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Troubling waters: the Jordan River between religious imagination and environmental degradation

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Abstract

Rivers are essential, environmental circulatory systems. They are also polyvalent repositories for religious and cultural meanings. This essay wades into the murky waters of the Jordan River and charts its shape from sociopolitical, environmental, and religious perspectives. Hovering in the Jordan’s polysemic eddies, we find quandaries that are epistemic as well as ethical. This essay orients ethical reflection on the disjuncture between the symbolic stature of the Jordan River and its materially degraded status.

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Notes

  1. Hydrology is profoundly impacted by global climate change. This datum rests atop the twentieth-century backdrop of major decline in key riparian systems worldwide. Their decline is symptomatic of a developing situation of global fresh water scarcity.

  2. Interviews were conducted in May 2008, in Israel and Jordan.

  3. These data were generated by the team of hydrologists that I accompanied in May 2008. While clear archaeological data about the precise location of the historical site of Jesus’ baptism is non-existent, historians of religion seem to agree that the two purported sites—one on each side of the river—near the Dead Sea are much more likely to have been close to the sought-after “original” baptism site than the commercialized version near the Sea of Galilee.

  4. The frequency increases when referred to simply as “the river,” although not every use of the term “river” in the Hebrew Bible refers to the Jordan.

  5. She adds that in several of these contexts, “[t]he personification of the Jordan bears similarities to the figure of Neptune or the river god,” but she disagrees with previous interpreters who would read the figure of the Jordan as a competing deity (Jensen 2011, p. 95).

  6. Daniel Hillel’s personal and professional histories with the Jordan River span most of the twentieth century and continue into the twenty-first. As a soil scientist, Hillel has written scholarly books on hydrology and agriculture; as an Israeli and self-proclaimed citizen of the region (not just the Israeli state), he has witnessed the changing shape and allotments of the river. His writings also provide glimpses into what personal—not necessarily religious—memories have to do with the twentieth century changes in the Jordan River.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Theology (Ste. 924), Fordham University, 113 W 60th Street, New York, NY, 10023, USA

    Christiana Z. Peppard

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  1. Christiana Z. Peppard
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Correspondence to Christiana Z. Peppard.

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Peppard, C.Z. Troubling waters: the Jordan River between religious imagination and environmental degradation. J Environ Stud Sci 3, 109–119 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-013-0116-1

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