Stan Rice has recently published another novel, The Almond Branch, in the Under the Sun series. This series poses the question, what is it that God is doing in this world under the sun? The phrase comes from Ecclesiastes, which is the almost-agnostic book in the Old Testament. Rice speculates on answers to this question: in the time of Solomon (Among the Lilies); in the last days of Jerusalem (this novel); in the Middle Ages of Europe (Paraclete); and in a modern Amish community (Blue Wild Indigo).
Here is the author’s summary from Amazon:
In Jerusalem, immediately before its conquest by Babylon, Jeremiah is on his way to succeeding his father as a priest. Even when they are children, Miriam loves Jeremiah, but Jeremiah is clueless about human love even when he grows up. He is borderline crazy and keeps alienating himself from his society. He thinks God speaks to him through puns. Jeremiah’s father has pagan images in addition to Jewish ones, to appease Jebusite neighbors, but Jeremiah destroys them. And it keeps getting worse, until Jeremiah has to live in a cave with the other prophets. Miriam is torn between a marriage proposal from an older but very good man, Saad, and Jeremiah’s invitation for her to join the prophets, though not as his lover.
Even after Miriam marries Saad, Jeremiah still seeks her comradeship. The king counts on Egypt’s help against Babylon, only to be disappointed. A wealthy businessman and his grim brother, modeled after Trump and Pence, cannot save Jerusalem either. While Jerusalem suffers starvation and cannibalism during the Babylonian siege, the king throws Jeremiah into a cesspit, from which he is rescued by a steward modeled after Obama and a court jester modeled after Biden. Jeremiah rejoices when the tension is broken and Jerusalem falls, and all the skilled people, including Saad, are deported. Miriam stays behind and rescues the Old Testament wisdom literature—which is still an embarrassment to conservatives—from being lost.
What could Old Testament prophets and modern scientists have in common? I have two answers for you.
First, both have to be observant of everything, all the time, and to ask questions about why things are as they are. When Miriam and Jeremiah are at a little waterfall, where the water drops create a rainbow, they think about why there are water drops. That is, why does water form into drops rather than just falling down to the earth as lots of individual little packets? This is a question that may never have even occurred to you to ask. You have to watch nature very closely and think about it. Jeremiah’s explanation is definitely pre-scientific, saying that almost infinitely small angels are holding onto one another, and they create the rainbow colors. Before you laugh, consider substituting “molecules” for “angels” and “hydrogen bonds” for “holding onto.” Jeremiah’s theory (as invented by Rice) is more like Newton’s theory (as accepted by modern science) than it is like Goethe’s theory.
But, maybe, Goethe might turn out to be partly correct. To Newton, colors were physical properties of light of different wavelengths, period. To Goethe, there was a psychological component, in which human perception made the colors different. We now know that the stimulation of the three kinds of color receptors in the retina sends signals to the brain to create the illusion of color. There actually is such a thing as psychological color!
Also, when Miriam and Jeremiah were out at the swamp, they saw a bittern camouflaged in the reeds. They almost didn’t see it, until Jeremiah told Miriam what to look for.
Second, a scientist can be a prophet if s/he explains the political and social consequences of scientific discoveries. Not every scientist does this. Thousands of scientists studied nuclear physics, but only a few (such as Andrei Sakharov and Albert Einstein) have spoken out to political leaders about the dangers of atomic weapons. A prophet might predict, wrongly (so far) that the world will be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust. If prophecy is mere prediction, then Sakharov and Einstein were wrong. But prophets open out minds to recognize the possibilities. In this sense, Sakharov and Einstein were true prophets, and though their predictions were wrong their prophecies helped to save the world, at least so far, from nuclear disaster.
Many prophets, ancient and modern, have been hated by political leaders. Those of us who are prophets about environmental disaster are hated by conservative politicians and by the corporate leaders who support them. Though the attacks sustained by Michael E. Mann have been much more mild then what Jeremiah experienced, they were inspired by the same moneyed interests that drove rich Israelites to hate Jeremiah.
