If things were good, it was because God was happy. To ancient Israelites there was no such thing as nature as we understand it today and no such thing as chance. The Lord will make the rain of your land dust, and sand shall drop on you from the sky, until you are wiped out.” In the book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book of the Hebrew Bible, God proclaims that if Israel obeys the laws, “the Lord will open for you his bounteous store, the heavens, to provide rain for your land in season.”ĭisobedience, however, will have the opposite effect: “The skies above your head shall be copper and the earth under you iron. In the 13th century B.C., nearly all of the Eastern Mediterranean civilizations collapsed because of a prolonged drought.įor the biblical authors, rain was a blessing and drought a curse – quite literally. The rainy seasons were brief any precipitation less than normal could be devastating.Īcross the ancient Near East, drought and famine were feared. Even in the best of years, it took enormous effort to coax sufficient sustenance out of the ground. Israel occupied the rocky highlands of Canaan – the area of present-day Jerusalem and the hills to the north of it – rather than fertile coastal plains. Underlying the texts about famine in the Hebrew Bible was the constant threat and recurring reality of famine in ancient Israel. The authors of the Hebrew Bible used famine as a mechanism of divine wrath and destruction – but also as a storytelling device, a way to move the narrative forward. As a scholar of the Hebrew Bible, I understand that famines in biblical times were interpreted as more than mere natural occurrences. Biblical stories of devastating famines are familiar to many. The choice of words conveys more than just scale.
As the coronavirus spread rapidly around the world last year, the United Nations warned that the economic disruption of the pandemic could result in famines of “biblical proportions.”
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