Through the roof

A fascinating new article by Jeremy Davies, whose work on deep time I already commend whenever I can,  offers the story of Noah's Ark as a framework for Anthropocene thinking - but not the Noah's Ark you think you know. Like several other important things, the story of the Flood appears doubled in the Hebrew Bible, and Davies concentrates on the one scholars trace to "J," the "Yahwist." Unlike the other one by the later priestly "P," J's God doesn't undo the very process of creation through the Flood but merely "sterilised" the earth of all life, while saving its essence in the Ark as a sort of seed bank. While P provides details on how the animals will be fed, etc., J's story provides no such detail: time stands still. With Davies' help we understand that being in the Ark was no picnic, but an experience of literally suspended animation. And where P's has a window, J's is just a box with a small hatch on the roof - the one through which Noah, utilizing an ancient navigational technique, eventually lets a dove out to see if land is near. Without even a window, the passengers had no way of seeing what was going on, no horizon.

In order for life to continue, it can't watch from the safety of distance but has to risk part of itself. Davies' article is called "Noah's Dove," because the reconnection to the world comes with the dove's three flights - first, returning with nothing; then, after a week of Noah's care, returning with an olive branch - proof that plants had survived or recovered; and finally, after another week on the Ark, flying away not to return. He makes beautiful poetic sense of this.

A venerable exegetical tradition treats the dove as an archetype of faithfulness. It twice returns to Noah and its mate, in the same way that, as Matthew Henry put it, ‘a Gracious Soul [. . .] returns to Christ as to its Ark’ (1707, s. v. Gen. 8:6–12). And yet on its third flight the dove departs, never to look back. That third flight bears witness to a fidelity deeper than faithfulness: to an affect that penetrates the dove’s being even more deeply, like the fidelity of water to the pull of gravity. The dove is the first creature to fall in love with the postdiluvian world. (344)

Life and the earth belong together, something Anthropocene discussions often bracket or even forget. And our interdependence on other forms of life isn't only about us - the dove, without whose aid we might still be in the box, ultimately finds its own home. We belong to the world, a world greater than us. Davies likens the dove to J's God who, once his rage has assuaged by an offering from Noah, decides "in his heart" not again to destroy life, and restores the cycles which weave our lives and the world's together: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night (Gen 8:22). But this is "in his heart": unlike P's Noah, J's Noah isn't told. 

The most striking thing of all about his affirmation is that it does not take the form of a promise or a covenant. Yahweh does not say anything to Noah. He is inscrutable, outside of relation or communication. He makes his vow only ‘in His heart.’ This is a musing, ruminative divinity, who lets go of his vengeful anger as a child might. Even as he dedicates himself to sustaining the world, Yahweh withdraws into his own meditations. He is seen at once in the most personal terms – he is susceptible both to fury and to mollification – and as fundamentally impersonal. In this moment, he is less a lawgiver or patriarch than he is the universe’s heartbeat. Just like the dove, he fulfils his purpose through a certain absence. The world that he affirms is the world of the dove: the world of systemic interconnection, experienced first of all through a sense of belonging that precedes any determination of where or how life belongs on the earth. (346)

It's a beautiful reading, and a useful counterweight to environmental humanities readings of Genesis focused on humans being created in the image of an unearthly God and given an analogous "dominion" over the rest of creation. I can't wait to share it with students. But I'll also have to tell them that no readers of the Bible before the 19th century prised apart the "J" and "P" versions as if one could, or should, stand on its own. Still, the "J" vision was there throughout, if often silenced by the less ecologically wise "P" one. And it's enchanting...