“Subdue the Earth”: What Does It Mean? - The BAS Library
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“Subdue the Earth”: What Does It Mean?

Humans received a God-given freedom to choose between a lifestyle that fosters life on this planet or that leads to death for the earth and its inhabitants. In the words of Deuteronomy 30:19: “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”

By Bernhard W. Anderson

The international Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 summoned all nations to assume responsibility for the proper care of the earth. This challenge demands a return to the Bible to see whether we have understood its teaching concerning the role of human beings in God’s creation. One text immediately leaps to our attention. The Genesis creation story announces God’s decision to create the human species in “the image of God” (Genesis 1:26–27). The resolution was accompanied by a mandate: “Let them have dominion” over non-human creatures. And God’s blessing empowered human beings to carry out this […]

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Endnotes

1.

Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155 (1967), pp. 1204–1207.

2.

Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975). Written from a Freudian perspective.

3.

Richard J. Clifford, S.J., “The Bible and the Environment,” paper presented to a conference on “Preserving the Creation: Environmental Theology and Ethics,” Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., April 1992.

4.

See further my 1971 essay, “Human Dominion Over Nature,” in Biblical Studies in Contemporary Thought, ed. Miriam Ward, R.S.M. (Greeno, Hadden & Co., 1975), pp. 27–45.

5.

The Atrahasis myth is summarized and discussed by Norbert Lohfink, S.J. “The Future: Biblical Witness to the Ideal of a Stable World,” in Great Themes from the Old Testament (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1982), pp. 183–201.