The Teacher Tree

THE TEACHER TREE

It is a well-established pattern; the promise of land requires it; the text requires it. One who promises land must take the one to whom it is offered up to a high place where, together, they can survey the offer. So, God had called Abram to travel to a new land, a land he would show him. “Abram passed through the land to the place of Shechem, as far as the terebinth [oak] tree of Moreh” (Genesis 12:6). The great oak tree stood in a valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, in the country, twenty-eight miles north of Jerusalem. Here God met him. God not only spoke; God showed himself. God promised to give this land to Abram’s descendants (of which he still had none). But there was still the matter of the showing.

So up they went. The lowest branches were so long and heavy that they sloped gently down and rested on the ground. The Angel of the LORD climbed up first. Then, the two walked from one branch to another as though hiking switchbacks on the side of a mountain. The LORD’s sandals fell to the ground half way up. Abram kicked off his own as well. Such youthful games the LORD expected from an old man.

In the higher branches, they climbed in the traditional way, hand over hand, foot over foot, one branch here, the next there. The leaves formed a huge green orb, a world unto itself. The branches formed a ladder. Suspended between heaven and earth, the LORD and Abram belonged to both and to neither. Sometimes the Angel of the LORD offered a hand to pull Abram up. Other times Abram seemed to grasp at the LORD’s heel. Abram was breathing hard.

At last, their heads popped above the leaves of the uppermost branches. Weight and wind kept them rocking wildly back and forth across the sky, knuckles white to secure their hold. Still, Abram tried to fix his eyes on the horizon. They were in a valley, hemmed in by the hills!

They ducked back inside the leaf-cover. Abram was puzzled, but the LORD simply said, “I have shown you what I have shown you.”

Abram and the LORD descended the great tree. Here Abram built his first altar to God. One could do worse than be a climber of oak trees.

But what had God shown to Abram? 

God showed himself, certainly, though there is nothing here about hiding in the cleft of a rock.

And what else?

A History of Interpretation

Perhaps it was the valley in which tree stood. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, acted on this interpretation. He traveled to the country outside Shechem and purchased the land where our story took place. He too built an altar, and for the first time claimed God as his God (Gen. 33:18ff, see 28:20-22).

But events spiraled out of the new possessor-of-the-land’s control:  Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, was raped by the crown-prince of Shechem; Jacob’s sons, Simeon and Levi, took justice into their own hands and murdered every adult male in the city; his other sons looted the city. Jacob and his family had to flee because around Shechem, the possessor-of-the-land’s name stank to high heaven. Before they ran, Jacob ordered his entire family to bury all their idols. They buried them under the great oak tree.

Much later, at the time of the Exodus, the sons of Jacob had not forgotten the promise, nor had they forgotten that Jacob still owned the land outside Shechem. When the Israelites returned from Egypt, they carried with them the bones of Jacob’s son, Joseph. They buried the bones of the Pharaoh’s right hand man with Jacob’s foreign idols “at Shechem, in the plot of ground which Jacob had bought” (Joshua 24:32).

Joshua acted on a different interpretation of the promise than Jacob: God meant to show Abraham the entire land of Canaan. But they would not buy all this land; they would conquer it. So, then and there, the people all stood in the valley between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim, they swarmed around the terebinth of Moreh in the center of the valley, they swore off the false gods Jacob had buried, and they pledged allegiance to the covenant with God. At the conclusion of the renewal, Joshua “took a large stone, and set it up there under the oak” (Joshua 24:26.)

As if the great tree were not easy enough to identify, it now had two altars and a huge boulder in its shadow.

Perhaps this association with Joshua’s conquest and the blessing of God led would-be-kings to claim the mantle of Shechem and its great oak tree. Whatever the reason, the great oak outside Shechem witnessed history’s slaughter-bench from the front row.

Abimelech, son of the judge Gideon, decided to both make and take the throne of Israel. He rallied the people of Shechem, and then murdered sixty-nine of his seventy half-brothers. Then the men of Shechem “made Abimelech king beside the terebinth tree” (Judges 9:6). The great oak witnessed the act.

At Shechem, Rehoboam planned to be crowned king, succeeding his father Solomon (I Kings 12: 1-19). (This would be the rough equivalent of the King of England traveling to Scotland to be crowned King of the realm.) Jeroboam, echoing the demands of Moses before Pharaoh, (Exodus 5:1-14; I Kings 12) asked that Rehoboam lighten the burden on the people. Rehoboam refused, Judah and Israel split, and Shechem became the first capital of Israel. The great oak witnessed these things.

It would be comforting if we could tell ourselves that these are aberrations, that kings and kingdoms need not always behave in such ways, that this is not what it means to be a nation like every other nation, history need not be so bloody. But that is precisely what scripture denies. Kings are no different than Pharaohs. They take sons, daughters, labor, the best of your land, “and you yourselves will become his slaves” (I Samuel 8:17). This was not what God was promising to Abram.

What, then, did God show Abram?

An Interpretation Outside of History

God showed God’s own self, to be sure. And God showed the land in the immediate vicinity as well. But both were shown in the shade of the oak tree.

So, let’s look more closely at this tree. Let us assume that the God who showed himself to Abram is also the God who showed himself in the Rabbi Jesus’ teachings, life, death, and resurrection. Let us also assume that though she was a unique oak tree, she was still an oak tree.

Abram and Sari would have seen her from a great distance as they descended into the valley. The floor of the valley was lush, though the understory was not dense, and many oaks, the great oak’s children, spread across the valley. Anyone standing high up in the surrounding hills could instantly identify her in the oak forest canopy, presiding like a mother hen with all her chicks gathered round. This was her kingdom.

She stood two-hundred feet high. Her trunk measured one-hundred and fifty inches in diameter. At about twenty feet up, the trunk split into three slightly less massive trunks which wandered off in different directions. The branches stretched out over one-hundred-fifty feet on every side, so that she was actually wider than she was tall. Later rumors claimed that this tree dated from the third day of creation. No one who saw her could doubt it.

Her size drew the attention of the humans. Her height, her girth, her expanse disoriented them. The human eye was constantly drawn further and further, never finding a place to rest. If she had given any indication of a desire and capacity to walk or to speak, the humans would have run in terror. Her little finger truly was larger than Solomon’s thigh, but she did not use that as justification to oppress those who depended on her. Instead, they came to her seeking for that they knew not what. She seemed to simultaneously reveal and hide secrets. That is why they gave her a title: The Moreh Oak Tree. “Moreh” means “teacher” or “oracle,” and her title included the definite article. She was The Teacher Tree.

Moreover, her majesty, the way she evoked the sense of sublimity, offered a glimpse of what humans expected of God. Humans chose her, God consented, and she became a living temple. Abram’s and Jacob’s altars didn’t happen by mistake; they recognized and sanctioned the reality. As long as she existed she would stand as an alternative to the later attempts of kings and priests to centralize religious and political power in the city. No subsequent tabernacle or building of inanimate stones could compare with her.

But she remained an oak tree, and she functioned according to the purposes that God had chosen for oak trees. The laws she followed did not need to be written on stone tablets, for God had implanted them in her DNA. She taught her greatest lessons, she revealed the character of God, not by words, and not by trying harder, but by fully being an oak tree.

The Teacher Tree’s body was the living home for many types of moths, wasps, ants, spiders, and beetles, and so also for mice, chipmunks, and squirrels. Even the sparrow found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she could have her young. Her long and broad leaves, each with nine smooth-edged lobes, provided food for some and nesting materials for others. When the sun’s heat dried up the animals’ strength, she freely offered a refuge to all. Her grey, scaly bark, spotted with patches of lichen, remained cool to the touch even on the hottest days. When the waters above the earth came down in the afternoons, small rivers would course along her limbs turning her bark to shiny coal black ribbons. Even so, her crown of leaves offered a dry refuge under which to wait out the early afternoon storms.

She fed her brood with her own body. In a mast year, over four-thousand pounds of acorns would fall to the ground. These fed the insects and mice as well as the jays, woodpeckers, and squirrels that lived in her branches; they also drew deer, javelina, and an occasional bear. People collected them to make acorn-meal, from which they fashioned breads and cakes. The acorns were a gift for all, without cost. She did not withhold from one animal, nor did she offer more to another. The great oak was a blessing to every biological kingdom.

Solomon’s kingdom was flashy, but it was also fragile, unsteady, and lacking in substance. It lasted barely forty years. The kingdom of The Teacher Tree had no walls or throne; it was so public that people overlooked it. But it was older than the patriarchs, and it outlasted Moses, the judges, the united kingdom, Israel, and Judah. Indeed, it continues to this day.

The land was and is God’s. People will dwell in the land only if they care for it and its creatures as God does.

This is why God wanted to show Abram the great oak, The Teacher Tree.

Thinking Under the Shadow of Moreh

I needed to spend time with stories of The Teacher Tree for two reasons. The first has to do with the nature of philosophy. Philosophy has not known how to think about trees. Socrates says, “I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country” (Phaedrus, 230d). Socrates confesses his urban bias. The Teacher Tree directly challenges Socrates’ account of philosophy and of cities.

Marcus Aurelius seems more promising at first. He valorizes nature in his philosophy:  “The fig tree is true to its purposes, so is the dog, so also are bees. Is it possible, then, that humans shall not fulfill their vocation?”  (Meditations, Book 10.) He is saying that we could learn to be better humans from trees. The irony, here, is that Marcus Aurelius was emperor of Rome, and he wrote his Meditations while in the field at war. Stoicism provides no social ethic, no politics, and no economics to challenge the ways cities and their rulers regard trees and human beings.

The Teacher Tree offered me cover to speak back to the urbo-centrism of philosophers, be they from Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, or Chicago.

The second reason for my focus on The Teacher Tree concerns how we make arguments and decisions.

Imagine a contractor wants to put in a suburb outside Shechem. The proposed name: Oracle Oaks. Of course that old oak tree will have to come down. A meeting is called. Area residents plead The Teacher Tree’s case. They appeal to beauty, sublimity, majesty, sacredness, and history. The zoning commission listens patiently. Then the developer hands out a spreadsheet to explain how much money everyone will make if he can develop Oracle Oaks. Of course the zoning commission will approve the development. They have to. It’s “development” after all. It’s “progress.” If they didn’t do it now, they would do it in five years.

Why is this? Why does beauty count only when it can be had on the cheap, or when it can be sold as “value added”? Why can’t beauty put brakes on the plans of a few humans to bend the earth into their image?

Beauty, sublimity, majesty, the sacred, even history witness to values outside of our selves. They tell us that God, the past, and others pre-date us, they make claims on us, they have their own integrity, and they have their own stories.

We don’t much like this. We are a people who know no other image than our own, and we know no other stories than those we write and in which we are our own heroes.

Israel’s history indicates that as long as we humans believe that we determine the meaning of history and that other creatures have no interests or say, then history will continue to be a slaughter-bench for humans and trees alike.

The Teacher Tree reminds me that the stories of the Bible about a more-than-human world. Humans crown the creation, but we still belong to it. Others creatures have places, and roles, and interests; beauty, sublimity, and majesty are their witnesses.  People will dwell in the land only if we care for it and its creatures as God does. Zoning commissions, take note.   

The Teacher Tree’s story tells me that God’s rule is not the rule of any emperor or governor, that God’s story is not the story of tetrarchs or the brothers of tetrarchs, and that the word of God cannot be controlled or directed by high-priests in temples of stone (Luke 3). The word of God comes in the wilderness, it burns in the bushes, it shows itself beneath the great oak tree where the promise is added to promise, and the creation is made new.