldwide over claims and rights to land between indigenous peoples and immigrants, often Christian colonists; and a new concern for the natural world and the human relationship to it arising from the environmental crisis. Partly because of such current developments, and partly because of the inadequacy of the historical reading of the Bible itself, land has been rediscovered as a crucial and indispensable player in the biblical drama. The significance of land in the Bible may be summarized under three of its key roles.

Agriculture

Arable land lay at the heart of the biblical landscape. It was the basis of Israel’s physical survival as a people and of its agrarian way of life. Israel’s economy throughout the biblical period was agricultural, combining the cultivation of grains and fruits with the herding of sheep and goats on small family farms. So central was this agricultural way of life to Israel’s self-understanding that according to one of its creation accounts, the Eden narrative in Gen. 2:4b–3:24, the first human was made from arable soil (Heb. ʾăḏāmâ, 2:7) and given the task of cultivating it (2:15; 3:23). Thus working the land, the very occupation in which most Israelites were engaged, was viewed as the archetypal vocation for which humanity was created.

Agricultural land was customarily owned and farmed by multiple family households, which themselves were social adaptations to the land and labor demands of hill-country farming. Land was regarded as an ancestral inheritance (naḥălâ, 1 Kgs. 21:3) remaining permanently in the family. Should sale be necessary, the nearest relative had the first option to buy (Jer. 32:6-15). The strength of the connection between a family and its ancestral lands is illustrated by Naboth’s refusal under great pressure to sell his ancestral vineyard to King Ahab (1 Kgs. 21:1-16). Also illustrated in this episode is the acquisition of land, not always legally, by Israel’s powerful and elite, a practice criticized harshly by the prophets (1 Kgs. 21:17-19; Isa. 5:8-10; Mic. 2:1-2). According to one theological perspective, Israel’s agricultural land was actually God’s land, on which Israelite families were properly regarded as resident aliens and servants (Lev. 25:23).

Just as human identity was grounded in the arable land, its cultivation, and its agricultural produce, so too Israel’s view of God was closely associated with this landscape. The fertility of arable soil was regarded ultimately as God’s work. God, for whom the thunderstorm was a common medium of revelation (Exod. 19:9, 16; Ps. 18:7-15[MT 8-16]), brought the rain upon which Israel’s dry-land farming depended (Gen. 2:5; Deut. 11:10-12). God made the soil fertile (Gen. 8:22; 27:27-28) and could render it sterile (Gen. 3:17-18; 4:11-12). In recognition of God’s control over the land’s production, Israel celebrated its primary religious festivals at the three harvests of its agricultural year, the harvests of barley and wheat in the spring and the harvest of fruit in the fall (Exod. 34:18-26; Lev. 23:9-22; Deut. 16:1-10). At each Israel offered to God the firstfruits of the harvest. Thus Israel’s worship and liturgical calendar were shaped by its agricultural landscape.

Nationhood

Just as land was the basis of Israel’s agricultural society, so it was the basis of Israel’s existence as an ancient Near Eastern kingdom. Especially prominent in Israel’s understanding of its land as its national territory are two beliefs. One is that Israel itself was not indigenous to its land. Its ancestral origins lay elsewhere. Abraham’s family migrated to Canaan from Mesopotamia via Syria (Gen. 11:27–12:9), and Abraham’s descendents later moved to Canaan from the Nile Delta of Egypt (Exod. 1–15; Josh. 1–12). The other belief is that Israel’s God gave the land to Israel, as expressed in the narrative of Abraham’s initial migration (Gen. 12:1-9) and in the account of the subsequent entrance of Abraham’s descendants into Canaan from Egypt (Deut. 1:6-8).

The permanence of the link between biblical Israel and its land is viewed in various ways. In some texts, the relationship is described as eternal (Gen. 17:8; Deut. 4:40; 2 Sam. 7:10, 16; Amos 9:15). Other texts regard Israel’s well-being in the land and its very claims to it as dependent upon its loyalty to its covenant with God and its obedience to God’s commands (Deut. 4:25-27; 11:13-17; Jer. 7:1-15; Amos 6:1-8). According to this latter view, the Exile and the experience of landlessness after the fall of Samaria and Jerusalem were understood as the ultimate punishment for Israel’s covenant faithlessness (2 Kgs.17:7-23; 21:1-16). Exilic prophets predicted God’s new act of salvation primarily in terms of the restoration to the Israelite exiles of their preexilic lands (Isa. 40:1-11; 49:19-20; 51:1-3; Ezek. 20:40-44).

Worship

As noted, Israel’s liturgical calendar, designating the times and rituals of its worship, was primarily shaped by the three harvest festivals celebrating the productivity of its agricultural lands. Just as the landscape influenced the times and rituals of Israel’s worship, so it also influenced the setting of Israelite worship. Though God could be present in any place, the primary site of God’s revelation in biblical Israel was the mountain top, Mt. Sinai on which the law was given and Mt. Zion on which the temple was built. Both mountains were considered sacred space (Exod. 3:5; 19:12, 23; Ps. 48:1-3[2-4]; 87:1-3). Thus a particular feature of the landscape was viewed as the special locus of divine-human communication. In its notion of sacred space, Israel shared with other cultures the notion that the landscape itself could be a medium of divine revelation.

The Jewish community in Roman Palestine, from which the first Christians came, was heir to a sense of the land that included the various roles it played in the religion of Israel. Thus the early Christian writings in the NT, especially the Gospel narratives about Jesus, reflect these same understandings. In the first place, the agricultural landscape of biblical Israel plays a prominent role in the Gospels. The small agrarian villages of Roman Palestine provide the context for the life and ministry of Jesus and his first followers, and it is with the imagery of this world — sowing and harvesting grain (Mark 4:1-20, 26-29), tending vineyards (12:1-12), herding sheep (Matt. 18:10-14) — that Jesus describes the character of the kingdom of God.

Furthermore, the political landscape of biblical Israel is reflected in a number of NT texts, where the relationship between nationhood and land is assumed. The gift of land to Abraham’s descendants is recalled (Acts 7:2-7; Heb. 11:8-9), Palestine is referred to as the land of Israel (Matt. 2:20-21), and the political restoration of Israel as an independent kingdom free of Roman control is mentioned by Jesus’ disciples (Acts 1:6). Finally, the sacred landscape of Israel is reflected in the Gospel narratives. The mountain figures prominently in Matthew’s Gospel in which it is the location of Jesus’ great sermon (Matt. 5:1–7:29) recalling the revelation to Moses on Mt. Sinai, of Jesus’ transfiguration (17:1-13), and of Jesus’ great commission (28:16-20). Mt. Zion and the temple, as the center of Jewish worship, provide the context of the Passion narratives in all of the Gospels, and in Luke-Acts it is here in Jerusalem that Jesus meets his followers after the Resurrection (Luke 24:33-53) and that the Church begins at Pentecost (Acts 1–2).

In spite of these lines of continuity between Judaism and early Christianity, several developments with the Christian community contributed to a distinctive view of land in the emerging Church. One of these developments was the rapid urbanization of Christianity. Within a decade of the Crucifixion of Jesus, the primary context of Christianity had shifted from the rural villages of Palestine to the cities of the Roman Empire. With this shift, the world of agriculture, which had had such a profound influence on the definition of humanity and on the understanding of divine activity in Israel, was left behind and replaced with an urban perspective. While the Gospel narratives about Jesus recall this agricultural perspective, Paul’s letters that take up directly the actual urban circumstances of his audience show only faint traces of it (1 Thess. 2:1-12; Rom. 11:17-24).

A second development affecting the Christian view of land was the conversion to Christianity of large numbers of Gentiles, who did not share the close political bonds Jews felt with the territories of Judea and Samaria, once parts of the kingdom of Israel. Thus among most new Christians the link between land and nationhood was undermined, or at least altered, and the self-understanding of the early Christians as God’s people no longer included a particular land as an essential element. It is noteworthy that Paul, who makes so much of Abraham’s role in salvation history, does not discuss God’s promise to him of land (Gal. 3:6-18; Rom. 4:1-25).

Finally, the strong apocalyptic character of early Christianity shifted its perspective on land. By stressing a future existence in a heavenly realm, unencumbered by the realities of earthy existence — whether agricultural or political survival — Christianity diminished the role of land in its religious consciousness (John 14:1-7; 1 Cor. 15:1-58; 1 Thess. 4:13-18). Still, its images of the new age never divorce it entirely from the earthly landscape: the kingdom of God does not escape earth’s bounds but is established in a transformed world (Rev. 21:1, 2; 22:1-5). Thus even Christianity’s apocalyptic vision consists in the natural realities — rivers, fruit trees, cities — that were a part of the biblical landscape.

Bibliography. W. Brueggemann, The Land (Philadelphia, 1977); W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land (Berkeley, 1974); N. C. Habel, The Land Is Mine. OBT (Minneapolis, 1995); T. Hiebert, The Yahwist’s Landscape (Oxford, 1996); C. J. H. Wright, God’s People in God’s Land (Grand Rapids, 1990).

Theodore Hiebert

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

LAND

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)