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Water Prophecy from the Wadi: River-Rites, Fish-Signs, and Rain-Promises

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Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars

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Abstract

Continuing the probe of water-ford politics and East bank numinosity, Chapter 8 tracks the Bedouin-trained Baptizer’s itinerary on either side of the Jordan—reinvigorating the Elijah tradition and throwing down a gauntlet to Roman and Jewish elite practices of reengineering water in service of urban bathhouse lifestyles at peasant expense. It will probe Jesus’ furtive lake-crossings, invoking Jonah as sign and offering fish as “saving” food, and culminate in his gender-bending Succoth challenge, as Wisdom incarnate, in John’s gospel, countering Temple-State claims to guarantee field-fertility through tax policy, with an older understanding of rain as wild bounty and water as “living” gift.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The planet-sized cyborg-cube, in Star Trek imagination, whose machine-human denizens intone “Resistance is futile” whenever “integrating” a newly conquered species into its massive circuitry.

  2. 2.

    I am beholden to Ched Myers and James Tabor for the some of the following thinking about Jesus and John as staging their significance by way of the memory of Elijah . Myers’ (2014) Wild Goose Festival talk entitled “Elijah as the Archetypal Wilderness Prophet” and Tabor’s (2012a) blog post “A ‘Jesus Hideout’ in Jordan” explore the role of place in haunting the baptismal messaging with wilderness meaning.

  3. 3.

    I Kgs 17:6 specifically mentions “bread” and “meat.” It is perhaps worth recalling that the manna/honeydew collected by Israel wandering the Sinai was baked into bread-like wafers (Ex. 16:13–36). Likely Elijah in Cherith would have been living by a measure of “hunting and gathering.” Anthropologist animist philosopher David Abram notes the experience of ethnobiologist Richard Nelson whose hunting in Alaska is occasionally aided by ravens somersaulting in the sky above his head to attract his attention and then leading him straight to his prey, hoping to gain some leftovers (Abram, 197). Corvids have similarly been known to establish such “hunting pacts” with wolf bands. And indeed another bird species (related to the woodpecker) in Africa, not surprisingly called “the honeyguide ,” has developed an ancient symbiosis with not only humans but also primates and badgers, directing the animals to hives, trusting that a bit of the comb will be left untouched in “thanksgiving.” And indeed, the African tribes so benefiting do leave behind some chunks of comb-wax, on which the birds feed, as an offering to their hunting guides.

  4. 4.

    Recounted in a talk given at Bolad’s Kitchen during the winter session of 2018, in Ojo Caliente, NM.

  5. 5.

    Though it is a “debt” in the most primordial sense, as Prechtel would insist. Again, simply by living we take, eat, and drink what we have not created. In consequence, we owe. What we owe in most indigenous understanding is beauty, given back in “offerings” of verbal eloquence and hand-crafted magnificence.

  6. 6.

    Keeping in mind from Chapter 7 that the “Son of Man ” figure made famous in Danielic prophecy almost certainly channels resonances of the Canaanite Storm Deity, it is also worth noting that—alongside its generic use invoking “wild water” un-interrupted by human design—one of the most common usages of baal is similar to the English term, “Sir,” an honorific meaning “Lord.”.

  7. 7.

    See discussion previously (in Chapter 6) of Baal undergoing a “shapeshift” from Storm God to Seed (“like produce of the earth” it says in the Baal/Anat cycle) swallowed by the ground (and by Mot) until resurrecting in harvest.

  8. 8.

    What is apparently in view is a grain of wild wheat, which unlike the domesticated version, when ripe, falls “of itself” onto the earth to reseed and propagate its life (that is, it sows itself). The advent of agriculture in southwestern Asia 10,000 years ago may have arisen from the effects of a random mutation in wheat in that part of the world, where some grains stayed on the stem longer rather than “falling,” thus presenting themselves for “harvest” by human beings beginning to experiment with farming, becoming seed for the next crop, and giving rise to what we now know as a “domesticated plant” (whose seeds require human intervention for effective reproduction). If so, Jesus could perhaps be said here to be inviting his movement to comprehend itself in a Sabbath-Jubilee image of wild grain, not domesticated crop, subtly returning toward a more indigenous way of narrating human responsibility and origins (i.e. “humans as plants”; Prechtel, 294–297).

  9. 9.

    Political theorist James C. Scott (using terminology similar to Richard White mentioned in Chapter 5) writes about such spaces as “shatter zones,” allowing for re-invention of culture and community away from state surveillance (Scott, 2009, 7–8, 24–25, 132, 328–331).

  10. 10.

    There may be undercurrents here of Baal’s vaunted Word that he sent as heretofore undisclosed “revelation” to Anat as discussed previously.

  11. 11.

    Here too, we are still laboring under the shadow of Canaanite precursors—El himself, is, on occasion, spoken of as tent-dwelling (though more often his “house” is spoken of as a pavilion; Coogan and Smith, 123, 130; Smith, 39–40).

  12. 12.

    The biblical “career” of Abel illuminates the point. Genesis marks Abel’s murder by Cain as a figure of primordial violence in which the archetypal farmer/city-builder “disappears” the archetypal herder (Gen. 4:8–12). The very icon of “silenced vacuity” (“Abel” in Hebrew means “vapor” or “mist”), Abel speaks through his shed blood, swallowed by the soil, “crying” ever after in an unrequited indigenous call for redress. In spite of that silence, Jesus multiple millennia later will invoke Abel as the prototype of the prophetic line in which he himself (Jesus) stands (Mt. 23:29–39; Lk. 11:46–51). This is also the line that “speaks still” at the time the Epistle to the Hebrews is written (Heb. 11:4). And finally there is even the hint that it is this Blood-Haunt that is the real substance of Babylon’s entire material splendor—the archetype of urban predation in which is found “the blood of the prophets and saints and everyone slain on earth” (Rev. 18:24).

  13. 13.

    I am again beholden to indigenous thinker, Martín Prechtel , for a new appreciation of the goddess-like powers of earth’s capacity to compost decay into vibrancy and life (Prechtel 2012, 10–11, 33, 47–48). See also the article by Cherokee scholar, Laura Donaldson , entitled “Theological Composting in Romans 8: An Indigenous Meditation on Paul’s Rhetoric of Decay” (Donaldson, 142–148).

  14. 14.

    See Steven Davies’ Jesus the Healer unpacking John’s Gospel as encoding memory of Jesus speaking when in trance and spirit-possessed (Davies, 94; Perkinson 2013, 83–84). And it is interesting in this vein to muse on English translation of the Hebrew qanah used in Prov. 8:22 wherein Wisdom would seem to be speaking of “being possessed by Yahweh” as the earliest moment on the way to creating—yes, with resonances of “acquiring” (like property), and “begetting”—but perhaps also not entirely shy of the idea of “hosting an ‘other’ within.”

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  1. Ecumenical Theological Seminary, Detroit, MI, USA

    James W. Perkinson

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Correspondence to James W. Perkinson .

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Perkinson, J.W. (2019). Water Prophecy from the Wadi: River-Rites, Fish-Signs, and Rain-Promises. In: Political Spirituality for a Century of Water Wars. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14998-7_8

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