DAVID KRONEMYER: The Bible has various allusions to water. In the Old Testament it is the primordial sea out of which God created the earth. It is what Noah overcame during the great flood. Jonah survived it after he was belched out of the whale. In the New Testament Jesus is a fisher of men. He performed a miracle with loaves and fishes. Several of the disciples were fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. The fish was a symbol of the early Christian Church. Baptism is immersion in water.
These references are surprising since the Israelites were not a sea-going people, unlike the Phoenicians immediately to the west or the Greeks across the Mediterranean. The preferred milieu of the Israelites was the desert. The climate of the Levant is predominantly arid. Abandoning the Nile, Moses led his people across the desert for 40 years. Jesus ventured into the desert where Satan tempted him for 40 days and 40 nights.
This antinomy between ocean and desert is suggestive. The ocean is fecund, full of life. The desert on the other hand is barren and desolate. Perhaps the Israelites yearned for water as a normative inversion growing out of their foundational nomadic experience.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Roger A. Sawtelle // Nov 27, 2010 at 10:50 am
You write that the prefered milieu of the Hebrews was the desert, however it seems to me that the Hebrews were traditionally herders, which put them more in land that has vegetation but not good for agriculture, such as hilly land. It is clear from Genesis that they felt blessed to be herders. Abel was a herder, while Cain was a Farmer. Lot chose fertile, inhabited land, while Abraham was content with the hilly nad mountainous land. Esau was a hunter, while Jacob followed the family herder business. David like many of his compatiots began his life as a shepherd. Herding is agricultural and civilized, unlike hunting, but it is also closer to nature than urban and farm life. Water is too broad a category to be pigeonholed. The Hebrews feared the power of the storm and unfamiliar power of the ocean. They appreciated the water from the rain, the spring, the stream, and the well.
2 David Kronemyer // Nov 28, 2010 at 10:07 am
Good points, but this still doesn’t explain the persistence of water motifs in the first book of Genesis. I’ve always wondered, how come the whale is the first specific animal to be mentioned in the Bible? Then of course there is the great flood …
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