If you besiege a town for a long time, making war against it in order to take it, you must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them. Although you may take food from them, you must not cut them down. Are trees in the field human beings that they should come under siege from you? You may destroy only the trees that you know do not produce food; you may cut them down for use in building siegeworks against the town that makes war with you, until it falls (Deuteronomy 20:19-20).

This curious and remarkable text occurs in Deuteronomy amid a cluster of provisions concerning “holy war.” Moses knows that war is a violence waged against an enemy population; he knows as well that it is always war waged against the generative ordering of creation. Already on the third day of creation, we have this:

Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation; plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good (Genesis 1:11-12).

God, moreover, charged the first human persons with care of plant vegetation:

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food…I have given every green plant for food.” (Genesis 1:29-30)

Mediating the Absolute and the Qualifications

The problem is that the makers of war do not pause to consider the will of the creator concerning plant life, nor the requirement of protection of plant life that produces food. Our verses in Deuteronomy, it appears, are to be read in the wake of the Genesis provision. The text in Deuteronomy begins with an absolute (apodictic) prohibition against cutting trees. The prohibition is informed by the recognition that the trees produce fruit that may not be taken. The prohibition is followed by a rhetorical question that insists upon a distinction in war between human beings and trees. We may hunch that trees are insistently “conscientious objectors” in every war. Human beings are often prone to war; but not trees! Trees are to be given a pass in every war, because the creator has provided them for food.

But then in verse 20, the absolute prohibition of verse 19 is qualified with the preposition, raq: “except.” Moses makes a distinction between fruit trees that yield food and other trees that do not yield food that may be utilized for the conduct of war. The absolute prohibition and the qualification that follows together exhibit the characteristic work of Torah teaching that must mediate between absolute theological, covenantal claims and the reality of lived life. What is not “excepted” in verse 20 is the awareness that human life, ultimately and eventually, relies on the food-yielding generosity and fidelity of the creation according to the will and purpose of the creator. The compulsion to make war must be restrained at that non-negotiable limit.

Development versus Creation

This text has been on my mind because I live in a beautiful tree-laden town that is always under threat from developers who regularly want to cut down more trees and claim more space for more building and investment. The tension between tree-protection and endless development is an enduring contestation in our town. It occurs to me that perhaps the developers in our town are willy-nilly cast in the role of war-makers who without restraint wage war against trees and much else in the natural environment. As one can see, the Torah provision is engaged in delicate negotiation concerning what is allowed and what is prohibited; so in our time the same engagement is under way in our town. I suggest that Moses would have said that the needs of war too often prevail, as one might, in our town, conclude that the war undertaken by the developers too often prevails against the vulnerability of the trees.

We may take a brief glimpse at the parabolic poetry of Ezekiel 17. In that parable a “great eagle,” Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, takes off the tip of the cedar tree (that is, he deposed King Jehoiachin in Jerusalem) (v. 3). But he cared for this royal remnant in exile so that it flourished (v. 6). But then another “great eagle” (Pharaoh) came and took up the flourishing plant (vv. 7-8). And then the poet has God ask his Israelite listeners three questions about the judgment made concerning the second great eagle:

Will the eagle not tear out the vine by its roots?

Will he not strip off its fruit and cause its leaves to dry up?

Will not all of its fruit and leaves shrivel up?

(Daniel Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1-24, 1997)

As Block clearly sees, we may imagine those who heard the parable would answer, “Yes, yes, yes. Yes, the great eagle will work havoc with the tree that is Israel! This usage by Ezekiel is yet another example of how the imagery of the tree lets us see and note clearly the way in which great political, economic, and military power is unrestrained in its exploitation of creation. It does damage to the land itself as well as to its human habitation. We may judge that the siege weapon in Deuteronomy 20:20, unrestrained developers in my town, and the work of the “great eagle” in the ancient world are all of a piece. All of them regard the momentary gain of wealth and power as so urgent and overriding that they will not pause to consider either the will of the creator or the wellbeing of the landscape.

The Power of Planting Trees

None of the awarenesses of Deuteronomy, my home town, or Ezekiel’s great eagle had prepared me for the moving exposition of “slow violence” of which Rob Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011) writes with such wisdom, courage, and passion. Nixon’s general thesis is that the abuse of the environment amounts to slow violence against the most vulnerable human population of the earth. It is “slow” because it advances only by general policies and actions that often remain unnoticed until it is much too late; it is “violent” because it abuses the landscape and it renders the life of the vulnerable more and more nearly unlivable. Nixon’s book, a slow demanding read, is one to which attention must be paid. In the book he is not precisely attentive to the vulnerable populations themselves, but to the daring courageous writers who have given voice to the slow violence and to the threat against the poor. From my reading of his book, I have acquired a new extensive reading list of books about which I had not known. I urge the reader to pursue the book as a huge wake-up call concerning the jeopardy of land and people of which we are mostly unaware. Nixon’s book provides chapter and verse concerning the threat in a deeply compelling way.

Among the instances of such slow violence that Nixon considers, I call attention especially to the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, an assertive act of resistance and alternative to the rapacious treatment of the land by the governing regime. I have not yet read the book that Nixon cites, but I will do so soon. It is entitled Unbowed, a memoir by Wangari Maathai, who helped to evoke the Green Belt Movement and has written about her experience with it. The work of the movement was to plant trees. On Earth Day in 1977 Maathai and a “small cohort of like minded women planted seven trees” (129). By 2004 when Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the movement had created 6,000 local tree nurseries, and engaged 100,000 women to plant thirty million trees, both in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa. Nixon notes that the achievement of the movement has been material:

…providing employment while helping anchor soil, generate shade and firewood, and replenish watersheds (129).

It has also been compellingly symbolic:

…by inspiring other reforestation movements across the globe (129).

Nixon labels the movement as “an iconic act of civil disobedience” that has refused to accept “illicit deforestation” perpetrated by Kenya’s draconian regime. The movement, not surprisingly, has fostered a broad alliance around issues of sustainable security. These issues, Nixon avers, are crucial,

to the very different context of post-9/11 America as well, where militaristic ideologies of security have disproportionately and destructively dominated public policy and debate (129).

The outcome of this remarkable enterprise is an

alternative narrative of national security, one that would challenge the militaristic, male version embodied and imposed by authoritarian rule (128-129). 

It cannot be overstated that the movement is led and implemented by women who in principle and in specifics know what the costs of militarism-cum-deforestation (almost always led by men) are for both land and people.

Even if the World Is Ending

I invite you as a reader to ponder the requirement of the Torah provision, the crisis of development in my home town as in many other places, the threat posed by the second “great eagle” in Ezekiel, and the future of the forests of Kenya. It is all of a piece. It is all an ongoing relentless contest between the proper caretakers of creation and the convergence of aggressive militarism, predatory economics, and the politics of hubris. The latter converge in order to regard creation as a tool for their fear, anxiety, greed, and ready violence. The amazing reality in Kenya (that Moses already had in purview) is that resistance and alternative are possible; but such resistance requires sustained courage, and such alternative requires daring imagination.

Perhaps you know this: When asked what he would do if he knew the world was coming to an end, Martin Luther famously responded:

If I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would plant a tree.

I do not know if Luther would regard such an act as “an iconic act of civil disobedience,” but it would be nothing less than that. And given Luther’s acute sense of drama, he likely would have taken it in exactly that way. Such an iconic act of civil disobedience is surely what James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Resistance (1985) means by his title phrase, the capacity of the vulnerable and the resourceless to resist and fight back against great odds in a way that does not lead to punishment or retaliation. It is surely time in the church to educate people in such iconic acts of civil disobedience. The matter is compellingly understood by a host of insistent women in Kenya. Such a host of brave women is an alternative to those who would, in their fearful greed, destroy our planet. It has turned out in Kenya that the regime was powerless in the face of tree-planting women. Nixon rightly judges that such issues are crucial not only in an era of Kenyan authoritarian rule, but among us in our “developed” context. Thus we can see that Moses was well ahead of his time, as he is so characteristically, when he declared:

You must not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them (Deuteronomy 20:19)!

Walter Brueggemann

October 25, 2022