The Climate Narratives of Noah and Joseph, by Professor Michael Northcott

In Christian tradition, as in other ancient cultures, the key device for teaching cosmology was storytelling. There are two foundational Biblical stories where individuals act prudentially to stave off climatic disasters, these being the stories of Noah and Joseph. In the Flood narrative, Noah learns in a vision that God intends to make it rain for months and to flood the earth because "the wickedness of humankind on earth was great." (Genesis 6. 5). In preparation for the coming inundation Noah begins his great ark project according to divine instruction, and his neighbours subject him to ridicule. They are content in their lives, they do not suspect that disaster will befall them, and they think Noah and his family are off their heads. When the flood comes the only ones who survive are those, animal and human, whom Noah has seen safely aboard his ark. The Biblical story of the flood echoes similar accounts of primordial inundation in the ancient near east, such as the Gilgamesh Epic, which likely have their roots in an actual geological event. Around 5,600 B.C. the rising waters of the Mediterranean precipitated the inundation of the deep basin that contained the freshwater Lake Euxine and resulted in the formation of the Black Sea. This ancient saga is not only a powerful story of human survival in the face of a climatic catastrophe but also a moral tale in which the flood is seen as divine punishment for a generation of humans who had become so depraved that "every planning and striving of its heart was always only wicked" (Genesis 6. 5). And as the narrator suggests the wickedness which had affected all humans was such that it affected the life of all flesh on earth, and endangered even the earth which was as a result "full of violence" (Genesis 6. 13). The narrator picks up a theme from the opening chapters of Genesis in which the sin of Adam and Eve is said to have effects not only on their children and childrens' children but on the earth itself.

The covenant which God made with Noah and his descendants after the Flood promised that the earth would not again be threatened by the bursting forth of the chaotic waters, and it was a covenant which included not only humans but "living things of every kind". It was as the English Jesuit Robert Murray suggests a "cosmic covenant" in which the idea of confrontation between the chaotic and elemental powers of ocean and climate and the ordering and sustaining power of God played a central role. For the Psalmist the regularity of the rains which water the crops are evidence of the sustaining action of the creator but they are also seen as a sign of good government; the good king overseas a land in which the rains come regularly. And the Hebrew Prophets argued that the burdens which greedy kings and merchants placed on land and people caused the droughts and spreading deserts which afflicted Mesopotamia from the eighth century B.C. Pollution is seen as a consequence of the failure to follow divine law: as Isaiah has it, "the earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant" (Isaiah 24. 5).

After Noah, and before Isaiah, the Old Testament speaks of another patriarch who not only correctly foretold an impending climate disaster, but helped an alien nation, and through them his own family and ultimately the chosen people of God, to survive it. This man was Joseph, and the story of Joseph offers a more hopeful scenario for our current climate change predicament than that of Noah: Joseph's warnings of imminent climate change were heeded by the Egyptians and prudent preparations were made which saved them, and subsequently Joseph's own family, from calamity. Like the story of the great flood, the story of Joseph may also have historical roots in the memory of a great drought in the Ancient Near East, which Greenland ice cores reveal took place in a three hundred year period from 2200 B.C. Although the drought was not caused by Egyptian agricultural or imperial practices it nonetheless would have shown up any weaknesses in those practices. Above all the claim of their rulers to be gods was shaken by the devastating famines and the famine taught them to act less like gods and more like shepherds of the people.[1] The lesson they learned was precisely the strategy recorded in the Joseph saga - investment in agriculture and centralised storage was a more effective means for managing the vagaries of the climate of the Nile region than the imperial claim that the rulers were gods and could control the forces of nature.

The story of Joseph not only shows how climate plays a role in shaping the destinies of civilisations: it is also a powerful story of divine providence. Through his betrayal by his brothers, who were jealous at the favouritism shown by Jacob towards Joseph in the gift of the multi-coloured coat, through his patient perseverance during servitude and imprisonment in Egypt, and through his prophetic wisdom in interpreting dreams, Joseph became vice-regent in Egypt. In that capacity he established a system of tithes and taxes, and thence a centralised system of agricultural storage, and he was in a position during the famine to save his own kin from the effects of the drought. When his family visit the court of Pharaoh to plead for help they are in awe at the power and wealth of the court, and doubly so when they later realise that Joseph, the brother they betrayed and nearly killed, is now ruler in this great empire. As Joseph puts it the evil which they performed in selling him into slavery was taken up into the divine plan; "God sent me before you to preserve life" (Genesis 45. 5). Divine providence works even through the evil his brothers did to him, and the tragedy of underserved suffering to "preserve a remnant for you on earth, and to keep alive many survivors" (Genesis 45. 7). The story shows in a paradigmatic way how God works through the seemingly unconnected events of history, both human and planetary, to bring about the salvation of the people of God. From the hateful jealousy of Joseph's brothers to the years of drought the divine hand works to save the sons and daughters of Jacob whose descendants, through the Exodus, eventually become the heirs of the land of promise.

The fathers of the early church interpreted Joseph as an analogy for Jesus. Just as God preserves his people through the undeserved suffering of Joseph so God redeems the new people of God through the underserved suffering and patient endurance of his Son Jesus Christ. The grace of God uses the human temptation of jealousy which drives Joseph's brothers to assault their brother and sell him into slavery and turns this temptation towards God's own purposes. As a friend of a prisoner Joseph is ultimately brought before Pharaoh to interpret a dream. And just as Christ ascribes his wisdom and power to God the Father, so Joseph suggests that any facility he may have in interpreting Pharaoh's dream comes from God and not from himself (Genesis 41. 16). There were no doubt many in Egypt who scoffed at Joseph's prediction of the years of drought and who argued, like climate change deniers today, that the prophecy of coming cataclysm is mistaken and that even if it is true it would be better to deal with it when it comes than make expensive and elaborate preparations in advance. But against the nay-sayers Joseph read the dream as a message from God to the King of Egypt. In a very important sense the science of global warming finds a powerful analogy in this story.

Prudential regulation and forward planning of the kind required if humanity is to mitigate climate change has a bad name among contemporary economists. An aversion to planning powerfully infects economists' accounts of the excessive costs which are said to be involved in reducing fossil fuel dependence. Rational choice theory, which as we have seen is the economic equivalent of Cartesian rationalism and Newtonian atomism, suggests that the invisible hand of the market is the best promoter of wealth and welfare in societies that are free from excessive regulation or planning and where individuals are free to pursues their own interests without regard for the interests of others. There is presently little evidence that climate change has unseated the cultural power of this description of rational human behaviour among economists and the banks, corporations and governments which they advise.

Trust in divine fidelity to created life is at the heart of the Jewish and Christian moral traditions. Both traditions recognise created order alongside the redeemed community as a place where divine fidelity to the goodness of created life is experienced and made manifest. But the God-given capacity to discern a future of climate change and the threats it entails requires concerted moral action, just as it did for Joseph, and not simply blind trust that whatever the planet throws at us because of our profligate waste of the fossil fuel reserve, God will somehow defend us in the end. In one sense as Christians we already know our end for we learn from the resurrection of Jesus Christ that our bodies will be raised with his body on the last day. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ not only directs Christians to an account of our end but to care and concern in this life for the conditions which sustain mortal flourishing.

The Joseph saga suggests that prophetic insight into the threats to life that human activities or planetary cataclysms may represent, and the wisdom to deal with such threats, are among the gifts that God gives to the people of God, and through them to all creatures, to help preserve the creation from destruction. In this sense Houghton, as the first chair of the IPCC, is a prophet of God, and climate scientists of all faiths and none, inasmuch as they have taken up the project he inaugurated, are doing the work of God, just as those whom Joseph led in the court of a foreign king to organise and plan for the coming drought were the agents of salvation for the people of Egypt and for the ancestors of Israel twelve thousand years ago.

If the signs of disturbances in the climate truly signify a potential cataclysm from fossil fuel burning then the Genesis stories of Noah and Joseph, in which God acts in history to save humanity and other species from destruction, educate those who read them that there is a divine will to preserve the creation from cataclysm. But these stories also teach us that prophets of climate change must be heeded with a change of heart leading to prudent and responsible action to mitigate disaster. Without a change of heart, metanoia, and a new sense of humility before the forces of this wondrous planet, we will not be able to achieve the transformation that is needed if planetary melt down is to be averted.

A Moral Climate can be bought in bookshops across the country or on Amazon.

Publisher: Darton, Longman and Todd
www.dltbooks.com

Read also Ann Pettifor's review of the book in Church Times (http://www.churchtimes.org.uk/content.asp?id=47011)

[1] Bryan Fagan, The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 143-5.