International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research and Growth Evaluation

Ecological Crisis, Gender and Liberation: Reading Ancient Narratives of Disaster in the Age of Climate Displacement

Oliver Terngu Agbile¹, Eugene Ikenna Udemba²

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Abstract

Christian ecological ethics has settled on stewardship as its governing idiom. This article argues that the settlement is not innocent. Stewardship became dominant because it is the one available vocabulary that asks nothing of existing property relations: it regulates how owners behave without asking how they came to own. Set against that idiom, the Hebrew Bible's narratives of disaster tell a different story. The Flood, the Egyptian famine and Joseph's grain administration, the drought of the Elijah cycle, the locust devastation of Joel, and the Babylonian deportations are narratives about who absorbs loss, who administers scarcity, and who is moved. That is also the grammar of climate displacement. Read in this register, Genesis 41-47 is a cautionary text rather than a model, since Joseph's celebrated food-security policy concludes with the land of Egypt consolidated under the crown and its cultivators reduced to tenancy. The article develops three commitments the stewardship literature has largely left aside. First, it reads the disaster narratives as accounts of distributed loss. Second, it takes gender as constitutive rather than incidental, drawing on ecofeminist and African women's biblical interpretation, on the ambivalence of the land-as-female trope in prophetic rhetoric, and on evidence that female-headed rural households lose approximately 8 per cent more income to heat stress than male-headed households in comparable settings. Third, it reads land through liberation theology rather than managerial ethics, treating Jubilee as redistribution and the preferential option for the poor as a hermeneutical starting point for adaptation policy. The existing evidence on faith-based resilience is retained but reoriented toward mobility: slow-onset displacement, planned relocation, and the fact that people displaced by climatic change fall outside the 1951 Refugee Convention definition. Counter-arguments receive sustained attention, including the charge of anachronism and the likelihood that the Jubilee was never implemented.

Keywords: climate displacementbiblical disaster narrativesecofeminist hermeneuticsliberation theologyJubilee and land redistributiongender and climate vulnerability

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Licensed under CC BY 4.0.