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Furthermore, this ‘grey’ mandate is reinforced later on (Gn 9:2) and celebrated (Ps 8). Not identifying ipso facto with the human characters but having empathy with earth as a character, Habel (ibid) indicates imaginatively what her ‘voice’ might sound like:

"Where is the justice in such a mandate? Why should I be subdued as if I were an enemy to be placed under foot? Why should the creatures I brought to life be treated as the slaves of human beings? (p. 68)"

Habel then presents an alternative humans-to-serve-text, Genesis 2:15: ‘Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to serve and preserve it.’ This is an alternative way of life, even an alternative God speaking here, not to be ‘harmonised’ with Genesis 1:26–28. Finally, Habel (2009:74–77) emphasises the way of Jesus, of serving rather than dominating (Mk 10:42–45). This is choosing the green rather than the grey way of life.

There are other mighty-acts-of-God texts that Habel highlights, but the Old Testament equivalent of the saving act of Jesus in the New Testament, namely the Exodus event, will suffice as an example. The plagues, the departure from Egypt and the crossing of the Reed Sea (Ex 13–14) all form part of this prominent event. Habel (2009:16–22) focuses especially on the waters of the Nile and that of the Reed Sea to demonstrate the collateral damage inflicted by God to nature in saving Israel. The Nile is ‘assaulted’ through the plagues (e.g. Ex 7:19) and the waters of the Reed Sea forced to swallow the Egyptians. These saving acts are suspiciously anthropocentric and ethnocentric and become destructive for earth’s natural eco-systems. The celebration in Exodus 15 depicts God as a mighty warrior and not as a compassionate creator (Habel ibid:84). Empathising and retrieving the voices of these innocent receivers as the stage upon which God’s wrath is enacted against Israel’s enemy, one can repeatedly after every plague hear the desperate call of the suffering waters of the Nile: ‘We are innocent!’ (Habel ibid:84). Or one can hear the call of the earth (and Reed Sea), voiced by Habel (ibid:85) as an (ironical) rhetorical question: ‘I am happy that you employed my winds to disrupt the flow of the waters and destroy people … opened my deeps so that I could swallow humans …?’ Bypassing some green texts (e.g. Ps 104; Jr 12:11; Hs 4:1–3) on the way to Jesus, Habel (2009:90) finds Jesus’ healing acts especially ecologically meaningful (e.g. Lk 5:17– 26) in so far as they demonstrate Jesus’ ‘intimate interaction with the human body’ with a spiritual dimension obviously also implied. Added to this is the act of God becoming flesh through Jesus (Jn 1:14) – ‘God became a piece of Earth – like Adam’ (Habel 2009:94). God joins the web of creation, identifies with and permeates creation (Habel ibid:94). By associating God so closely with nature, it begets (ultimate) intrinsic worth!

The third set of grey texts concerns the promised-land syndrome, the divine right that allowed ancient Israel to invade and possess Canaan: ‘The Lord has given us this land!’ (Jos 2:10). The book of Joshua has become the charter for the promised-land syndrome (Habel 2009:28), not only for Israel but for all colonising countries later on, invading the new world. As with the Exodus event, the collateral damage destroying nature continues, for example: ‘With the destruction of Jericho, “oxen, sheep and donkeys” are all destroyed as an act of devotion to God’ (Jos 6:21; Habel ibid:32). Ironically at the forefront, even with cosmic support (Jos 10:11–13), is the warrior God. The rights of the Canaanites who have been custodians of the land for centuries are totally ignored (Habel ibid:28). The empathising voice that Habel (ibid) gives to the land sounds as follows:

"Why devote cities and landscapes to destruction rather than preservation? Why, after rescuing his people from Egypt with mighty acts of destruction, does this God feel constrained to do the same to the peoples and the land of Canaan? (p. 98)"

A few green moments en route to the New Testament is the Sabbath text and the depiction of Canaan as Yahweh’s sanctuary where God resides on earth (Ex 15:17; Lv 25–27). When Israel lost their land during the exile, a new promised land is depicted, a return to Eden where miraculously even the deserts will overflow with water (Is 43:19–21), the wolf and the lamb will feed together (Is 65:25) and the normal river ecosystems of earth is turned upside down in their abundance (Ezk 47). Habel (2009) lets the earth protest to these unnatural ecosystems:

"Why does God suggest a future where the new Promised Land is itself alien to the very creation God has celebrated in the past? These images of a transformed land, or even heaven may be grand and glorious but they are hardly green – at least not as I have known green in the past. (p. 106)"

When Habel again offers Jesus as the green answer to the grey inconvenience of some Bible traditions, he interestingly opts for a Jesus that is part of the here and now and not reigning in some distant celestial abode where the earth has been dissolved (e.g. 2 Pt 3:10; see also Phlp 2:4–11). He finds Romans 8:18–27 a powerful green text where, whilst creation continues, it groans together with humanity and the suffering Spirit, anticipating healing from all the wrongs done to it (Habel 2009:111). The cosmic Christ’s suffering, reconciliation and healing effects all of creation (ta panta), not only humans (Col 2:20), and shows God ‘… at one with creation’ (ibid:113). Habel (ibid) summarises:

The green texts identified above have tended to locate God in, with and under creation; Creation is God’s sanctuary, world – or even body. The grey texts locate God outside of creation, intervening and interrupting the natural ecosystems of Earth. http://www.ve.org.zadoi:10.4102/ve.v35i1.1310