Rivers

Rivers have a unique place in biblical cosmology. 

Though watery, rivers are unlike the sea, which always threatens to overwhelm the land. Channeled, water becomes life-giving. They keep land fruitful, set boundaries between peoples or join them as liquid roads. A river is water brought into service to human needs, water reconciled with land.

Rivers appear in the theophany of Habakkuk 3. In an exodus reference, the prophet asks if Yahweh raged against rivers or the sea, and sent his cavalry and chariots out to make war (v. 8). From the beginning, Yahweh proved Himself equal to the hydraulic demands of running the universe, and He can conquer and subdue the waters in all their forms.

My interest is in verse 9, where Yahweh doesn’t fight rivers but makes war against the land so that rivers appear: “You cleaved the earth with rivers.” It is another exodus reference, given that Yahweh “cleaved” (baqa) the sea to let Israel pass through, creating a “land river” between the walls of the sea. (There is perhaps a punning reference to creation too, baqa playing off bara, “create.”) Here rivers appear to be war-scars on the land. Yahweh takes out His bow and His rod, and when He is done the land is scarred with rivers.

But these scars on the land become channels of life-giving water, and there’s a double meaning in that. Yahweh blows turn the rocky soil into springs, the spear-thrust opens a wound in the earth of the new Adam, so that He flows with water and blood.