“He gives to the beasts their food,
and to the young ravens who cry.”
We see with natural eyes what we call natural law. We see animals eating, and then our logic finds no need to picture a god atop the food chain. And so we have to mentally edit texts like these and call them poetry, or some such other ill-educated maneuver.
As if ancient man did not see what the beasts did to eat. As if ancient people were stupid.
But they were closer to nature than we are. And these same people were acquainted with suffering and lived with gore. They were not doe-eyed children thronging a nativist dream scene. They didn’t live in peace; they didn’t cringe at the sharp of the sword. They slaughtered these beasts for both food and forgiveness.
He makes the fire His messenger, they would say, and rides on the chariot of the storm. The nations are His footstool, and He rolls up the sky like a kerchief.
All that, and yet when they heard the cry of the nestlings, they thought it is God who fills these mouths with food – even as they watched, close than you or I ever do, the mothers fly to the nest with the worm.
These were not people asleep to the observation of nature, ungifted as we are by the awakening to science. If anything, they watched the woods and flocks closer, for their survival. If anything, they imagined a cosmos both more detailed and larger, both more severe and more gentle, and a God of both fire and morning bread. They were full sophisticates. And they had a singularity of vision that we struggle with, only because we don’t want it.