The Bible and Ecology: To the question of attitude to nature in the Old Testament
This article deals with the ecological culture of Old Testament monotheism, and therefore analyzes such books of the Old Testament as the Book of Genesis and the Psalter. We study the question of the relationship between man and nature according to the biblical texts. Based on the analysis of the Old Testament books, we come to an unambiguous conclusion about the absence of such phenomena as anthropocentrism, ecophobia and consumer attitude to nature in the biblical picture of the world. On the contrary, the Old Testament, oddly enough, is very ecophilic, despite its strict theocentricity. According to him, man is recognized as the crown of creation, but at the same time is a part of nature, and therefore receives from God the commandment to "cultivate" it and "keep"it. Thus, man is placed above all other creatures and is given the functions of the "administrator of Eden", but only God is the master of nature. According to the Old Testament, man is fully responsible to God, including for his attitude to nature. As a result, we come to the conclusion that the ecological culture described in the Bible has nothing to do with the global environmental crisis of our time, since it does not form a consumer attitude to nature, but, on the contrary, instills in a person the responsibility for preserving the natural environment.