Stan Rice has just published another novel, Among the Lilies, the first novel in the trilogy Under the Sun. The central character is Elah, who is the scribe who writes the things that King Solomon takes the credit for: Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs, as well as many other Old Testament writings.
The summary from Kindle is:
Elah, the narrator, is a servant in one of King Solomon’s harems. While this sounds like the best job in the world, Elah’s work is way below his mind. He spends all the time he can thinking and writing about what, if anything, God is doing under the sun. But then he meets and loves Henna, the only black woman in Jerusalem. She is confined to her stepfather’s walled garden. Elah risks his life to meet Henna in the garden.
While in a cavalcade to the cedar forests of Lebanon, which he intends to cut down to make his palace, The King (who resembles Elvis) elevates Elah to the position of chief scribe. When The King sees Henna, he decides to add her to his stable of wives. Meanwhile Gomer, who becomes the woman in charge of the royal kitchens and is an expert in poisonous wild plants, is not at all pleased. She wants Elah for herself, and doesn’t she try to do something about it. But she cannot keep Elah from meeting Henna again. His quest fails.
Elah becomes a leader of revolutionary forces against The King. Elah finally finds Henna in the muddy eroded landscape that used to be the forests of Lebanon. The King captures Elah and offers him the choice between death and not quite being dead.
In order to build his Temple and Palace, Solomon must totally destroy the forests of cedars in Lebanon. They were legendary before him, but today very little remains of the fabled cedars. This photo shows one of the last remaining groves of Cedrus libani today.
The forests are magnificent when Solomon first visits them and contracts with King Hiram to cut down the trees. He just doesn’t understand that a bunch of gilded trunks in a Temple are nothing compared to the living forest from which they came. At the end of the novel, all that remains of the forest is mud, which consumes Elah and Henna and delivers them to their downfall.
History books seldom include the environmental devastation that comes with the fall of civilizations. Early historical records tend to just be a list of kings and battles. Historians now routinely include economics and sociology in their explanations of the rise and fall of civilizations. One of the early historians to include geography in his European histories was Marc Bloch, from Strasbourg, where I now live. But world history seldom includes the environment, something that works like A Forest Journey and Collapse are helping to rectify.
But you can find an environmental explanation for the collapse of societies even in the Bible itself. The Israelites were commanded to let their farmland rest every seventh year (the “sabbath of the fields.”) They apparently never did so. After 470 years, the Israelites owed a debt of 70 years to the land. This law is stated right after the ten commandments in Exodus 23:10-11. In Leviticus 26:34-35, Moses quoted God as saying that if the Israelites did not let the land rest every seventh year, Israel would be conquered by enemies, the land would lie desolate, and then the land would “enjoy its rests.” According to the Second Chronicles 36:21, this is exactly what happened. “The land enjoyed its rests” for seventy years, not incorporated as a part of the Israelite economy, but all at once, after its collapse, during the Babylonian captivity. We have not yet, even today, learned the lesson that we have to treat God’s Earth with respect if we are to survive.
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