The purpose of this project is to showcase ecocriticism, a perspective borrowed and modified from literary scholarship. This perspective, detailed in Chapter 1, encourages interdisciplinary approaches, drawing on input from the sciences, social sciences, and literary theory. Also, because ecocriticism actively looks for nonhuman characters and natural imagery, it has the virtue of highlighting aspects of biblical texts that are often downplayed or ignored (such as Yhwh's direct speech to nonhuman characters). I apply the ecocritical perspective to three texts: Genesis 2-3, Joel, and Jonah, drawing out natural imagery, nonhuman characters, and the relationships (a key ecological theme) between all characters: human, divine, and nonhuman, the last category sometimes including plants and soil.;Chapters 2-4 examine the three texts from different interdisciplinary perspectives. Chapter 2 gives an ecocritical rereading of the Eden narrative, drawing on human behavioral ecology to show how this story, especially in the curses of Genesis 3.14-19, echoes the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, in which humans gradually transitioned from a foraging lifestyle to one of settled agrarianism. Chapter 3 draws on entomology and ecocritical insights regarding crises and natural imbalances, showing how ecological catastrophe reveals to the author(s) of Joel the suffering of animals as well as humans. Chapter 4 draws on theories of comedy, especially Joseph Meeker's theory that comedy is a survival-focused, ecological mode of literature, to explicate the book of Jonah. What emerges is the character of Yhwh as a comic figure; desiring no human or animal deaths, Yhwh is willing to go to absurd lengths, engaging in trickery and object lessons in an attempt to reconcile divergent parties and to help the other characters choose life.;Chapter 5 discusses the themes common to these three biblical texts, especially the corrected themes of limitation and interdependence. Each of the three texts also reveals a God who is inextricably related to nature by virtue of having created it, and who values nonhuman persons and the health of the soil along with human wellbeing.
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