Foundations of the Earth: Global Ecological Change and the Book of Job

By H. H. Shugart

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?" God asks Job in the "Whirlwind Speech," but Job cannot reply. This passage -- which some environmentalists and religious scholars treat as a "green" creation myth -- drives H. H. Shugart's extraordinary investigation, in which he uses verses from God's speech to Job to explore the planetary system, animal domestication, sea-level rise, evolution, biodiversity, weather phenomena, and climate change.

Shugart calls attention to the rich resonance between the Earth's natural history and the workings of religious feeling, the wisdom of Bible scripture, and the arguments of Bible ethicists. The divine questions that frame his study are quintessentially religious, and the global changes humans have wrought on the Earth operate in not only the physical, chemical, and biological spheres but also the spiritual realm. Shugart offers a universal framework for recognizing and confronting the global challenges humans now face: the relationship between human technology and large-scale environmental degradation; the effect of invasive species on the integrity of ecosystems; the role of humans in generating wide biotic extinctions; and the future functioning of our oceans and tides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9780231537698

Book preview

Preface

Foundations of the Earth intends to demonstrate the intrinsic connectedness of the Earth’s systems, their dynamic change, and their interactions with humans. The book emphasizes environmental synthesis at large scales—regional to global scales in space, centuries to millennia to even longer scales in time. The issues in the chapters, all on our changing and human-altered planet, are interwoven. The overarching themes involve planetary complexity, connectedness, and dynamism. These are large themes for a small book, and the diversity of disciplines considered is substantial. The mutual interactions among different Earth systems provide a unity to the text.

The book uses a set of questions from a small section of the Book of Job as an overarching theme to provide additional connectedness. These biblical questions frame chapter discussions on such topics as, Where did the solar system come from? How were animals domesticated? How do changes in the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere imply global warming? How does climate and its change alter the world’s vegetation and vice versa? The intention here is neither to substantiate the questions, which coalesce into a creation account starting in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job. Nor is the intent to reconcile the Bible with science somehow. Rabbi Shelomo Ben Isaac, or Rashi (France, 1040–1105 CE), distinguished what a biblical text says from what it means and separated the literal translation from traditional interpretation.¹ In considering the whirlwind questions, this book considers the what-it-says part of Rashi’s distinction with literal translation from a standard source (the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible) and largely interprets what it means as if it were a direct question to a scientist.

The verses starting with Job 38 through the first part of Job 42 are a composite of divine questions called the whirlwind speech. In the speech, God interrogates Job concerning the workings of the Earth, its creation, and nature. Some Jewish and Christian environmentalist writers see the whirlwind speech as a green creation story, particularly in its representation of the human role on the Earth and its natural systems.

Despite the gravitas of pointed questions posed by the deity that made and controls the Earth, the questions from the whirlwind speech considered in Foundations of the Earth are direct and easily understood. They ask Job and humankind in general if they understand the workings of the planet upon which they live.

Foundations of the Earth will appeal to some readers because it discusses the environmental implications of verses from the Bible. These were important questions in their ancient context. They are certainly no less important today. Foundations of the Earth is framed in a religious topic, but it is simultaneously about global systems science, particularly global ecology. It presupposes no religious background or even religious interest on the part of the reader. However, readers with a religious bent should find the scientific discussions of the whirlwind speech’s questions significant. Certainly, the divine questions in this text are quintessentially religious. After all, they are an account of the directly spoken word of God to a person.

I came upon the whirlwind speech when asked by a minister to find Bible verses appropriate to be read at my mother’s funeral. After a longish night of compulsive searching, my eyes fell upon Job 39:26–27: Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars, and spreads its wings toward the south? Is it at your command that the eagle mounts up and makes its nest on high? These two verses seemed appropriate to Kathryn Luvois Rich Shugart, an avid, keen-eyed birdwatcher with a steady hand that could beam sixteen-power binoculars on everything from small warblers to eagles, dead at ninety on November 7, 2006. I periodically reread these and the surrounding Joban verses, which I eventually learned was the whirlwind speech. The questions in these verses spun out to issues of cosmic creation, Earth’s planetary function, rain, storms, birds, and mammals.

This book, Foundations of the Earth, responds to some of the questions in the whirlwind speech. The response comes from a scientist with a research interest in the dynamics of ecosystems attempting to comprehend and explain some remarkably good and very ancient questions. The text is annotated with many hundreds of backnotes for those who would like to take up the issues in more detail, as might be done in a college seminar or discussion group. This note format is used to give access to these sources without simultaneously chopping the narrative into bits. For those unfamiliar with the story of Job, the first chapter provides an abbreviated version of the Book of Job. The other chapters elaborate specific whirlwind questions, which provide epigraphs to each chapter as Joban quotes.

I have enjoyed a lot of help from friends in the process of developing this book. Several read the entire text through different stages of its ontogeny. My debt to them is great as is my gratitude. These stalwarts were Lyndele von Schill, my longtime friend and coworker for these many years; Ramona K. Shugart, my wife and soulmate even after forty-seven years of marriage; Rachel Most, my coteacher to anthropologists and ecologists; Erika C. Shugart, my elder daughter and talented science communicator; G. Carleton Ray and Jerry McCormick Ray, dedicated marine biologists and conservationists; Megan McGroddy, tropical ecologist and soil scientist par excellence; Alan Crowden, a remarkably helpful and consistent supporter of my writing endeavors; two broad-thinking anonymous readers that Alan managed to entice to read the manuscript; and four anonymous reviewers from Columbia University Press. Patrick Fitzgerald, Bridget Flannery-McCoy, Kathryn Schell, and Robert Fellman at Columbia University Press worked with patience, contagious enthusiasm, and professionalism, each in their own way, to push this project to a satisfactory conclusion. Thank you all!

Several colleagues took on one or more chapters and really dug in to try to help with a diverse array of technical issues, details, interpretations, and general directions: Simon Bickler, Michael Pace, Bruce Hayden, Robert Dolan, Fred Damon, Scott Schnee, Howard Epstein, David E. Smith, and Amato Evan. My special appreciation goes out to Martien Halverson-Taylor and the members of her Job class (RELJ 5559—New Course in Judaism, Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia). Martien and her students willingly tolerated a scientific interloper untrained in ancient Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew and were the participants in engrossing discussions on the Book of Job and its roots. Finally, thanks to friends who were willing to listen to bits and pieces of Joban lore: Bruce Hayden, Bob Dolan, Todd Scanlon, Pat Allinson, David and Cyndy Martin, Dwayne and Yvonne Osheim, Brian Walker, and many others. My own scientific research often would spill over into my thinking during writing of this book. This was supported by several grants from NASA.²

1

Introduction

There was once a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job. That man was blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.

—Job 1:1 (NRSV)

Then the Lord answered Job out of the Whirlwind. Source: Plate 13 from William Blake, Illustrations of the Book of Job Invented and Engraved by William Blake (London: James Lahee, No. 3, Fountain Court, Strand, 1826). Collection of Robert N. Essick; Copyright © 2013 William Blake Archive. Used with permission.

This book treats the omnipresence of global environmental change and the role of humans as agents for this change. We are significantly altering our planet in ways that are patently obvious. When one looks from an airplane window, one sees the hand of humanity upon the land: fields where there were once forests, fragmented landscapes and grasslands that were once continuous, muddy rivers that were once clear. A walk on a beach, anywhere, reveals the flotsam and jetsam of things we have thrown in the seas. More subtle but also easily demonstrated are the changes we have wrought upon the ocean’s fauna and chemistry. Similarly, it is straightforward to show that human actions have changed the chemistry of the air. We know from basic physics that a change in atmospheric dynamics follow from a change in its chemistry—namely, an increase in global temperature.

The whirlwind speech from the Book of Job, a set of divine questions on the functioning of the planet and its natural systems, is used in this book to provide a starting point to discuss the current knowledge of global environmental issues. The Joban whirlwind questions connect the consequences of human actions to the state of our planetary home. The global changes, which we have wrought, operate in physical, chemical, and biological domains. The poetry of Job and the power of the whirlwind speech are the skeleton of a more unified synthesis across the diverse global issues that Earth and its peoples now face.

ON JOB AND THE WHIRLWIND SPEECHES

Job’s home, the biblical land of Uz, is a land of grazing pastoralists whose wealth is measured in numbers of sheep, oxen, camels, and donkeys. Regretfully, this pastoral scene is marred by murderous bands of marauding nomads, the Sabeans and the Chaldeans, who sweep across the land, burning houses, killing families, and stealing livestock. Patriarchs such as Job try to appease the wrath of God in private sacrificial ceremonies.

The Book of Job begins with a brief prose narrative describing Job’s situation (Job 1–2). He is wealthy; his seven sons and three daughters enjoy reciprocal feasts at one another’s houses. Job makes regular burnt offerings to God out of concern that his adult children may have sinned. In a celestial conversation with the tone of a friendly wager, God’s positive opinion of Job, There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil, is countered by Satan, who asserts that Job’s piety is a result of his great prosperity: But stretch out your hand now and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face (Job 1:11). Satan is given permission to take away Job’s possessions.

Immediately, raiding barbarians arrive to destroy Job’s wealth. Sabeans kill his servants and steal Job’s oxen and donkeys; Chaldeans raid his camels and put more servants to the sword. Fire falls from the sky and destroys more servants and Job’s sheep; a terrible wind blows down his eldest son’s house during a feast, and all his sons and daughters perish. Nonetheless, Job is undaunted in his faith: The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord (Job 2:21). Satan doubles down on his wager and tells God that Job’s faith will waver if he is physically afflicted: But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and flesh and he will curse you to your face (Job 2:5). God grants permission for Satan to inflict infirmities on Job practically to the point of killing him.

Job is covered in sores from head to toe. His wife, who has suffered the same terrible losses, tells Job to curse God, and die to end his suffering.¹ As Job sits in ashes scraping his sores with a potsherd, three friends, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Namathite, gather to console him. They sit with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights without speaking. When they do begin to speak (Job 3:1), the text shifts from prose to poetry.

Job breaks the silence by cursing the day he was born. In the verses that follow, Job’s three friends opine on his terrible situation, and Job responds. This continues through three cycles, with the three friends becoming progressively more insistent that Job has sinned in some way.² Because they believe God rewards good and punishes evil, they surmise that sin must be at the root of Job’s calamitous fall. Each time Job answers that he has not sinned and that his suffering is unjustified. Eventually a younger man, Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite, begins to speak. Elihu has a different message from the three others. The creation of the world is clear testimony to God’s incomprehensible power. Further, God is under no obligation to treat Job well for Job’s good behavior—Job’s self-righteousness does not constrain God’s actions by some mortal moral imperative.

God then speaks to Job from a whirlwind. In a series of direct questions, God asks Job what he knows of the creation and the functioning of the planet. Job knows no answer to these questions and humbles himself before the Almighty: I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted (Job 41:2). The writing shifts back to prose at Job 41:7. God rebukes Job’s three friends. He tells them to contribute seven bulls and seven rams as a burnt offering and to ask Job to pray for God to forgive them. Job’s brothers and sisters and all his friends gather to comfort him, and each of them gives him a ring and a coin. His fortune is doubled to fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys (Job 42:12). Seven sons and three beautiful daughters (Jemimah, Keziah, and Keren-happuch) are born to Job. He lives another 140 years and sees his children, his children’s children, four generations (Job 42:16).

THE WHIRLWIND SPEECH

The whirlwind speech frames the present book, Foundations of the Earth. Many of the questions out of the whirlwind are posed in a straightforward, understandable manner. Others are somewhat more difficult to understand, and a few are incomprehensible because of our inability to appreciate the Joban context. The whirlwind questions largely concern the formation, functioning, and dynamics of our planet and its ecosystems. These are questions whose answers are critical to our future. We must understand the planet’s function as our actions change its land surface, atmosphere, and oceans. Job professed that he did not have an answer to any of the whirlwind questions. But can we answer the whirlwind questions about the functioning of the planet any better than Job could?

That said, Foundations of the Earth does not simply tally some sort of scorecard of modern technological society versus the grazing patriarchal society of Job’s day. The religious understanding found in the Book of Job operates in a different dimension from the scientific implications of questions in the whirlwind speech. For example, when God asks the first question, Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. ‘Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me if you have understanding’ (Job 38:3–4), it is posited by the same Almighty who created the Earth. Clearly there is a correct answer, which he uniquely knows. This is the case for all of the whirlwind questions. One either has the knowledge to answer the question or one does not.

Job testified that he did not know how to lay the foundation of the earth. A modern scientist could produce the statement that a current estimate is that the Earth’s age is 4.54 billion years, plus or minus 45.4 million years, based on radiometric dating.³ The inexactitude of this response to the Joban God might well provoke a divine demonstration of why one might need to gird up one’s loins when speaking to the Almighty. If Job or a modern scientist were asked to produce the absolutely true age of the Earth, I don’t know, would be the wisest answer from either.

Science pursues truth, but its findings are not represented as the truth. Science as a way of knowing is a process. Scientific understanding develops with observations, experiments, and analyses, but this understanding is subject to change, radical revision, or even abandonment when new information and new understanding develop. This continual evolution of scientific wisdom can be, and often is, used to discredit scientists in public, political, and legal forums.

In the current politicization of global sciences, particularly concerning the implications of a human-augmented global warming, and with tensions between cosmologists and evolutionists with some religious fundamentalists, questions on the truth of scientific findings often erupts as a fatuous discussion point. This is not a new tactic. Early in the evaluation of the environmental impact assessment of public works projects, lawyers for the industry asked questions of scientist witnesses such as, Do you believe without a shadow of a doubt that the heat from this power plant will destroy the fish populations in the river? Today, a scientist might be asked, Do you believe in global warming? These questions are rhetorical devices, intentional or not, that cloud scientific issues. Scientists do not deal in absolute certainties that are beyond a shadow of a doubt—they do not deal with believed truths. Belief is central to religion but is one of the weakest of arguments in support of a scientific position. The following discussions of the answers to the whirlwind questions are not truths. Hopefully, they are our current best understanding of the world and its functioning.

Foundations of the Earth focuses on the first two-thirds of the whirlwind speech. The last part of the whirlwind speech, which concerns the Behemoth (a giant semiaquatic creature that some see as patterned after the hippopotamus) and the Leviathan (a fire-breathing dragon of the abyssal depths that could be an amplified account of a crocodile) is not treated here. Both of these mythic creatures were created in the time of chaos. They are the playthings of God but are enormous, horrific, and dangerous to humans. The creatures are significant theologically but it is difficult to see how they relate to meaningful scientific questions. ⁴

THE WHIRLWIND SPEECH AS AN ACCOUNT OF PLANETARY CREATION AND FUNCTION

What the Book of Job clearly presents in the whirlwind speech is an account of the creation of the Earth along with examples of the way it functions. Under divine interrogation, Job clearly does not pass muster in his knowledge. When compared to the whirlwind speech, other creation stories in the Bible differ significantly on the issue of the importance of humans and whether the Earth serves them or vice versa.

The best known of the seven biblical creation stories are the two accounts of creation in Genesis.⁵ The priestly creation story in Genesis 1 describes, among other things, a wet world where the land must be separated from the sky and the seas,

And God said, Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.

(Genesis 1:6–10)

The Yahwistic account of creation in Genesis 2 and 3 describes an arid land watered by an artisan spring:

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground.

(Genesis 2:4–6)

Both of these accounts make humans the focus of creation, as does the creation account in Psalms 8:4–5, which says, What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.⁶ The same can be said for Psalms 104:14–15, which, while it has many parallels with the Joban creation story, sees humanity in a positive light and assures that the happiness of humankind is a divine objective: You cause the grass to grow for the cattle, and plants for people to use, to bring forth food from the earth, and wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart. In contrast to this, the creation story in the Book of Job sees man’s position in the creation and in the resultant world to be unimportant—in fact, insignificant. The Joban creation story places humanity as mere part of a created world and certainly not as its centerpiece.

For readers interested in the religious or devotional aspects of the whirlwind questions, three recent books provide insights into these issues. The Comforting Whirlwind: God, Job, and the Scale of Creation by Bill McKibben provides a discussion of the environmental implications of the whirlwind speech as a paradigm for environmental living. Kathryn Schifferdecker’s scholarly but readable text, Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job, is a theological analysis of the whirlwind speech. William Brown’s Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder presents the seven different creation accounts in the Bible and uses them to interweave theology and science at different scales of time and space. All three of these books identify the difference in the creation account in Job from the other biblical accounts and discuss its implications for a more environmentally conscious behavior for humans on the planet.⁷

THE ANTIQUITY OF THE JOB TEXT

We are changing our planet and our local environments. The whirlwind speech in the context of this book asks environmental questions from antiquity that have only gained in importance in modern times. How old are the questions from the whirlwind speech? How long have people been concerned with these questions? One indication of the antiquity of biblical sources comes from the words, use of words, and phraseology in a text. From these analyses, the Book of Job is generally thought to have been composed sometime in the sixth century BCE⁸ or perhaps slightly later, after the Babylonian exile.⁹ This said, there is a wide range of opinions by religious scholars as to the time of its composition.¹⁰ The sixth century BCE was a dynamic time in the history of the Jewish people, with the fall of Jerusalem to King Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon in 599 BCE,¹¹ the eventual capture of Judah by the Babylonian Empire,¹² and the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its religious and political infrastructure to Babylon.¹³ With this social trauma came a time of reformulation of concepts of state and religion. The Babylonian exiles produced significant portions of the Hebrew Bible, including the Book of Job.¹⁴

The Book of Job reads of a different time, a time more ancient than the apparent time of its composition.¹⁵ It was at a time when the Chaldeans, who early in the first millennium BCE formed a kingdom in what today is Yemen,¹⁶ and the Sabeans, who became the eleventh dynasty of Babylon in the sixth century BCE, were nomadic raiders; when wealth was measured in herds and slaves; and when religion involved private sacrifice with neither a shrine nor a priest.¹⁷ The concept that sacrifices assuage the anger of God is a primeval religious concept. Job lived to an extremely old age, another 140 years after the whirlwind speech. This is an age appropriate to the Patriarchs from the earliest books of the Bible. It is not as old as Methuselah’s 969 years but is certainly older than people normally live, by a substantial margin. The use of the ancient Hebrew word (or qesitah) for the monetary unit given to Job by his friends and relatives after his ordeal is otherwise found only in the early books of Genesis and Joshua, in connection to the story of Jacob.¹⁸ If the temporal setting of the Book of Job is ancient, the composition of the narrative likely is more recent, perhaps 2,500 years ago.

The Book of Job also fuses elements from older religious texts from various other peoples. One obvious indication is that even though it deals with the God of Israel, no one in the Book of Job is actually an Israelite: Job is an Edomite, and his friends (Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, Zophar the Namathite, and Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite) are from locations to the east. At the story’s end, Job divides his property among his daughters and sons. The Mosaic code would allocate inheritance to daughters only in cases in which there were no surviving sons; this implies some different sort of cultural milieu.¹⁹

The whirlwind speech has imbedded in its essential questions the elements of a creation myth.²⁰ This myth, as the first of the two creation stories in Genesis, is of a wet world. Lands must be separated from the waters. The seas are divinely constrained: Or who shut up the seas with doors when it burst out of its womb?—when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far you shall come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped?’ (Job 38:8–11). The watery-universe creation from Genesis 1 shares elements with a Babylonian creation epic known as the Enŭma Elish.²¹ The Enŭma Elish version of creation reflects the annual flooding of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers and the resultant chaos in Babylon. It is likely that the Babylonian exiles, who shaped the story of Job, would have also been familiar with the Enŭma Elish.²²

There also seem to be elements of Ugaritic legends in the Book of Job. Ugaritic, a Semitic language, is known only from a large library of clay tablets unearthed in 1928 from the ancient city of Ugarit, which was located on the shores of the Mediterranean near modern Ras Shamra in Syria.²³ Ugaritic was an unknown Semitic language thought to have become extinct in the twelfth century BCE after Ugarit’s destruction. It is written using a cuneiform adjab (alphabet without vowels). The cryptology of translating Ugaritic challenged archeology and linguistics; it took decades. Some of the literary texts that emerged involve the religion of the Ugaritic people, who in the Bible are referred to as Canaanites. These include The Legend of Keret, The Aqhat Epic (or Legend of Danel), and The Baal Cycle (The Myth of Baal combined with The Death of Baal). Similarities with the Book of Job are seen, for example, in the use of literary permutations based on the number seven (six events happen followed by a climax on the seventh event), the number of sons and daughters of Job (and Baal), and the naming of Job’s (and Baal’s) daughters in the story but not the sons.²⁴

The Book of Job is beautiful literature that is made more compelling by its ancient tone. The effect of the text is felt through the obscurations of time and translation. It is set in a deeper past than the already deep past in which it was written. Compiled 2,500 years ago, it dates at least another six hundred years to Ugarit and is likely much older. As one peels away time, one also peels away technology. Push the origins of some of the elements back to the time of the Canaanites, a Late Bronze Age people, and one has moved at least six hundred years into the past.²⁵ The Job story could have roots well beyond this;²⁶ one is left to wonder just how long the questions in the whirlwind speech have been on the minds of humans.

QUESTIONS TO JOB FROM THE WHIRLWIND

In this book, specific quotations from the Joban whirlwind speech (using the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible) begin each discussion of ecology and environmental change. The lone exception to this rule is in chapter 3, where both the King James Bible and the NRSV are quoted to illustrate some of the subtle effects of word choices by biblical translators. This chapter discusses the effects of the domestication of animals and plants on terrestrial ecosystems.

Chapter 2 discusses current concepts of the creation of the universe and, more specifically, the solar system. The story of whirling stellar dust clouds under the triggering event of a nearby exploding star is no less fantastic than any number of creation myths (including that in Job). The issue of how a rich array of observations implies the scientific account of creation provides a platform to discuss science as a way of thinking. Chapter 4 deals with the effect of the release of feral species and the importation of invasive animals on the Earth’s biotic diversity; chapters 5 and 7 discuss the interaction among the components of the Earth systems of atmosphere, land, water, and ice on our dynamic planet. The lack of environmental constancy and the naturalness of change in the planetary history is a basic theme in both of these chapters. The physical interactions discussed in chapters 5 and 7 also provide background to the chapters that finish this book. Chapter 6 investigates the periodicities in the environment at multiple scales and the phenology and biological timing of plants and animals. Chapter 8 discusses the interaction between vegetation and climate at the global scale along with the possible consequences of human modification of climate. The simultaneous effects of climate change and human interactions with animals frame the global change–related challenge to conservation biologists treated in chapter 9. Chapter 10 discusses the possibility of human planetary engineering now being considered as a possible remedy to the negative effects of humanity’s changes to our planet.

Even in the face of a long geological history of change, humankind and its systems are now a major force shaping the nature and the future of the planet. The issues in all of these chapters act in concert on our changing and human-altered planet. The whirlwind questions, posed to Job by the deity that made and controls the Earth, ask humans if they understand the workings of the planet upon which they live. These were important questions in their ancient context. They are no less important today.

2

Laying the Foundation of the Earth

Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb?—when I made the clouds its garment, and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said, Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped?

—Job 38:4–11 (NRSV)

Black-and-white rendering of a color mosaic of the Orion nebula, in the constellation of Orion, from images taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Orion shows prominently in the early winter evenings at northern latitudes. The Orion nebula is visible to the naked eye and is located to the south (or north, in the southern hemisphere) of the three bright stars that form Orion’s belt. Embedded in this image are at least 153 glowing embryotic solar systems called protoplanetary disks. Each of these will eventually form a system of planets orbiting a central star. Object names: Orion Nebula, M42, NGC 1976. Image Type: Astronomical. Source: NASA (http://hubblesite.org/andtheHubbleHeritageTeam), C. R. O’Dell and S. K. Wong (Rice University). Material credited to Space Telescope Science Institute on this site was created, authored, and/or prepared for NASA under Contract NAS5–26555.

In the so-called priestly account of the origin of the Earth found in Genesis 1:1–10, a universe of water exists, and the formation of light initiates Earth’s creation. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. The water is partitioned into two parts on the second day. And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’ One part of this partitioned universe of waters then is separated into sky and sea. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. On the third day, land and sea are separated from the other beneath the dome of the sky. God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear. And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas.’ This sky-domed earth and sea sat under a sky-lined bubble in the watery universe.

The creation accounts of other cultures in the Middle Eastern region have similarities with the biblical priestly account. They postulate a creation that involves a primordial ocean often represented as a goddess. In these creation stories, this ocean deity is often somehow divided into components—the land, seas, and sky of Earth. For example, in the Babylonian creation mythology Enŭma Elish, Marduk, the storm god, slays Tiamat, a primordial sea goddess and mother of the first generation of Babylonian deities. Marduk then divides her corpse to create the sea and the land.¹ Nearby in time and space on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Syria, Yamm, whose name in the Ugaritic Baal legend means the Sea, must be defeated before cosmic order and subsequent creation can be established. In Sumerian mythology, Nammu, also a primordial sea goddess, gives birth to the heaven and earth. She later creates humankind.² In the priestly creation in Genesis and as in the Baal and Enŭma Elish legends, a water-filled universe precedes divine creation.³

The creation account in Job differs from the watery priestly account and of the Ugaritic, Babylonian, and Sumerian wet creation accounts. In the Joban creation, an initial divine construction project with foundations and cornerstones produces land. Then the sea bursts forth from the womb. The infant sea is wrapped in clouds and swaddled in darkness. The oceanic part of creation is not a dividing event about the separation of primordial waters or the dissection of sea goddesses. It is a birth with God as a divine midwife to a powerful infant whose seething waves pulsate with tides and storms.⁴ God instructs this newborn where its boundaries are and where it should not go. Joban creation involves elements of birth and childrearing, elements that match the other procreation-centered aspects in the whirlwind questions about animals that follow in the text.

THE ORIGIN OF THE EARTH

Behind all the creation accounts, biblical, scientific, or otherwise, lies an essential and difficult question: Where did all of this come from? The current scientific explanation is that the Earth coalesced from an eddy in a vast swirling flat disk of space dust whirling ever faster around a forming star, a star we call the Sun. This creation seems remarkable when expressed as a single statement. Indeed, it is no less fantastic than creation stories from other cultures—that the Earth was made by a water beetle bringing up the mud that then spread to form the land,⁵ that it was coughed up from the stomach of a solitary god named Bumba,⁶ or that it was constructed from the corpse of Ymir, a frost giant.⁷ One significant aspect of the whirling-disk-of-space-dust creation account is that this process can actually be observed taking place across the universe in different stages of completion by using modern instruments such as the Spitzer and the Hubble space telescopes. A second significant aspect is that it explains some of the regular features of our solar system. What are these patterns, and what do they tell us about the origins of the major Earth systems, the land, the seas, and the atmosphere?

PATTERNS IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM

The formation of our solar system began about 4.6 billion years ago with a collapse in a cloud of celestial dust like the ones currently forming protoplanetary disks in the Orion Nebula and shown in the illustration at the front of this chapter. There are regularities in our solar system that are consistent with such a whirling disk coalescing to form the Sun and its planets. Before discussing the processes that formed our solar system, it is useful to point out some of the planetary patterns generated by the process.⁸

Regularities in the Planets

The planets in the solar system are sorted according to their composition. The planets in orbits near the Sun, called the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars), are relatively small, rocky, and dense. Their atmospheres represent a minor fraction of their mass. They rotate slowly and have no or few moons. The planets that are further from the Sun, the Jovian planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), are large and are almost all atmosphere—they are primarily made of gases. They spin rapidly and have many moons; they also all have rings.

Regularities in Orbits

Planets do not