Land of Canaan

The landscape of Northwest Connecticut is peppered with biblical references.  There is a community called Sodom, about whose namesake even the impious have heard.  We have the lovely Town of Sharon, but no Rose of Sharon, alas, to compete with the ubiquitous multiflora. There is also Goshen, where "...Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt, in the country of Goshen; and they had possessions therein, and grew, and multiplied exceedingly." (Genesis 47:27). 

I live in North Canaan, named for "a land that floweth with milk and honey" but also "a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof" (Numbers. 13:27, 32).  The frontier of the Hebrew Exodus and the frontier of colonial Connecticut had more in common, it seems, than the promise of opportunity for God's chosen in a howling wilderness.  The land could be bountiful but it could also devour. A classic interpretation of this biblical paradox, and one that finds expression in frontier societies and where frontier attitudes remain, is that only the strong of will and body can tame the land and make it yield its riches.

I was pondering the more modern expression of this duality in my community when I came across an essay by Alon Ben-Meir, professor of International Relations at New York University.  Professor Ben-Meir was speaking specifically to the tragic and prolonged conflict in the Middle East, but he also offers a deeper insight into the relationship between humanity and nature in the Land of Canaan allegory. 

"The eleventh-century scholar Shlomo Ben-Yitzhak (Rashi) who studied and worked in France, and is considered the foremost Jewish interpreter of the Old Testament, advanced a more compelling explanation. In his view, the land of Canaan can either be the land of milk and honey or a land that consumes those who dwell there. God intended it to be that way: The choice of whether it would be a land of abundance or devastation was left to the inhabitants themselves. Should the governors be just and caring, the people compassionate, abiding by the highest morality in their day-to-day conduct and respecting each other's rights, then they should live in peace. If they made this choice, then the land would indeed exude milk and honey. But if they decide to live in opposition to these standards, then violence, cruelty, and hatred, greed, venom, revenge, and retribution will be the result, and they will eventually perish through their own misdeeds."

This reading of the Canaan paradox would tend to argue toward a society that valued stewardship over resource exploitation, that protected the rights of the individual without diminishing that same right in others or depleting the common store.  It would also seem to run counter to prevailing attitudes today in some quarters, both nearby and farther afield, regarding private landowner rights, natural resource management, and the role of government in safeguarding the common wealth.  Jared Diamond has much to say on this subject in his recent book, Collapse, and others have made similar observations.  Where Garrett Hardin identified a Tragedy of the Commons, there could just as easily be said to be a Tragedy of the Private, for private ownership has degraded more habitat and destroyed more natural resources than all ther world's communal area pastoralists.  Private ownership, for all its flaws, has also protected vast acreages, yet the pace of land conversion from open space to built environments far outstrips the capacity of private efforts to conserve it. 

For Canaan, and communities like it, to sustain the flow of milk and honey, we will need to value our rural character, our affordable quality of life, and our ecological wealth.  Although it goes against our independent Yankee grain, we may need to set limits on ourselves so that these may endure.  When the gravel mine down the road is tapped out, houses and not farmland will replace it.  When Wal-Mart comes looking to plant a huge box store in the Litchfield Hills, it is unlikely to take root in the communities with up-to-date zoning and comprehensive open space and development plans.  We need not follow the path that will make of this place "a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof."

Comments

[Tim Abbott]

Thank you for your comments, Dr. Kingery. My interest in the biblical antecedants of the names of certain towns and places in northwest Connecticut is both cultural and literary. The New Englanders who settled this part of the state made deliberate choices about the names they gave their new communities and these reflect not only their values but their relationship with the frontier. In our more secular society, place names with biblical referents do not resonate the way they would have at the time of Canaan's establishment when Yankee congregationalists were intimately familiar with the Bible and its allegories.

Biblical Canaan was a frontier, just as northwest Connecticut was for settlers in the 1730s. Those who settle in the frontiers both reject the civilized lands they leave behind and expect to struggle with the wilderness to wrest its potential "milk and honey" from the untamed land. Those who claim uncivilized lands with the support of a higher being may also see their occupation as righteous and sanctified, so long as they adhere to their faith. Those heathens previously occupying the promised land without taming the wilderness would represent a direct challenge to the settler's faith. If in the settlers' eyes, those who stray from the faith are to be driven from Canaan as in Eden before them, this most certainly applies to Canaan's prior inhabitants.
Certainly this is how Puritan settlement of New England played out with regard to Native Americans, and perhaps also to the Israelites in Canaan.

[Paul M. Kingery]

I enjoyed your commentary on Canaan's land. I would add another element. When unfaithful, the inhabitants were not only devoured, but scattered to other lands, where they would regain submission to God and purity of life before God would return a remnant to the land. Another cycle of this is pending, in which Jerusalem will be destroyed, and much of Israel and Palestine with it, then Christ will lead a purified remnant of the faithful back to a renewed land. I have been studying and writing about the Land of Canaan with regard to the Christian future. Are you interested in topics about the apocalypse, end times, the end of the world, eschatology, last days, the horsemen of the apocalypse, the beast, prophesy, prophesies, revelation, 666, bible prophesy, prophets, Canaan, Canaan's land, Land of Canaan, or the Christian future? If so you may enjoy reading " Land of Canaan." This is a free online book. The Link is http://landofcanaan.info/book.php
The section about the Land of Canaan is in the introduction.

Let me know if that further stirs your thoughts.

Thanks,

Paul M. Kingery, PhD, MPH