“Who, not What”: Discerning the Presence of and Rereading the Role/s of Creation Community in the So-called ryb in Micah 6:1-8

Since 2000, the publications of the Earth Bible Project (EBP) have significantly helped address the ecological crisis by reading the biblical text “with Earth as a subject rather than an object in the text,” and “with a declared consciousness of ecojustice”. This paper presents the EBP’s six ecojustice principles – intrinsic worth, interconnectedness, voice, purpose, mutual custodianship and resistance – and the proposal of its critics to consider them as “heuristic keys.” Employing these ecojustice principles/heuristics keys by way of the encompassing term “integrity of creation” facilitates posing new questions and gathering fresh insights in discerning the presence of and rereading the role/s of the creation community in the so-called byr-pattern in Micah 6:1-8. The paper delves on these issues as it (1) focuses on their role as witnesses (Mic 6:1-2); (2) discerns the presence of other members of creation and recaps their role/s in the making, breaking and keeping of the covenant with YHWH (Mic 6:3-5); (3) tackles the ecological crisis as evidence of covenant violation (Mic 6:6-7); and (4) proposes ways to re-establish the integrity of creation as a sign of covenant renewal (Mic 6:8). The discovery that the pericope calls people to shift their way of thinking from “what” to “who” or “who, not what” mobilizes the rich resources and creative potential of scripture and its interpretation. This way of reading the text with Earth will certainly help in the “remaking of the moral imagination” that the environmental crisis requires of those who dynamically engage with the biblical text.status: accepte