Response to Genesis 1:28

For English we are starting to read Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. The first of the seven books within the The Poisonwood Bible begins on page one and refers to Genesis 1:28 from the Holy Bible

And God said to them,
Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth,
And subdue it: and have dominion
Over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
And over every living thing that moveth upon the earth

My first response was that God must have really wanted humans to think that they were somehow superior to the other creatures and that they had higher power over the earth. The phrase that really caught me was “subdue it”. Here I thought that God was really telling them to use and enforce their power over the earth to gain power and establish their higher ranking in the world. The word “subdue” made me think of the word “submerge”. This made me imagine humans submerging everything else on the earth under some defining level. The phrase “subdue it” leads to the logical next phrase “and have dominion”, which just justifies them establishing their higher ranking in the world. The rest of the quote, I felt, was just an elaboration on that main idea.

The beginning of the quote just has God telling humans to grow and prosper as a race. So while reading, I didn’t think too much of it. The phrase “replenish the earth” was what gave me a hard time and forced me to think about its meaning after reading the whole quote. I had a hard time with it because I kept wondering: to replenish the earth, wouldn’t it have had to been full and then empty? The bible never talks about the earth ever becoming empty before Genesis, it just starts out empty, and then God fills it. I came to the conclusion that God had assumed that humans, after having established their power over the earth, would then execute according to their power and use the resources of the earth for their own means. Because God makes this assumption, he gives humans the responsibility to give back, to take care, and to replenish the earth after doing so.

I context to the The Poisonwood Bible, I would have to infer a number of things. Because I know that Price family is a very religious family having an evangelical Baptist as a father and husband, the book may be about how the Price family lives in response to the message God has sent them through this passage of Genesis. As a human myself, God has put me in a superior position over other, has given me guidelines and permissions for me to interpret into my behavior, as well as responsibilities for the world and other life forms. I believe that the Price family also felt various indications of how to live that God places on them in this passage. The book could be about how they respond to these indications in the way they live. It could also be about how they interpret God’s message or how they find they have misinterpreted it, or if they learn to interpret it differently. It could be about how they treat others, not necessarily plants, animals and resources of the world but other people as well.