Subdue and Dominion

Subdue

The world was created for human beings. It was a “good” world, for us. And God tells us what we are to do with the rest of creation. We are to subdue it and have dominion over it, something reiterated in Genesis 9:1-3 and Psalm 8. When we look at the Hebrew words for “subdue” and “dominion” we see just what God wanted from us. The Hebrew word for subdue is כָּבַשׁ and it’s a very harsh word which literally means “to trample on.” According to an authoritative Lexicon it means to “tread down, beat or make a path, subdue; 1. bring into bondage, 2. (late) subdue, force. [Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon]. We see this word used in Zechariah 9:15 of Israel trampling on the weapons of her enemies. In Jeremiah 34:11 it’s used of slave owners taking back released slaves and subduing them again. The word “subjugate” would be an appropriate word for what this word means, and doing this demanded force. The same word is used by king Ahasuerus who was angered at what he considered Haman’s attempted sexual assault (”subduing”) of Queen Esther, in Esther 7:8. It’s also the derivative word for the word “footstool.” What God said was for us to make the rest of creation a footstool for our own purposes.

Dominion

Roderick Nash, a history and environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sums it up in these words: “The image is that of a conqueror placing his foot on the neck of a defeated enemy, exerting absolute domination. Both Hebrew words are also used to identify the process of enslavement. It follows that the Christian tradition could understand Genesis 1:28 as a divine commandment to conquer every part of nature and make it humankind’s slave.” [The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 90].

-The Christian Delusion, John Loftus

Inter-Dependence

“Human beings were not created in the image of some external deity; we developed out of the evolutionary soup as part of the fabric of life itself. DNA evidence today demonstrates that we are kin not only to apes, but to cabbages. We are part of an emerging life force sharing a common environment with every other living thing. No creature can dominate the world, as those called Homo sapiens have sought to do, because all life is radically interdependent.

-John Shelby Spong

Modeling

Gordon Wenham, concurs. He claims that although man rules over the world, he “rules the world on God’s behalf,” and as such in this text “mankind is here commissioned to rule nature as a benevolent king, acting as God’s representative over them and therefore treating them in the same way as God who created them. This is of course no license for the unbridled exploitation of nature.”

SO let us look at how the god who created them treated them.
He set up an unwinnable situation, then punished them perpetually for failing it.

The people in Biblical times conceived of God based upon this brutal world and the brutal rulers they have known. This God can be cruel. He can be kind. He is cruel with those who do not submit to his rule and obey his every command. He can be kind with those who do. This God can slam the world with a flood for disobedience, require Abraham to sacrifice his only son, pulverize the Egyptian nation with devastating plagues, send snakes to kill 3000 people for their disobedience, and be pleased when babies are dashed against the rocks (Psalms 137:9). He can send a drought or famine or plague of locusts or even another nation to kill every man women, child and animal for being disobedient. This God also threatens us with eternal punishment if we don’t think the evidence to believe in him is convincing. This God is described as a God of War, a Jealous God, and an Avenging God. This would be the divine model we find as the model for man’s given lordship over the earth. Be kind to subjects who are in obedience. But be very harsh toward those subjects who are disobedient. Trample on them. Break them down. It was a patriarchal world. Mankind was to dominate over the world just as God ruled. And so it couldn’t have been a pretty world to live in as women, slaves, children or animals. If a fig tree produced fruit, for instance, bless it, but if it didn’t, then curse it as Jesus did (Matthew 21:18-19).