How Can Jeremiah Compare the Migration of Birds to Knowledge of God’s Justice?
In biblical times, aspects of nature that are easily explained by modern science were considered mysteries, and sparked a sense of awe. Although today, a scientific explanation is often available, nature still has the power to arouse wonder in us. On the other hand, once a phenomenon is scientifically analyzed and explained, it may lose its awe-inspiring qualities.
Every day our favorite meteorologist explains to us why the wind is blowing in a particular direction. The direction of the wind, which mystified the author of the Fourth Gospel, no longer causes us to wonder (John 3:8).
The same evangelist explains a seed’s germination as a death (John 12:24). Today’s botanists and geneticists understand the process in terms of chemical transformations. Although the origin of the wind no longer captures our imagination, the germination of a seed continues to inspire our sense of wonder. The silhouette of a sower casting his seed over plowed ground is still a powerful symbol of faith and hope.
One of the most amazing natural mechanisms, for which there is as yet no adequate scientific explanation, controls the flight of migratory birds. That a hummingbird crosses the Caribbean Sea without getting lost, without getting tired, and at the right time is nothing short of a miracle. Scientists have done extensive research to determine how the miniscule brain of a hummingbird is able to carry out such a feat, but, so far, they have been unsuccessful.1 Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, even this marvel of nature may be scientifically explained. But when that day arrives, looking up in the sky to see the birds of passage crossing the horizon will still impel us to marvel at the faithfulness of these birds.
The prophet Jeremiah was an avid student of nature. One of his observations led him to make the following comparison:
“Yea, the stork in the heaven
knoweth her appointed times;
and the turtle and the crane and the swallow
observe the time of their coming;
but my people know not the justice of the Lord.”
(Jeremiah 8:7)
Watching the stork, the turtle, the crane and the swallow, the prophet noticed the relationship that existed between their behavior and the times fixed in creation. In the spring, they flew north, where apparently they had an appointment. In the fall, they returned south to keep another date. They never failed to fulfill their appointed rounds, established within the very order of creation. The prophet is amazed at the faithfulness of these creatures, but he is even more amazed to realize that, by contrast, God’s people had no knowledge of the Lord’s justice (mishpat).
Reflecting on the prophet’s observation, one is tempted to think that the prophet made an invalid comparison. It is not at all the same to recognize God’s hand in nature, on the one hand, and to see God’s justice in history, on the other. Justice is not painted on the landscape as fall and spring are. Besides, is justice, like the migratory flight of birds, a matter of natural instinct? Undoubtedly, justice is difficult to know. None of the five senses gives concrete information about it. What is justice? The best human minds have been asking this question for centuries without agreeing on an answer! It can even be said that whoever pretends to know justice is assuming prerogatives reserved to God.
In the Greco-Roman tradition, justice is represented as a blindfolded woman with a balance in one hand and a sword in the other.2 She represents the human quest for impartiality, equity and just punishment. But it is well known that this woman does not exist. She represents an ideal which, precisely because it is an ideal, escapes all human societies. That is why all societies are in a constant process of rewriting and testing their laws in order to reach the ideal that the blindfolded woman represents.
Looked at with philosophical sophistication, Jeremiah’s comparison may seem puerile. Jeremiah, however, was a Hebrew prophet, not a professor of the philosophy of law in the Greco-Roman tradition. For the Hebrew prophet, what God does in nature and what he does in history are not separate or unrelated activities. Western universities have compartmentalized reality into fields of study; they have separated the physical from the social sciences; and they developed separate methodologies for investigating them. But this dissection of being into nature and history is a modern way of looking at things. For the ancient prophets, wars and droughts, the coronation of a king and the spring rains were all manifestations of the same power that was active in creation. For them, to compare nature and history was not adding apples and oranges, but rather taking note of how creatures behaved within creation.
When Jeremiah wrote of the mishpat Yahweh (“the justice of the Lord”), he was not referring to precepts and customs that establish themselves implicitly or explicitly as laws or mores. For Jeremiah, justice is not a social value that must be preserved at any cost, or an ideal to which legislators and judges must aspire. In the Bible, justice is what humans do when they act out what they are: creatures of the creator. Mishpat (“justice”) refers to the universal order of creation.
Two different Hebrew words are often translated as “justice” in English: One is mishpat; the other is tzedakah.3 Neither is an abstract ideal. Both make reference to the fact that God established his creation in an orderly way, and everything in it has a reason for being. In other words, all things and all beings within creation are to fulfill the purposes for their being. Everyone is supposed to be what s/he was assigned at creation. Mishpat refers to the fact that God has established a purpose for everyone. Tzedakah refers to the fact that a being is acting in accordance with his/her purpose within the framework of creation. Mishpat is justice in the sense that it has been declared, established or ordered; that is, within creation there is a structure that involves everyone. Tzedakah is justice in the sense that it is being realized.
The establishment of the mishpat Yahweh is therefore not limited to the promulgation of social, civil or cultic ordinances. It embraces the ordering of the whole of nature, even of human biology. The God of mishpat established the conditions within which all those involved in creation may fulfill the purpose for their creation.
The mishpat Yahweh is thus the ordering of creation by God himself. The tzedakah Yahweh is what God does when he acts as creator. When women and men act like God-created creatures, they reveal that they know the mishpat Yahweh, at the same time are declared just before God, as doers of tzedakah. God reveals his justice (tzedakah) when he does what he must do as creator, that is to say, he saves his people.
About the God of Israel, the prophets in the Babylonian Exile asked these rhetorical questions:
“With whom took He counsel? and who instructed Him?
and taught Him in the path of justice (mishpat)?
and taught Him science?
and showed Him the way of understanding?”
(Isaiah 40:14)
Faith knows that none advised God in the ordering of creation. By creating, God established the ways of mishpat. Referring to the prerogative of the prince to establish social order among humans, Second Isaiah proclaims that the Servant of Yahweh “shall establish mishpat in truth” (Isaiah 42:32), and that by saving Israel, God is just (tzedakah) (Isaiah 45:21). Speaking of the Persian king Cyrus, the agent to be used by God to bring the Exile to an end, the prophet says that God raised Cyrus in tzedakah, that is, doing what he is supposed to do (lsaiah 45:13).
If a human being is just, it is not because s/he is achieving an ideal, or because s/he is bettering him/herself and projecting a figure above the crowd. People are just when they do what they are supposed to do as creatures. It is only in this sense justice is the same as obedience. Justice is the in which God expresses his concern about the creation and carries it out. That is why God’s justice (both mishpat and tzedakah) is an act that is done,4 not an ideal to be reached. God did and does justice. Creation has been created, and justice is to be accomplished. Within this framework, then, it is not at all incongruous to think that humans, just like the migratory birds, must live according to the order established by the creator.
Jeremiah complains that the not living according to mishpat, Jeremiah follows his apparently incongruous comparison with natural migrations by giving a list of particulars about the situation: The people of Israel were exploiting the foreigners, the widows and the orphans among their neighbors, and seeking the death of innocent people (Jeremiah 7:5). His words echo those of his predecessor, Amos, who traced his warnings of doom to the people’s lack of justice. Amos also carefully analyzed the economic and religious situation, since it is impossible to separate the two. It is somewhat surprising that at Bethel, where Israelite worship was based on the iconography of the golden calf, Amos did not accuse the people of worshipping “other gods.”5 Neither did he accuse them for being rich and having “ivory beds” and “houses of cut stones” (Amos 6:4, 5:11). Rather, he accused them because they were using their religiosity to cover their insensitivity toward the poor and the marginal. The people of Israel were using their religious festivals to maintain an economic system within which not everyone could be what s/he had been created to be. They were ignoring justice not in being rich, nor in becoming rich, but in being and becoming rich while blocking others from occupying the place God had designed for them in creation.
Within this context, it is not at all out of place for Jeremiah to condemn the people’s lack of knowledge of God’s justice. God’s people should know the place that their neighbors occupy within God’s creation. They should know that—just as the birds of passage know the schedule of the seasons.
What left Jeremiah in awe was that among living creatures, humans seem to be the only ones in whom the built-in mechanism that allows all beings to keep in tune with creation was apparently malfunctioning. The radar that keeps migratory birds on track works perfectly, but the radar that tells humans how to keep within the modality of justice is broken. Watching the birds, the prophet is in awe at their obedience to the times, but observing the behavior of humans, the prophet is in awe at the scandal of their gyrations out of orbit. They neither know, nor do, justice. He was, indeed, right to wonder how humans continue to live as God’s creations without knowing the mishpat Yahweh.
MLA Citation
Endnotes
See Geoffrey V. T. Matthews, Bird Navigation (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Stephen T. Emlen, “Migration: Orientation and Navigation,” in Avian Biology, Vol. 5, ed D. S. Farner and J. R. King (New York: Academic Press, 1975), pp. 129–219; Joel C. Welty, The Life of Birds, 3rd ed (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1985), pp. 487–497.
See Plato, Republic, 327–369, 442–448; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. V; Cicero, De Officiis, I, 20–60, De Re Publica, III, 32–48.
See Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, Vol. I (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1961), pp. 239–258; Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, Vol. I (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 370–383, 417.
The prophets insisted on the doing of justice, as stated by Micah in his famous summary: “You know what the Lord requires of you: to do justice, to love fidelity to the covenant, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). Also expressed by Jeremiah when he was asked to be, as it were, the Hebrew ancestor of Diogenes: “Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem. Look and take note! Search her squares to see if you can find a man, one who does justice” (Jeremiah 5:1).