Dig, Baby, Dig!
Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash
The prophetic traditions of the Old Testament voice an ongoing and relentless critique of the Great Powers that endlessly preyed upon vulnerable Israel. In their threats against vulnerable Israel, funded by arrogance, they are taken to be in violation of the rule of YHWH. The Great Powers are marked by hubris, the arrogant claim that they are autonomous, accountable to no one, but completely free to engage in endless inhumane exploitation. The two most obvious prophetic critiques of such policy concern Egypt and Assyria under Sennacherib.
-Concerning Egypt in its imagined autonomy:
I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt,
the great dragon sprawling in the midst of its channels,
saying, “My Nile is my own; I made it for myself.”
Because they said, “The Nile is mine, and I made it,” therefore, I am against you, and against your channels, and I will make the land of Egypt an utter waste and desolation, from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border of Ethiopia (Ezekiel 29:3, 9-10).
The mighty Pharaohs had no clue that they were answerable to the creator God in a way that curbed their power.
-Concerning Assyria:
For he says:
Are not my commanders all kings?
Is not Calno like Carchemish?
Is not Hamath like Arpad?
Is not Samaria like Damascus?
As my hand has reached to the kingdoms of the idols whose images are greater than those of Jerusalem and Samaria, shall I not do to Jerusalem and her idols what I have done to Samaria and her images (Isaiah 10:9-11)?
By your servants you have mocked the Lord,
and you have said, “With my many chariots I have gone up to the heights of the mountains,
to the far recesses of Lebanon;
I felled its tallest cedars, its choicest cypresses,
I came to its remotest height, its densest forest.
I dug wells and drank waters,
I dried up with the sole of my foot all the streams of Egypt (Isaiah 37:24-25).
In every case, such imagined autonomy is answered, in prophetic voice, by the assertion of the rule of YHWH that renders the mighty powers as penultimate. The mighty powers are propelled by consuming hubris of which Timothy Garton Ash, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe (2023) can write concerning what went wrong in the world by 2008:
If I had to summarize the answer to that question in a single word, it would be hubris—the tragic flaw of excessive self-confidence. The hubris of the American “new Rome” matching into Iraq. The hubris of Cool Britannia and the hubris of my Polish friends, confident that fish soup had been turned back into an aquarium. The hubris of believing that the enlargement of the American-led geopolitical West into eastern Europe could continue smoothly without facing a fierce challenge from revanchist Russia. The hubris of the eurozone, perfectly captured in Trichter’s 2008 speech of neo-Carolingian self-congratulations. The hubris of a European Union that, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, in 2007, saw itself as a model that the world might now respectfully emulate…The hubris, too, of a globalized, financialised capitalism which boasted that it had put an end to “boom and bust” and found in the free market something like a universal panacea (p. 238).
Such contemporary acts and policies of hubris reiterate that of the ancient Great Powers.
That presumed autonomy could imagine that the mighty rulers had complete control of creation and were free to exploit as they wanted. Thus they engaged in wholesale extraction of the riches of creation from which came wealth, power, influence, and grandeur. The mantra of such limitless extraction is, “Dig, dig, dig,” or more poignantly, “Dig, baby dig.” The great powers knew, early on, that the earth, just below its surface, held great wealth that awaited extraction.
Job 28 is a most singular probe that celebrates the capacity to extract wealth from the earth (vv. 1-6). At the outset, verses 1-2 identify the extraction of gold, silver, iron and copper. The culmination concerns sapphire and gold (v. 6). The great imperial regimes were indeed masters of creation, free to extract and plunder in order to transpose raw materials into visible wealth that they could possess and control. They had no restraint, nor had they any reason to limit their great appetite for extraction. In ancient Israel the great practitioners of such inordinate wealth were imitated by Solomon. On a smaller scale than the great empires, he too is presented as a dealer in such extracted commodities:
Moreover, the fleet of Hiram which carried gold from Ophir, brought from Ophir a great quantity of almug wood and precious stones (I Kings 10:11).
And indeed, Solomon’s great wealth is displayed in his ambitious building projects that teem with gold. He too understood the advantage of extracted wealth for the enhancement of his regime. The by-word of all these regimes is, “dig, baby, dig.” And of course that ancient mantra is only slightly modified in the extractive formula of modern day leaders with chants, “Drill, baby drill.” Now for them it is oil, not precious stones. But the project is the same; extraction from the earth turned into great revenue for wealth and power. Indeed for modern day leaders “drill, baby drill” becomes the solution to all economic problems. The community gathered around them, moreover, is simply a replay of the old exhibitionist effort of the ancient regimes that exuded hubris, recognizing no restraints.
But Job 28’s celebration of extraction reaches a pivot point of rhetorical disruption.
The disruption is marked by an interruptive preposition: “But.”
But where shall wisdom be found?
Where is the place of understanding (v. 12)?
It is an odd disruption. Neither wisdom nor understanding had been on the horizon of the extractors. They had prospered and gotten along very well without such a reflective pause. But the text of Job 28 insists upon such a reflection, and disrupts the self-congratulatory wealth of extraction by a question that is not easily dismissed. What about wisdom that runs beyond and below knowledge, information, and know-how to a dimension of human existence that the extractors had neglected?
The poem goes on to provide an answer to this disruptive question. First, negatively: wisdom is not to be found in the deposits of the sea, the depths that the extractors might probe:
The deep says, “It is not in me,”
and the sea says, “It is not with me (v. 14).
It cannot be acquired by the possession of precious stones (vv. 15-19). The technological capacity of the great regimes offers no clue to this more elemental discernment. But then positively:
God understands the way to it,
and he knows its place (v. 23).
God knows! God knows what the extractors do not and cannot know.
God as the creator does work that consists in wind and water, rain and thunderbolt (vv. 24-26). God’s preoccupation with wind and water is, ironically, power that is not extracted, and that is not readily reduced to a salable commodity. It is for that reason that the extractors abhor wind power and water power; they cannot market it. But the creator God specializes in the very forms of power that the extractors reject and fear. Wind power and water power are embraced because they are not easily monetized. The creator God specializes in modes of power and sources of energy that are beyond conventional commoditization.
This chapter in Job begins with recognition and even celebration of the human capacity for extraction. But it ends on a very different note. Verse 28 may strike one as an add-on. Unless, to the contrary, we take verse 28 to be the point and purpose of the entire chapter:
Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom;
and to depart from evil is understanding (v. 28).
“Fear of the Lord” is the substance of wisdom! It includes recognition of the ultimacy of YHWH that renders all else penultimate. More than that, it summons all to awe; human persons are fully accountable to the rule and intent of the creator God. Such an awareness would have eluded the great empires that specialized in extraction. “Fear of the Lord” is a recognition that the creation answers to the creator; as such creation is not to be viewed as a field of extraction, but rather as a life-giving habitat that is entitled to care, protection, and regard. It follows, moreover, that the creator God has, in the covenant of Sinai, set forth norms of proper human conduct and policy; “evil” consists in the violation of those norms. Thus creation, as the gift of the creator, is not available apart from the requirements and expectations of the creator. While the extractors may imagine themselves to be ultimate and autonomous, this final verse insists otherwise.
Of course it will be readily recognized that the substance and intent of verse 28 is the oldest, most long-running dictum of the entire wisdom tradition. It is voiced already in the Book of Proverbs:
Do not be wise in your own eyes;
Fear the Lord, and turn away from evil.
It will be a healing for your flesh
and a refreshment for your body (Proverbs 3:7-8).
To “fear YHWH” is reinforced here by the refusal to be “wise in your own eyes.” The practice of such fear, moreover, is reckoned as restorative, healing and life-giving, the very assurance of wellbeing that is never on offer from extracted precious stones or oil. The extractors wrongly imagine that their great wealth will somehow guarantee their wellbeing. But of course it will not. Such wellbeing is on offer only where life is ordered according to proper fear, and a shunning of evil. The extractors, to the contrary, fear no one or anything, and are free, in their own eyes, to engage in evil as is necessary for self-advancement, self-gain, and self-securing.
The same mantra as verse 28 and Proverbs 3:7 is reiterated at the end of the Book of Ecclesiastes. After the daring probes of the book, the argument comes to the same point:
The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments; for that is the whole duty of everyone (Ecclesiastes 12:13).
Obedience to the commandments governs and curbs our extractive appetites. In the end, human actors are answerable for “every deed.” No exemptions are on offer, not even for the rich and powerful.
This series of texts enunciates two different ways to be in the world. On the one hand, there is the way of autonomy in which extraction is without restraint, and in which extractors may pursue, as an ultimate concern, wealth and power. On the other hand, the way of response to the creator is a way of health and wellbeing that is not defined by extraction, but by answerability to the creator God for one’s way in the world.
It is the work of the church to insist and to exhibit the claim that life of penultimacy before God is a more compelling, more satisfying, and more faithful way to live. That alternative way of life permits and evokes the practice of generous neighborliness, and makes possible peace, wellbeing, and healthiness for all parties. The way of responsiveness to God opens to us all kinds of gifts that are not on offer when we regard ourselves as ultimate.
There is a better way than hubris.
There is an alternative to an extractive existence. There is a way to cherish creation without plunder. Paul termed it, “a more excellent way.” The “less excellent way” majors in
Dig baby dig.
Drill, baby, drill.
The gospel, as an alternative, is a way to share fully the gifts of creation, and so to live peaceably in common wellbeing.
