“Their Leaves Shall Be for Healing”

Abstract

In this article, I expand trauma hermeneutics to encompass ecological trauma, as well as human trauma. I then apply the resulting ecological trauma hermeneutics to Ezekiel in order to offer an alternative explanation of the causes and agents of the trauma suffered by the exiles in Babylon. To do so, I bring the description of the land east of Jerusalem into conversation with a modern example of soil salinization and apply ecological trauma hermeneutics to Ezekiel's vision in 47:1-12, identifying the necessary conditions for healing the ecological trauma of the land and fostering the future resilience of the human-land community.

Keywords

trauma ecological hermeneutics soil salinization Babylon fructifying stream

Between 597 and 587 bce, the southern kingdom of Judah experienced crushing military defeat by the Babylonians. The invaders then took the Israelites from their homeland to a foreign land with foreign customs and gods. A significant portion of the Hebrew Bible was produced during and after the Babylonian exile. In recent decades, biblical scholars have adopted insights from trauma studies to interpret exilic writings, like the book of Ezekiel, as literary products of this communal trauma (Daschke: 61–102; Poser: 27–48). These literary constructions answer the existential threat that exile poses to the community by interpreting the trauma in a way that shapes the identity and enables the survival of the people as a people. Although trauma hermeneutics provides significant insight into the psychological and sociological effects of certain traumatic events on human individuals and communities, it has largely ignored the wider ecological systems that may have also been traumatized. Extending the concept of trauma to encompass the ecological systems on which human beings depend opens new possibilities for identifying the causes and agents of trauma than does a focus limited to human psychological states alone. It also enables the interpreter to develop appropriate responses to the harms sustained. Reading Ezekiel's vision in 47:1–12 through the lens of ecological trauma hermeneutics (re)constructs a wholistic understanding of the socio-ecological system that may well have been traumatized by an unsustainable agricultural regime long before the acute stress of the Babylonian conquest gave rise to Jewish exilic literature. This reading demonstrates that a restoration of the land may be as necessary as restoration to the land if the people are to avoid re-traumatization from ecological disaster in the future.

Trauma Hermeneutics and Ecological Trauma

Trauma hermeneutics draws from the fields of psychology, sociology, and literary theory to apply the insights of trauma studies to the interpretation of biblical texts that originate from traumatic contexts (Frechette & Boase: 1). This allows interpreters to make sense of the disjunctive narratives, graphic imagery, and other jarring elements that disrupt “plain sense” readings of such texts (Frechette & Boase: 4–15). In using “trauma” to describe what happened to the land of Judah, I am neither appealing to the medical definition of a catastrophic physical injury nor attempting to draw univocally from the human-centered work of biblical trauma hermeneutics. Instead, I define ecological trauma as the disordered state that results from severe stress or injury to a community of creatures, stress or injury that impairs that community's ability to maintain its functional identity within the ecosystem. This understanding of trauma focuses on the effects of the traumatic event(s) and the condition of the traumatized entity while allowing for many points of contact between ecological degradation and the insights of trauma hermeneutics.

For example, Christopher Frechette and Elizabeth Boase explain that trauma can cause human beings to process sensory stimuli in abnormal ways as they dissociate from their former identities (Frechette & Boase: 4). By focusing on communities or collectives of creatures, i.e. ecosystems or their components, ecological trauma hermeneutics uncovers cases where ongoing affliction or cumulative pressure places communities of creatures in a state where they are affected similarly: the community is no longer able to respond to familiar stimuli in the ways it had previously, and thus things that are not in themselves novel provoke new reactions as the ecological regime dissociates and adopts a new identity. Under cumulative pressure from various disturbances, wet-lands can become woodlands, and grasslands can become deserts. Consideration of ecological trauma allows, and even requires, interpreters to expand their understandings of the traumatized community from which a text emerged to include the ecosystems upon which the human community depended. Doing so reveals connections between the traumatization of the ecological community and human trauma, clarifying the relationship between traumatized entities within their larger socio-ecological community.

The Ecological Trauma of Soil Salinization

The ecological trauma of soil salinization led to the downfall of ancient civilizations (Jacobsen & Adams: 1251–52), contributed to the failure of modern colonial regimes (Proust: 132–44), and still plagues areas around the globe today (Rengasamy: 1017–18). The basics of irrigation-associated soil salinization are as follows (drawing from Rengasamy: 1017–23 and Williams: 85–91). Many areas of the world contain high levels of salts in their underlying water tables. Native vegetation that is tolerant of this condition keeps the ecosystem stable through complementary levels of root systems. A lattice of shallow- and medium-rooted plants take up most of the rain that falls in the area, preventing it from ever reaching (and therefore from ever raising) the water table. Deeper rooted halophytic, or salt-tolerant, plants draw from the subterranean water stores, again, keeping the water table far below the surface level of the soil (Rengasamy: 1019). Adapted for the climate and conditions of their locale, these communities of plants cooperate with the typical patterns of rainfall and the less-than-ideal soil conditions to maintain an ecosystem capable of supporting various forms of life, including in many cases nomadic hunting and gathering humans. When agricultural humans move into the area, however, they replace the native perennial vegetation with shallow-rooted annual grain crops and supplement the rainfall with irrigation systems that allow large volumes of water to infiltrate the deeper levels of the soil. The irrigation water itself may carry dissolved salts and thus increase the salinity of the surface soil directly. It also increases soil salinity indirectly by raising the subterranean water table, which then carries dissolved salts with it. If this combination of factors persists, the salts can be carried up to the roots of the crops, creating dead zones where none but the most halophytic plants can survive. Unfortunately, this situation is largely irreversible. Even if the irrigation ceases and the water tables eventually return to their pre-agricultural levels, the salts remain behind in the soil, preventing further agricultural efforts (Williams: 85).

This is what I have referred to as ecological trauma. The community of traumatized creatures includes the native plants killed off in the area, the agricultural crops put in their place that cannot survive under salinized conditions, the once-stable water table displaced through irrigation, and the soil that is salinized. The imposition of an agricultural regime of irrigation and cultivation produces the severe stress that causes these traumas and creates imbalances in the water-soil complex. Under this stress, the community of vegetation, soil, and water loses its resilience and becomes incapable not only of sustaining the alien system imposed upon it, but also of returning to its previous condition. The ecological trauma causes a secondary human trauma as crops become less and less productive until they eventually die off entirely. For civilizations dependent upon the harvest, starvation ensues. This famine, caused by the saline toxicity of the surrounding land, leads the human community to believe that the earth itself, and perhaps even the gods, have become unreliable. As Frechette and Boase explain, such trauma challenges “[a]ssumptions that the self has agency and dignity, enjoys solidarity with trustworthy others (human and divine), and inhabits an environment that is relatively safe” (Frechette & Boase: 5). The failure of the ecological regime strikes at the heart of the cultural regime, undermining human relationships with one another, the divine, and the land.

Ecological Trauma in Ezekiel?

There are natural obstacles that prevent interpreters from readily identifying ecological trauma as part of the context for biblical stories. Historically, biblical interpreters have been reluctant to apply the same kind of analysis to Christian scripture that is applied to other religious traditions. Anthropologists and sociologists are aware that indigenous communities record their experiences with ecological change, including ecological trauma, in their religious and cultural practices and narratives as what has come to be called traditional ecological knowledge, or TEK (Berkes & Folkes: 123). Such TEK creates communal memories of social-ecological systems that cover much longer periods of time than an individual human lifespan, thus securing a record of environmental changes that occurred in the distant past. It also memorializes actions taken by the community to mitigate or adapt to the changes that have occurred, including strategies used to predict, protect individuals from, interpret, and cope with such changes (Fromming & Reichel: 221). TEK has been used to reliably predict seasonal weather and determine appropriate planting times (de Olmos: 207), to protect human beings from environmental dangers like seasonal landslides (Branch: 51), and to protect natural buffers and systems such as coral reefs and mangrove swamps that promote the resilience of the community in the face of environmental change (Fromming & Reichel: 226–28). Nevertheless, biblical interpreters have tended to avoid examining the revealed religions based on biblical narratives and rituals through the same lenses as those applied to indigenous traditions. Instead, scriptural references to material realities are generally read as metaphors or symbols of spiritual truths that have little or nothing to do with the ecological context of the story.

In addition to the Western hesitance to examine biblical texts using the same TEK lenses that are applied to indigenous traditions, trauma itself creates a barrier to clearly perceiving or recording the causes of that trauma. Texts that arise from extremely violent or traumatic experiences are unlikely to provide direct evidence of the actual causes of that trauma. René Girard describes this difficulty using the example of Guillaume de Machaut's Judgment of the King of Navarre. That text records a series of massive tragedies, blames the Jewish population, and describes the community's response to the tragedies as the killing of the Jewish citizens. Although modern criticism does not accept the self-justification of such a text—few today would believe that Jewish people caused the tragedies recorded—we can nevertheless find “real events among the unlikely occurrences of the story” (Girard: 2). Girard argues that the text can be properly interpreted by connecting the tragedies suffered to the plague (a more plausible cause for entire cities being struck dead) rather than the alleged nefarious actions of one segment of the population. By postulating the likely—although unattested—cause of the disaster, this hermeneutical lens allows the interpreter to better understand the trauma recorded in the text (Girard: 2–7). A similar phenomenon can be seen in narratives of witch trials and other cases in which one segment of the population is scapegoated for disaster that befalls the entire community. Narratives produced in response to such severe communal distress are unreliable sources for determining the underlying cause of that distress.

When trauma is severe enough to call into question the reliability of the earth itself, as in the case of ecological degradation severe enough to overturn an agricultural regime, human community members are likely to blame what they perceive as higher powers. The community may attempt to restore the land's reliability by blaming their own moral failings for the ecological trauma (Frechette & Boase: 5–6). While restoring a sense of human agency, this also makes God or the gods the ultimate author of the trauma, which is then understood as punishment of the people for their unfaithfulness. Frechette and Boase argue that these fictions allow survivors to “transfer causality from the sphere of human agency to the divine realm,” a practice that aids their psychological recovery by restoring agency while also exonerating the community from ultimate responsibility for the trauma (Frechette & Boase: 17). This practice persists in modern legal parlance, which continues to refer to many such disasters as “acts of God.”

Despite these obstacles to obtaining direct textual evidence that ecological trauma provides the context for Ezekiel, there is enough indirect evidence to hypothesize such trauma and justify reading the text in conversation with ecological trauma in order to test that hypothesis. This reading of Ezekiel 47:1–12 follows the process of ecological hermeneutics, which approaches biblical interpretation from a posture of suspicion, identification, and retrieval (Habel 2008: 3–5). Suspicious of the anthropocentric focus of the vision in Ezekiel 47:1–12, the ecological interpreter identifies with the land to retrieve the voices of the earth lost in the passage. This focus on the community of soil, water, and vegetation that made up the land of Judah invites the interpreter to consider the land's promised restoration, current degraded state, and condition prior to that degradation. Such a reading provides evidence that the text records a communal memory of ecological trauma and that soil salinization played a significant role in that trauma.

First, the vision in Ezekiel 47:1–12 emphasizes the transformation of the natural world from a degraded state to a fruitful one. The prophet sees a stream flowing eastward from the rebuilt temple, growing rapidly deeper, and restoring life everywhere it goes. Like other biblical visions of restoration, it shares what Norman Habel describes as “[a] common and troublesome theme … the natural world is transformed into the unnatural. Instead of a restored ecosystem we see a distorted ecosystem” (Habel 2009: 104). In violation of basic hydrology, the stream flowing from the temple becomes a deeper and deeper river despite having no tributaries (Block: 692). Verses 8–12 describe a series of transformations this miraculous water performs. The river becomes fresh and full of fish, trees grow on either side of it, every living creature swarms where it flows, and when it reaches the Dead Sea, even that becomes fresh and filled with fish (except for the marshes, which will continue to provide salt for the community). The implied contrast indicates that the area described was, at the time of the writing, both desolate of life and salinized. The vision itself directs the reader's attention to this desolate area by directing Ezekiel's attention eastward. As the prophet contemplates the miraculous river, his guide tells him, “This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh” (Ezek 47:8, emphasis added). The Arabah refers to the Jordan River Valley and eastward to the “sea of stagnant waters,” where Lot settled with his family in ancient times (Oblath: 220). The text itself highlights both the geographical region of the Arabah and its degraded condition.

The Arabah was the place where the city of Sodom was said to be located (Oblath: 220). The simple fact that Ezekiel's vision refers to the land where the city of Sodom stood might not alone be enough to bring the story of Sodom into conversation with Ezekiel 47:1–12. The prophet, however, refers to Sodom's relationship to Jerusalem elsewhere in the book as well. Ezekiel 16:45–57 characterizes Jerusalem's sin as of the same kind as Sodom “with her daughters” (Ezek 16:46–47). The prophet places both the punishment and restoration of Jerusalem in relationship to that of Sodom, writing that God promised that all of their fortunes would be restored together to their “former states” (Ezek 16:53–55; see Bowen: 89). The prophet seems to have had some idea of what Sodom's former state was, and this passage indicates that the restoration of Jerusalem would be related to the restoration of Sodom. Relevant to the current inquiry, this raises the questions of what happened to transform Sodom from its former state and how its degradation relates to Jerusalem's fall.

Interpreters have spilled a great deal of ink debating what the sins of Sodom actually were. Gerhard von Rad notes that Genesis, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Jeremiah all describe Sodom's inequities differently, and argues that Genesis's “narrative is somewhat distinct from the popular Israelite conception of Sodom's sin” (Von Rad: 218). On the basis of Genesis 19:5, many interpreters characterize the sins of Sodom as involving sexual violations, particularly those of a homosexual nature (Peterson: 17–18). Others characterize the sins as violations of hospitality (De La Torre: 192–98). Based on Ezekiel's description of Sodom's sin as “pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease” (Ezek 16:49), others characterize the sin as economic injustice, including the failure to aid the impoverished (Bowen: 89). The present article offers a different, but related, possibility. Sodom's wealth, and its subsequent pride and economic abuses, could have arisen from environmentally-damaging agricultural practices. The Torah connects certain ecologically-sound farming practices—including leaving portions of the yield unhar-vested and allowing the fields to lie fallow for one year in every seven—to proper economic attitudes, including care for the poor and humble reliance on divine providence (Lev 19:9–10, 23:22; and Lev 25:1–7). Ignoring these principles in order to maximize agricultural yield could easily result in initial prosperity, even as it sowed the seeds of destruction by robbing the soil of its health and fertility. Such dedication to maximizing yield continues to lead to ecological disasters today (Holling, Gunderson, & Ludwig: 5–6). Biblical texts support this theory by recording narratives that describe both the initial prosperity of the land of Sodom and its later destruction.

Genesis introduces the land where Sodom was located in 13:10–11. When Abraham and Lot came into the promised land, Abraham gave Lot his choice of places to settle. According to Genesis, Lot saw that “the plain of the Jordan was well watered everywhere like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt, in the direction of Zoar; this was before the Lord had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen 13:10). Commentators note that this image provides a stark contrast to the region as later known—this vision is “before the catastrophe of Sodom” (Von Rad: 172; see also Wester-mann: 177; and Wenham: 297). Lot settled in this apparently fruitful valley of the Arabah. According to the Genesis saga, however, Sodom was a sinful city destined for destruction. God sent two messengers both to rescue Lot and his family and to destroy the cities of the plain (Gen 19:5–13). Genesis describes their destruction thus:

Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah sulfur and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. But Lot's wife, behind him, looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

[Gen 19:24–26]

In contrast to Lot's first sight of the plain as a well-watered garden of the Lord, Abraham looked down on the plain “and saw the smoke of the land going up like the smoke of a furnace” (Gen 19: 27–28). Not only the cities, but the entire plain was destroyed and left ruined.

Both the Genesis stories and Ezekiel's pronouncements in chapters 16 and 47 offer a glimpse of the ecological memory of Judah, a memory that included both a time when the Arabah between Jerusalem and the Great Salt Sea was able to sustain civilizations, and the many generations since, when it had been a barren wasteland where almost nothing could grow. Ezekiel speaks of the former glorious state to which this area will be restored, while Genesis describes its previous state as a well-watered garden of the Lord. These accounts support the use of ecological trauma hermeneutics as a lens for interpreting the texts. Not only human beings, but the land itself was traumatized by something in its distant past. As would be expected from trauma literature, both of these texts indicate that the trauma was caused by God as punishment for the sins of the people. Despite this divine attribution, details from both Genesis and Ezekiel indicate a different possible source of this ecological trauma. Ezekiel 47:1–12 refers to water being made fresh or specifically to salt three times (47:8, 9, and 11). Genesis records the destruction of the plains through sulfur (19:24), which is the main component of Na₂SO₄, a salt that is even more destructive to plant life than NaCl (Reich, et al.: 319). It also preserves the odd detail of Lot's wife becoming a pillar of salt (19:26). These details, taken together, indicate that the ecological trauma sustained by the plain of Arabah may have involved soil salinization. This is supported by the fact that salinization continues to plague the Jordan Valley today (Ammari, et al.: 376).

The hypothesis that the Arabah suffered from soil salinization is further supported by archaeological evidence from the Ancient Near East (ANE). Such evidence indicates that agriculturally-induced salinization was a persistent problem for cities in the region during biblical times. Thorkild Jacobsen and Robert Adams describe systems of irrigation and intense cultivation dating from the third millennium bce in Mesopotamia, together with evidence of three major instances of soil salinization since that time (Jacobsen & Adams: 1252). Temple surveys described patches of saline ground, reduced production of wheat (which has a low tolerance for salt) in comparison with barley (which has a higher tolerance), and an overall decrease in plant fertility during the first (and most severe) case of salinization which lasted from 2400 to 1700 bce (Jacobsen & Adams: 1252). Jacobsen and Adams note that the area never fully recovered; in fact “many of the great Sumerian cities dwindled to villages or were left in ruins” (Jacobsen & Adams: 1252). Areas of the ANE clearly suffered from soil salinization when they engaged in the intensive cultivation needed to support a city. Many of their traditional practices, however, indicate that early inhabitants had the ecological knowledge necessary to avoid that situation. One example of such local ecological knowledge was the practice of leaving fields fallow every other year to allow deep-rooted native plants to stabilize the soil and water, thus preventing widespread migration of salts to the surface (Jacobsen & Adams: 1251–52).

Literature of the ANE also attests to the ecological trauma of soil salinization. The Epic of Atra–khasis, an Akkadian epic dating from the 18^th century bce, notes that when the gods were angry with humanity, “The womb of earth did not bear, vegetation did not sprout…. The black fields became white, the broad plain was choked with salt” (Lambert & Millard: 27). This is an apt description of what happens in cases of severe soil salinization, when salt deposits become visible on the soil surface. Both literary and archaeological evidence indicate that soil salinization was a problem in the ANE before and during the times in which Genesis and Ezekiel were written. The Arabah's condition was likely that of land suffering from salinization, and the people associated with this land would be afflicted by accompanying famine. When the reader identifies with the Arabah, the trauma of military defeat and exile experienced by the people of Israel is relativized within the context of a land whose trauma began when the first human beings settled there to start a civilization.

Fostering Resilience

When traumatized communities transfer responsibility for their ecosystems' failures to the divine, the lens of ecological trauma allows interpreters to recognize that this is a fundamental misdiagnosis of the causes of trauma. Although this transfer of agency may aid in the psychological reintegration of human trauma survivors, in cases of ecological trauma it can also perpetuate the ongoing victimization of the creaturely communities involved. This in turn perpetuates the ongoing trauma of the human community. If human beings assume that soil salinization is divine punishment for sexual immorality, inhospitality, or economic inequities unrelated to their agricultural endeavors, they might reform their social, cultic, or sexual behavior while continuing to engage in the same agricultural practices that are destroying the land's fertility. When human beings attempt to make meaning out of situations of ecological trauma, blaming cultic impropriety while ignoring the physical practices that led to the trauma in the first place exacerbates the underlying conditions.

Bringing Ezekiel 47:1–12 into conversation with a modern example of soil salinization in Australia highlights the sad fact that far too often human beings avoid taking responsibility for ecological trauma even when we have scientific evidence of exactly what we are doing. The Australian government characterizes dryland salinity as “one of the greatest environmental threats facing Western Australia's agricultural land, water, biodiversity and infrastructure” (Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development). Katrina Proust of the Australian National University notes that this situation could have been avoided had British colonists paid attention to earlier ecological disasters (Proust: 131–32). Despite knowing as early as the 1890s that intensive irrigation had led to widespread salinization and corresponding famine in colonies in India, British developers embarked on an identical system of irrigation and replacement of native vegetation with annual crops in Australia. Proust notes that “the cautions expressed by the [soil] scientists had little influence on the policy direction in the face of the optimism of the engineers,” particularly when “technological development was readily associated with the material benefits that people were enjoying” (Proust: 144). Land was irrigated, water tables rose, and after initial periods of productivity the land became infertile. Proust notes that this situation could have been avoided if British settlers had been willing to forego short-term benefits in favor of the long-term health of the ecosystem. Western Australia's dryland salinity problem does not result from improper worship or a vengeful God. It is, however, related to a human deficiency in moral concern for non-human creatures and a short-sighted obsession with immediate gains at the expense of all else. In the face of ecological trauma, human beings should consider the possibility that they are indeed to blame, but not for cultic or ritual improprieties. Instead, they need to examine what actions are harming the socio-ecological system at hand. Shifting blame to the divine or to particular, non-ecological immoralities will not address the ongoing harm being done to humans and non-humans alike.

Ezekiel's vision of restoration might not seem to make room for this kind of human moral agency—it overtly invokes only divine agency for both the degradation and restoration of the land. Ezekiel is a passive observer of this restoration. He is taken to the temple, guided to the stream, and shown the many trees that have appeared through divine agency. Interpreters assume that the “miraculous” healing of the land occurs through the supernatural powers of the fructifying stream (Bowen: 262–63; Block: 696–701; Cook: 267). By bringing life to the Arabah, to the land of Sodom, the stream fulfills Yahweh's promise to “restore their fortunes, the fortunes of Sodom and her daughters” (Ezek 16:53). Considering the role of excessive water in soil salinization, however, one must wonder how an enormous river, which would ostensibly raise the water table even more, could cure the salinization of the soil. Although most commentators follow Ezekiel by explicitly invoking divine agency in the restoration (Block: 701–702; Cook: 262–273), the ecologically sensitive reader perceives that this restoration will require the cooperation of the physical elements that make up the land as well.

We now know that salinized soils can be remediated through engineering and/or biological solutions. Engineering solutions involve draining the water table back to previous levels coupled with either heavy irrigation to flush the salts out of the soil or removing and replacing the upper layers of soil altogether (Nouri, et al.: 95). This approach is expensive and requires vast inputs of both energy and water. Alternatively, biological remediation involves planting halophytes in degraded areas. Deep-rooted plants draw the water table down over time, while other plants remove the salt from the upper layers of the soil. Some varieties of such plants increase microbial activity to break down salts in the soil while others take the salts up into their own leaves and stems, where they are stored out of the soil or neutralized through chemical processes and finally emitted through transpiration (Nouri, et al.: 98–99). A variety of plants with different salt tolerances and different root depths can help lower the water table, protect the soil from erosion, and desalinize the soil over time. In their review of remediation techniques, Nouri, et al., argue that bioremediation “can be recommended as an efficient, inexpensive and environmentally sustainable intervention in many areas of the world” (Nouri, et al.: 94–107). In places where engineering solutions are unavailable due to expense or other factors, salinized soil can be healed by taking it out of agricultural cultivation and restoring a biodiverse mixture of halophytic plants adapted to the area and its conditions.

From an ecological perspective, Ezekiel's vision is not an account of magical restoration of the land, but rather encompasses both engineering and biological remediation of salinized soil. The land is taken out of cultivation by the removal of the people to Babylon. Without intensive agricultural enterprises, native vegetation can return to the area. The first step of remediation of the land requires cessation of the activities that led to salinization in the first place. The trees and river of Ezekiel's vision can then address the underlying problem. Deep-rooted trees would lower the water table even as the abundant river flushed salts from the degraded soil. Although Habel is correct when he notes that any tree that bears fruit every month is decidedly unnatural (Habel 2009: 104), the trees described need not be limited to a single species. A biodiverse grove of different halophytic trees could produce fruit in different seasons while restoring and maintaining the functional stability of the land. The leaves may or may not have medicinal value for healing human ailments, but the leaves of halophytic trees that pump excess salt out of the groundwater and transform it into harmless compounds for transpiration would literally heal the land. Although interpreters seem to assume that the trees function simply as symbols of abundance and healing for the restored human population (Keil: 360; Zimmerli: 515; Cook: 271–72), in this text they invite the ecologically sensitive interpreter to see the conditions necessary for restoration of the land. Biodiverse native vegetation must be allowed to flourish to keep the subterranean water table out of the root zones of crops, and the soil needs to be flushed by water to remove the remaining salts. The fact that the vision incorporates both the water necessary to flush the salts from the soil and the plant life necessary for preventing a recurrence of salinization suggests that the community from which Ezekiel drew his symbols, if not Ezekiel himself, had some understanding of the causes of and solutions for soil salinization.

Although we do not have conclusive proof that Ezekiel understood the relationship between soil salinization and the food insecurity that accompanied the Babylonian siege, circumstantial evidence suggests that he and his community may have. One of the sign-acts Ezekiel performed was baking and eating bread made from a mixture of six different grains and legumes (Ezek 5:9–15). This perplexing passage becomes clearer when read it in conversation with the ecological trauma of soil salinization. Wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt are each part of the agricultural regime that leads to soil salinization. By eating this strange bread Ezekiel consumes the concrete manifestation of the people's ecological sins while re-enacting the siege. Additionally, his frequent references to the “river” Chebar in Babylon continually direct his audience's attention back to the vast irrigation channels of Babylon (Ezek 1:1; 1:3; 3:15; 3:23; 10:15; 10:20; 10:22; and 43:3). Even as Ezekiel proclaims that the Israelites earned their fate, he points consistently to their captors' identical, unsustainable practices. A community with TEK of the causes of soil salinization would see those canals as the eventual downfall of their enemies. While the lands around Jerusalem were being restored by reduced cultivation due to the exile, the Israelites could find hope that Babylon's practices would eventually lead to a degradation like their own.

Reading Ezekiel 47:1–12 through the lens of ecological trauma enables the interpreter to identify means for fostering the resilience of the socio-ecological system of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas. This identification then provides religious resources for recovery and resilience-building in similarly-situated communities. Where geological conditions leave ecosystems vulnerable to salinization, it is wiser to adapt human settlements to the native vegetation than to replace indigenous plants with annual crops better suited to other locales. When salinization has already occurred, the human community needs to mitigate the damage by abandoning the agricultural regime responsible and restoring the native vegetation if possible. If the ecosystem has become too degraded to support such restoration, a diverse community of halophytic plants might still be able to heal the land, particularly if accompanied by a responsible system of irrigation and drainage to flush excess salts out of surface soils.

Ecological trauma hermeneutics also contributes religious insights for the recovery of the traumatized human community. The devastation described in Genesis 19 might not be simply punishment for intra-human immorality, nor punishment for offending the divine. Salinization is the natural consequence of uninformed or uncaring human interference with a functioning ecological regime. Healing its damage requires more than reforming the community's religious or moral codes, their agricultural practices must also change. The tendency of interpreters to identify the sins that lead to divine punishment in the Hebrew Bible as cultic or ritual offenses may be as counterproductive as trauma survivors' attempt to displace the causes of their traumas onto the divine. Concrete physical acts lead to trauma, and these actions need to be addressed in order to create the safety that survivors need to heal.

By enabling interpreters to identify accurately the causes of trauma, ecological trauma hermeneutics affirms human agency, the reliability of the land, and divine justice, while also providing hope for remediation. Soil salinization is not an indication that either the land or the gods have turned against the people. Rather it is the indictment of particular ecological abuses that are harming the land. Trauma survivors will accept irrational blame for actions unrelated to their trauma in order to reclaim their own agency. Ecological trauma hermeneutics enables them to assert that agency by taking rational responsibility for their part in harming the land instead. Clearly identifying the causes of ecological trauma and the means for its healing enables survivors to adopt better practice that foster resilience in the future.

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