Phinehas

Berwick:          Everyone says you’re the best. Without you, I’ll get hung for this.

Sherlock:         No, no, no, Mr. Berwick, not at all. Hanged, yes.

Sherlock S1 E3, ‘The Great Game’ (2010)

 

A rather PG illumination from the Alba Bible, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Castilian made in Toledo in the fifteenth century, depicting the episode I’m about to discuss. Thanks to Scott Nevins Memorial on Wikimedia Commons.

All right, folks, grab a Bible; open it to Numbers 25; read the whole thing.¹ (Potentially have a quick glance at the previous chapters to remind yourself of the context as well.)

I’m serious. You don’t even need to fetch a physical copy of the text; you can just bring it up in a new tab. There’s a link in the last footnote. So read it, and come back to me when you’ve finished.

***

All done? Good. What do you make of it?

Well, you’ll probably have gathered that I’m about to tell you what I make of it, so send up a quick prayer for discernment and get ready to do some weighing of my words against what you can actually see in scripture. Fair warning that this is going to be pretty heavy going if you’re not all that into Hebrew linguistics. Allons-y…

So here’s where we join the story: Israel is encamped in the plains of Moab. King Balak of Moab saw what Israel did to Sihon, king of the Amorites, and his people (hint: they defeated them in battle and dispossessed them), and thought, yikes, I need to get me some sort of supernatural help against these people. So he commissioned the seer Balaam son of Beor to curse the Israelites for him.² Trouble was, Balaam couldn’t curse the Israelites, because his whole modus operandi was to curse people in the name of their God, and the God of Israel didn’t have anything against his people. So Balaam ended up blessing the Israelites three times instead. (It’s hilarious. You should 100% read that bit too if you haven’t before.) Anyway, Balaam presumably felt a bit bad that he’d literally done the opposite of what Balak asked him, because a few chapters later, we find out that he’s the one who advised Balak to do what he did next – check out Numbers 31:16 (the same is confirmed again in Revelation 2:14). Like, look, Balak, I can’t curse these guys, because their God has nothing but favour for them; if you want them to be cursed, you’re gonna have to get them to bring that curse on themselves by disobeying his laws. Now, from what I know of this God of theirs, he’s really not keen on his people worshipping any other gods, or having sex with random foreigners who worship other gods, so your best bet is to send in some of your women, to seduce their men and invite them to sacrifices to your gods. That should definitely put the people under a curse.

And what do you know, the plan worked like an absolute charm. The Israelites started going off with these Moabite and Midianite women and participating in sacrifices to their gods – specifically, the local version of Baal, Baal of Peor. In this way, Israel bound itself to Baal of Peor, and God’s anger, as was only right, flared. He spoke to Moses: take the chiefs of the people and hang them in the sun before the LORD, and thus avert divine wrath from the people as a whole.

A brief word of context before we continue: you may or may not know that Hebrew, like all Semitic languages, works according to a system of triliteral (three-letter) verbal roots; from one particular sequence of three letters are formed a whole range of verbs, nouns, and adjectives that pertain to one idea or semantic field. The root מלך (mlk), for instance, contains the idea of being king, and by changing the vowels with which you connect those three consonants, and adding various prefixes and suffixes, you can form words like מֶלֶך (melekh) “king”, מַלְכָּה (malkāh) “queen”, מַלְכוּת (malǝkhūth) “kingdom”, מָלַךְ (mālakh) “he was king”, יִמְלֹךְ (yimlōkh) “he will be king”, מֹלֵךְ (mōlēkh) “(one) being king” – you get the idea. Sometimes the thread of imagination that connects words formed from the same root can be pretty tenuous; sometimes it’s not even at all apparent what that thread of imagination is – but all the same, by using a word from a particular root, you can, to a greater or lesser degree, tap into the semantic field with which that word is associated.

Back to those first few verses of Numbers 25, the word translated “hang” there is derived from the root יקע (yqʿ), which is a bit of a weird one. For the form in which it appears in this instance, my Hebrew dictionary gives the definition as “of some solemn form of execution, but mng. uncertain”; it cites translations of the word into other languages with terms meaning “impale”, “expose”, or “crucify”.³ Hmm. Can we gather any firmer indications of the word’s meaning from evidence found within the scriptures? Why yes, yes we can. Check out 2 Samuel 21:12-13, which uses another Hebrew root, תלה (tlh) – or, variantly, תלא (tlʾ) – as a synonym for יקע: “And David went and took the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from the citizens of Jabesh-Gilead who had stolen them from the square of Beth-Shan, where the Philistines had hanged (תלה) them in the day of the Philistines’ striking Saul down on Gilboa. And he brought up from there the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son; and they collected the bones of the hanged (יקע).” So יקע and תלה are clearly both accurate ways of describing what the Philistines did to Saul and Jonathan. It’s worth mentioning that for them at least, this wasn’t a means of execution – Jonathan was killed in battle, Saul fell on his own sword (check 1 Samuel 31) – but rather the means by which their bodies were made a spectacle of after they were already dead. And that was achieved by hanging them up, possibly by piercing them with something (like pinning a notice to a display-board), as we can infer from the following. 1 Samuel 31 says they struck (תקע, tqʿ) Saul’s body to the wall; the same word is used most commonly for blowing a trumpet, though also, among other things, for pitching a tent (Genesis 31:25), stabbing a guy in the guts (Judges 3:21), or fastening hair to a loom with a weaving-pin (Judges 16:14) – so you can gather the kind of thrusting-through action that it denotes. Other uses of the root תלה also give us clues as to the process being described: you can תלה a vessel on a peg (Ezekiel 15:3); a shield on a wall (Ezekiel 27:11); the earth on nothingness, if you happen to be God (Job 26:7) – or, most commonly, a person on a tree. תלה, therefore, clearly means “hang” in its straightforward sense of “suspend”. In some instances it seems as if it might refer to a means of execution – be that hanging or crucifixion or impalement or whatever else – but in others, like the one mentioned above, it definitely refers to something done to the bodies after they’re already dead.

 

Hanging vessels on pegs has been standard practice in many human cultures, hence the English word cupboard. Yep, it used to refer to a board with pegs on it, not an enclosed set of shelves.

So the order that God gives to Moses in Numbers 25 doesn’t necessarily involve “hanging” the chiefs of the people in the way we’d probably assume, like, with a rope round the neck to kill them. Rather, it involves suspending them, quite likely already having been killed, and quite likely that by piercing them through with something. Why does God tell Moses to do that? Take a look at Deuteronomy 21:22-23: “And when there is in a man a sin of the judgement of death, and he is killed, and you hang (תלה) him on a tree, his body shall not remain on the tree, for you shall certainly bury him on that (same) day, for a hanged man (תלה) is a curse of God, and you shall not defile your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.” A hanged man is a curse of God – so if you hang someone, you make him a curse. Back in Numbers 25, the people have placed themselves under God’s curse by disobeying him, but what God is saying to Moses is, carry out the curse on the leaders who instigated this, and that will suffice to remove it from the rest of the people. (The specification to hang them “in the sun” presumably means, as per Deuteronomy, that they are only to hang there during daylight hours, and to be taken down and buried before nightfall.) So Moses passes on the order to the judges of Israel: each of you kill those under his responsibility who have participated in the sin of worshipping Baal of Peor.

We don’t actually find out whether this order was ever in fact carried out, though, because the narrative shifts. While Moses and the people are gathered in the entrance to the Tabernacle, mourning over the sin that’s been committed among them, a bloke called Zimri brings this Midianite woman called Cozbi into their sight – and off the two of them pop into some kind of “tent” or “chamber”. More on that particular word in a moment, but in the context it seems pretty clear what they’re up to. Right in front of the Tabernacle. Yikes. And so Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, grabs a spear and goes after them and skewers them both on it. (And again, the fact that he was able to thrust both of them through with a single stab is strongly suggestive of what it was they were doing.)

Verse 8 is very interesting, because it contains two different but similar-looking hapax legomena (that is, words that only occur once in a corpus, in this case the entire Hebrew Bible). One of them is the word for “tent” or “chamber”, קֻבָּה (qubbāh). The other is the word for the woman’s “belly”, קֹבָה (qōvāh). Neither is necessary for the verse to make sense: “and he went after the man of Israel, and he pierced both of them, the man of Israel and the woman, and the plague was restrained from upon the children of Israel” actually kind of works better purely from a narrative-flow point of view. What do these two weird words actually add to the proceedings? Why bother including them at all? And on top of that, why opt for such obscure terminology, when Hebrew has perfectly good, normal words for “tent” and “belly” that would be more than happy to do the job?

I think the answer to these questions can be found by considering the words’ roots. qubbāh derives from the root קבב (qbb), which means “curse”. It’s not a very common root in scripture; indeed, verbal conjugations of it only occur in chapters 22-24 of the book of Numbers – the Balaam episode, directly before the bit we’re currently discussing. Interesting. qōvāh, meanwhile, probably derives from the root נקב (nqb)⁴ – which also means “curse”, though among other things. The most basic meaning of the verbal root is “pierce” or “bore through”, whence an idea of being hollowed out, which accounts for most of the nouns (nearly all hapax legomena) that derive from this root: נֶקֶב (neqev) “bezel”, מַקֶּבֶת (maqqeveth) “hole (in a rock)”, קֵבָה (qēvāh) “stomach”.⁵ The second meaning is “specify (by name)”, which is a fairly clear leap of logic – like English “pin down”. The third meaning is then “blaspheme” or “curse” – again, a pretty straightforward leap of logic from the second.⁶

In their meaning “curse”, קבב and נקב are synonyms. Check out Numbers 23:8: “How can I curse (נקב) whom God has not cursed (קבב)? How can I denounce (זעם, zʿm) whom God has not denounced (זעם again)?” It’s a nice example of Hebrew-poetry parallelling, where each half of the verse repeats the same idea in different words, and the fact that in the second half, it’s the same word twice over, tells us that קבב and נקב likewise mean the same thing.⁷

So what does all this mean for our two weird little hapax legomena in Numbers 25:8? Well, I think what they’re designed to achieve is to get the reader to see Phinehas’ actions in terms of the idea of curse. In the Hebrew, the same preposition directly precedes each of the two words, though it tends to be translated “into” before qubbāh and “through” before qēvāh, and as I said, neither word is necessary for the structure, sense, or fundamental gist of the verse, so it’s essentially as if the author has just chucked the phrase “for a curse-y thing” into the verse, twice. Scholarly debate over these two words seems, from the rough impression I get, to have largely focussed on what specific, technical meaning they might carry; I suspect that the meaning in each case is pretty mundane, but that the author chose to include these obscure words in his account of the matter to put the reader in mind of cursing; to cast Phinehas’ actions as the carrying out of the curse on Zimri and Cozbi.

Because by stabbing the couple, Phinehas neutralised the effects of the curse. He stopped the plague; he successfully averted God’s wrath from Israel. In fact, God consequently gives him a glowing commendation and a hefty promise of favour: “Phinehas, son of Eleazar, son of Aaron the priest, turned my wrath from upon the children of Israel, in his being zealous with my zeal in their midst, and I did not put an end to the children of Israel in my zeal. Therefore say: I am giving him my covenant of peace, and it shall be for him and for his seed after him an age-long covenannt of priesthood, because he was zealous for his God and made atonement for the people of Israel.” Which is all a bit weird, really, isn’t it, because that isn’t actually what God asked to be done. He asked for the chiefs of the people to be suspended before him. But Phinehas went and stabbed one pair of illicit lovers, and apparently that did the trick. More than that, Phinehas in this manner proved his credentials as Good At Being A Priest, and won the right to the priesthood for himself and his line. What was it about his actions that made him a good priest? He was zealous for God, and, crucially, he made atonement for the people. The word translated “make atonement” in English versions comes from a root whose basic meaning is “cover”. On the Day of Atonement, the High Priest covers the ark with blood, and so covers over the sins of the people. Indeed, covering over the sins of the people is kind of the High Priest’s main job, so of course Phinehas’ doing so proved his suitability for the role. But why did it work? Why did stabbing Zimri and Cozbi work to cover the people’s sins, avert God’s wrath, remove the curse from them?

 

A replica of the High Priest’s outfit, made for the Tabernacle replica at BYU, apparently, which I assume stands for Brigham Young University. So that’s the getup Phinehas won for himself. Thanks to Ben P L on Wikimedia commons; usual conditions (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en) apply.

Well, why does anything work to avert God’s wrath? Because it somehow functions as a type of the cross, the one occasion when God’s wrath was really, truly turned away, and the sins of those he chose really, truly covered – for it is impossible, as we know, for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins (that’s Hebrews 10:4 if you weren’t sure). Consider the nature of Jesus’ crucifixion: he was suspended, by being pierced through with nails – exactly the kind of punishment that God prescribed for the chiefs of the people who yoked themselves to Baal of Peor (though they, mercifully enough, would probably have been dead beforehand). And after he died, he was stabbed with a spear. Blood and water, remember?

When God commanded that the chiefs of the people be suspended, he was commanding – not that Israel could have known it at the time – that a type of the cross be carried out. What Phinehas did was carry out a different type of the cross. He foreshadowed not so much Jesus’ being suspended as his being pierced – indeed, the root used for “pierce” in Numbers 25:8 is דקר (dqr), which also shows up in one of our favourite Jesus-y bits, Zechariah 12:10: “and they shall look on me, whom they have pierced” (as quoted in John’s account of the crucifixion, at 19:37) – and that satisfied God enough to stop the plague. And again, carrying out types of the cross is literally a priest’s main job, because every sacrifice is a type of the cross. That’s why they work. Phinehas showed that he was capable of such things, and that he had a zeal for God’s holiness, and so that he’d make a really good priest.

I suspect – can’t prove, but suspect – that Paul may have had this episode at least slightly in mind when he wrote the following section of the letter to the Galatians: “For as many as are of works of law, are under a curse; for it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all these things written in the book of the law, to do them. And that by law, nobody is justified before God, is apparent, because The righteous one shall live by faith. And the law is not from faith, but The one who does the things shall live by them. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, becoming a curse on our behalf, because it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree, so that the blessing of Abraham might come in Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.” In Numbers 25, Israel put themselves under a curse by disobeying the law God had given them (incomplete as it may have been at that stage). In order to be redeemed, they needed someone to become a curse on their behalf. God prescribed that the chiefs of the people be given over to that fate, but Phinehas – acting with God’s zeal, under divine inspiration – enacted an alternative, in carrying out the curse on Zimri and Cozbi. One blow was struck instead of many. One man made atonement for the people, and inherited a perpetual priesthood as a result. Phinehas is definitely a type of Jesus here – but whereas Phinehas killed a couple for their own sin, Jesus was himself killed for other people’s sins. The type, like every type, was imperfect; it didn’t actually take away anyone’s sins. It just bore enough resemblance to the cross to do for the time being.

Jesus is our greater, better Phinehas. We have all put ourselves under a curse by failing to do what God wants, but in Jesus, that curse is carried out on one instead of many. Jesus was more zealous with God’s zeal than anyone ever has been, and what that led him to do was to become a curse on our behalf. He was suspended and he was pierced, and he turned God’s wrath from upon us and covered over our sins with his own blood. And now we stand before God not according to law, whereby all are under a curse, but according to faith in him. A few verses earlier in Galatians than the passage I quoted, Paul’s talking about Abraham, and how he “believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness”. Guess who the only other individual in the whole of scripture who has something counted to him for righteousness is? Psalm 106:30-31 says this: “And Phinehas stood up and intervened, and the plague was restrained. And it was counted to him for righteousness, from generation to generation forever.” Wow. That’s a pretty big deal, huh? Carrying out a type of the cross was counted to Phinehas for righteousness. But when Jesus went through the real thing, it was counted to us for righteousness.

I’ll wrap this up now, because this post is stupidly long and I’m amazed you’ve stuck with it so far as to be reading this now. But hey, don’t just shut the tab and go on scrolling Facebook. First take a moment to marvel that the Son of God became a curse for us – that God the Father chose to avert his righteous wrath from us by offering up his Son to bear it instead, to be hanged and pierced so that one blow might be struck instead of many. Phinehas proved he was a good priest, but Jesus is the best priest, because at the cross he made complete and permanent atonement for his people. He intervened, and the plague we deserved was restrained, and it was counted to us for righteousness.

Footnotes

¹ Here it is: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=numbers+25&version=ESVUK.

² Extrabiblically, the same figure – Balaam son of Beor, the seer – is attested in an inscription from Deir Alla, which I think is pretty cool: https://www.livius.org/sources/content/deir-alla-inscription/.

³ The dictionary in question is the legendary Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon, which, though dated, is still pretty blooming excellent. Available free at various Internet locations including this one: http://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/BDB.pdf.

⁴ Some scholars think it also derives from קבב, or even is actually the same word qubbāh again. I think they’re wrong, because I take the Masoretic pointing seriously as good evidence for the correct way to read the text, and according to the Masoretic pointing, the bet in qōvāh is not doubled. But even if they were right, it wouldn’t negate my point.

⁵ Some scholars think that qōvāh is actually the same word as qēvāh. Again, I think they’re wrong, because the Masoretic pointing doesn’t allow for it, but even if they were right, it certainly wouldn’t negate my point.

⁶ For this paragraph I consulted both BDB and the greatest book in the world after the Bible, Benjamin Davidson’s Analytical Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon. If you read any Hebrew at all and you don’t have a copy, get one. Again, you can get it free online at various locations including this one, https://ia800905.us.archive.org/25/items/analyticalhebrew00daviuoft/analyticalhebrew00daviuoft.pdf, but get a physical copy if you can.

⁷ Here’s another fun fact that I decided it was confusing to include in the main text: as you can also probably tell, the two roots are also pretty similar in terms of the consonants they contain; in fact, they deducibly derive from the same biliteral proto-root. Back before the dawn of writing, Semitic languages used two-letter roots, but then proto-Semitic speakers realised that there weren’t enough two-letter combinations to convey as many ideas as they wanted to, and so they switched to using triliteral ones. To get their new three-letter roots, they filled out old two-letter roots with extra letters: adding an N to the beginning of the root and repeating its second letter are both totally standard ways of achieving this, so we can infer that קבב and נקב both come from a theoretical biliteral root קב.

No Infestation: Weathering With You and the Value of Humanity

“Who cares if we don’t see the sun shine ever again? I want you more than any blue sky. The weather can go crazy.”

Weathering With You (2019)¹

 

Tokyo in the rain! Surely there could be no more appropriate cover photo for a post about Weathering With You.

It came as no surprise at all that I absolutely loved Weathering With You.² After all, Makoto Shinkai’s previous film, Your Name,³ is my very favourite film ever, and basically all of the elements that secured it that lofty and coveted title were also present in Weathering With You. Adorable, wholesome plotline with heroes I could really root for, tick. Sweet-spot magical realism, pushing just far enough beyond the possible for the thing to properly feel like an escape, tick. Neat, engaging scripting that felt beautifully well tied together, tick. A good blend of funny bits, dramatic bits, slow bits to build the plot, and heartbreaking-yet-uplifting emotional bits that reach right down into your soul to stir it properly, tick. Animation so breathtakingly beautiful that I could wish, contra Paul, that my whole body really were an eye, in order to be able to drink in each frame more fully, tick. Well, except for the fact that were that so, I wouldn’t be able to hear Radwimps’ gorgeous, soaring soundtrack, or the way that the sound marries up with the visuals so perfectly: there’s a moment, for instance, when a huge, heavy rainfall suddenly erupts out of what had been a clear sky, and it’s so beautifully done that you can practically feel the water hit the ground. Tick. It hasn’t usurped Your Name for the top spot on my list, but only because I think Your Name’s plot is cleverer – pulls you through more twists and turns that make you marvel at it, kind of thing. That said, the two plots have a great deal in common (spoilers for both films ahead, proceed at your own risk). Teenage love story between a city kid and a country kid; magical realism, with the magical elements being explained through things related to the Shinto religion; random episode at the beginning of the film that’s very significant but only explained later; climax involving the boy doing something a bit crazy in order to save the girl from some kind of natural-disaster-related threat.

Although what that natural-disaster-related threat actually means for the girl is pretty different in each case. In Your Name, the threat is a meteorite that’s going to destroy our heroine’s entire town, and so the way she has to be saved is by all the people being evacuated from the impact zone. In Weathering With You, by contrast, our heroine Hina, as a so-called ‘weather maiden’ with supernatural influence over the weather, knows that she has to offer herself as a sacrifice in order to stop the freak rainstorms that have been plaguing Tokyo of late. When protagonist Hodaka follows her up into the clouds and brings her back to earth, the rain starts again. And it never stops. It rains so much that three years later, much of Tokyo is underwater. Hina doesn’t need to be saved from the natural disaster; by being saved, she causes it. Her life is bought at the cost of great swathes of the city lost to the sea.

It wasn’t the ending I was expecting. I suppose I was anticipating that there would turn out to be a way whereby Hina could survive and the weather could be put back to normal, because, you know, that’s the kind of thing that tends to happen at the end of wholesome animated films. But no – the decision was made and it came at its price. I liked that. It forced us to ask whether it was worth it.

There was a point earlier in the film where Hodaka’s employer Mr. Suga, not really believing in the weather-maiden story, made an offhand remark to the effect that one death for the sake of fixing the crazy weather seemed like a fair enough deal. It was clear, though, that that remark came not from a place of thoughtful rationality, but one of bitterness: Mr. Suga is still reeling from the premature death of his wife and resenting that he is permitted only limited contact with their young daughter, and what he seems to really be saying is something like, well, at least that death would do some good; why should this weather-maiden person live while my beloved does not? One can sympathise on those grounds, but not agree. Another perspective is offered by a sweet old lady that Hodaka and Hina helped out earlier in the film. After Tokyo begins to be lost to the rising waters, she takes an equanimous approach: sure, her old home is gone, but centuries ago, this entire area used to be underwater. The freak rainstorms are just the sea claiming back what belongs to it, the planet shifting through its normal, natural cycles. Hodaka repeats this idea to himself as he goes to meet Hina after three years apart, testing it, trying to work out whether he thinks it accounts for what has happened. He sees Hina and concludes not. The neverending rain isn’t just nature doing what nature does; he and Hina made a choice. They decided that it wasn’t acceptable for her to be offered as a sacrifice. They decided that if the rain never stopped, that was a price worth paying for her life. It was they who, to that end, sentenced whole districts of Tokyo to be slowly swallowed up by the ever-increasing flood – and Hodaka is glad, very glad indeed, that they did.

 

I, of course, already know what it’s like for the rain to never stop, because I live in Britain. (That’s a joke. The rain does stop sometimes.)

Well, that was how I understood it, anyway. I think of Weathering With You as a bold, uplifting affirmation of the uniquely great value of human life. Which is a bit of a contrary idea, actually, when held against much of fashionable modern thought – particularly if you take it specifically as affirming the uniquely great value of human life at the expense of disorder in the natural world.

I don’t know whether you’ve noticed this, but there’s a strand of thinking within the modern sustainability movement that sees population control as a necessary part of the solution. Some people call this view neo-Malthusianism, after a Georgian clergyman called Thomas Malthus who wrote an essay about population in which he posited that, whereas population growth is exponential, growth in food production is linear. Consequently, he argued, if left unchecked, the human population will end up increasing faster than food production can be ramped up to sustain it, leading to catastrophes of famine, disease, and war. A better solution, Malthus reasoned, is just to get people not to produce as many new humans in the first place.⁴ His ideas have experienced something of a revival of late, though with a new climate-emergency sort of flavour. Remember the Duke and Duchess of Sussex (or whichever titles they’re going by now they’ve ‘stepped back’) saying that they won’t have more than two children, in the interests of the environment?⁵ Or have you come across the BirthStrike movement, with people trying to bring about large-scale changes to How Things Are Done by refusing to have children until such changes are made?⁶ Or what about Population Matters, which claims Sir David Attenborough as its patron, and advocates very straightforwardly for having fewer children, and also achieving certain changes to get people in the developing world to have fewer children?⁷

I’m with Population Matters on the benefits of women’s education and proper access to contraception, but I approve of those things because, you know, because they give women greater freedom and access to a better quality of life, not simply because they tend to result in there being fewer humans in the world than there would otherwise have been. Neo-Malthusianism comes way too close, in my view, to seeing humans as a kind of harmful infestation in what would otherwise be a nice, orderly, balanced world. And the focus on the developing world strikes me as particularly yikes: like, sorry, all you folks living in poverty in Africa and Asia and Latin America, but there are just too bloody many of you already and we don’t want any more of you. No, worse than that: there are just too bloody many of you already and if you cause your children to be too numerous, you render them guilty of destroying the planet merely by existing. Like an infestation. Shudder.

The trouble with seeing the problem as being that there are Simply Too Many Humans, is that that’s such a dehumanising position to take. It views humans not as individuals, not as people, not as precious lives of uniquely great value, but as a mere statistic. Humanity as nothing more than a great ever-consuming Blob that needs to be cut down to size. The right to exist is the most fundamental individual human right there is, and yet somebody here is necessarily being stripped of that right. But having said that, who? Because even the most strident neo-Malthusian is also, whoops, still a human; still another sliver of colour pushing the population bar higher up the chart. Surely she’ll be compelled either to determinedly focus the blame on other people – those peasants in the developing world being the obvious target⁸ – or to end up deeply insecure about her own right to exist?

 

Though you can see who’s using the most electricity there.

There is, I think, a pretty interesting – though not so interesting as troubling – intersection where these kinds of ideas collide with Christian doctrine. We all know that God made the world and it was very good; and then our first ancestors, daft things that they were, went and disobeyed him, and thenceforth everything was messed up. So humans are the problem, right? The world was ‘very good’ before our sinfulness sent it all to hell in a handcart, and it follows that it would have been better off without us. Turns out we are a kind of harmful infestation here.

                                                                                                                                

Except that that’s not actually true at all. For starters, the world wasn’t ‘very good’ until it had human beings in it: everything else in creation was just ‘good’.⁹ Categorically, then, the world would not be better off without us – not in the eyes of God, the only one whose opinions are actually completely true and indeed the measure for truth. Also, I know I’ve written about this before, but the pre-Fall world wasn’t perfect. The potential for sin was there, and that made it flawed. And so this whole mess that we’re living in now isn’t the result of everything having gone off the rails; it’s part of the necessary plot to bring us to the truly perfect happy ending.¹⁰

So humans are the one vital component that elevates God’s creation from ‘good’ to ‘very good’; and humans, moreover, are the one thing he specifically redeems for participation in the new creation. Jesus died to save people – people, not ecosystems. And beyond that, he died to save individuals. He knows each of his sheep by name; he indwells each personally by his Spirit. Humanity is no statistic in God’s eyes, no Blob. It’s no infestation of an otherwise nice, orderly, balanced world. On the contrary, it’s the one bit of the world that God cares enough about to have sacrificed his dearly beloved Son to the worse fate that exists on its behalf. He places that kind of uniquely great value on the life of each individual he has chosen to be blameless before him.

So was Hodaka right? Was saving Hina worth it – worth the freak weather, the sunken city, the disordering of the natural world? If we’re going by God’s standards, then yes, yes it was. Indeed, when, one day, God completes the rescue from sin and death that he has begun in us, he’ll do a lot worse than flood Tokyo: he’ll set the whole world on fire. He’ll bring the present cosmos to an end, and establish a new heavens and new earth in its place – and this so that we whom he has chosen might survive, might live with him forever and ever. Humanity is no infestation in creation. Humanity is, in no insignificant sense, the point of creation. We’re kind of what creation is all about.

This isn’t an argument against trying to make the best use of the resources we have; I’m all for doing our best to live sustainably and keep the natural environment healthy. It is, however, an argument against seeing Too Many Humans as an inherent problem.¹¹ Humans aren’t just some population that needs to be controlled for the sake of maintaining balance in the world; they’re individuals of uniquely great value. They’re no infestation in creation; they’re the only thing that makes it ‘very good’.

Footnotes

¹ The exact form of the quotation may not be reliable, as I am relying on random people on Reddit for it, but that was the gist.

² Here’s a trailer to give you a flavour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6iK6DjV_iE. I think it might still be in UK cinemas if you fancy it – definitely worth the big screen experience.

³ For that one, you can have Radwimps’ music video for the theme song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2GujJZfXpg. I could seriously cry from how beautiful this animation is.

⁴ Thanks, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism.

⁵ This should jog your memory if not: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7301321/Prince-Harry-interviewed-Dr-Jane-Goodall-Meghans-edition-British-Vogue.html.

⁶ I should add that they say they ‘disagree with focussing on the topic of population before equality based system change in regards to tackling the environmental crisis’: https://www.birthstrikeforfuture.com/.

⁷ Have a click around, see what you think: https://populationmatters.org/.

⁸ I feel I should clarify that I’m using the word ‘peasants’ ironically there.

⁹ See for yourself: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=gen+1&version=ESVUK.

¹⁰ See ‘Better, Not Back’, under November of last year in my blog archive. Or, you know, don’t, if you have stuff to be getting on with.

¹¹ There’s also, on a natural, practical level, the fact that humans are also the only beings in the material universe who have yet proved any good at coming up with better ways to use resources so that they can suffice for larger populations. Deprive the world of more humans and you deprive it of more ingenuity. But that wasn’t my big point today, and I didn’t want to confuse things by putting it in the main body.