Drought, Famine, Plague and Pestilence: Ancient Israel s Understandings of and Responses to Natural Catastrophes

This interdisciplinary study integrates textual analysis of the Hebrew Bible and comparable ancient Near Eastern material with social theory and archaeology in order to articulate the ancient Israelites' understandings of natural disasters, their intellectual and theological challenges to those understandings, and their intellectual and theological reconstructions thereof.

After a survey of textual and archaeological evidence for natural disasters in the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean world, Robertson demonstrates that common understandings of them are cast in terms of punishment for covenant infidelity. However, when natural disasters are understood as such, their arbitrary destruction challenges those taken-for-granted assumptions. The clash between cognitive expectation and experiential reality produces cognitive dissonance. Responses, then, come in the attempt to return to cognitive, if not social, stability.

Several responses were practiced and articulated by the ancient Israelites regarding the retributive understanding of natural (and other communal) disasters: avoid and/or attempt to prevent the disrupting experience through the use of apotropaic and other ritual techniques, protest the suffering of the innocent, revise assumptions about divine punishment and/or divine character, revise assumptions about human actions, or despair at the lack of identification of any correlation between human action and divine punishment.