“The meek shall inherit the Earth” is a well-known biblical phrase that is typically understood to convey the idea that the meek, the pliable, the unquestioning, will be ‘given’ the Earth by God. These are the people who in God’s eyes deserve the Earth for themselves, because they live the favoured lifestyle.
But then where has everyone else in this scenario gone? What has happened such that the Earth is now being ‘inherited’? Are we talking about another global catastrophe where God selectively punishes the ne’er-do-wells, but leaves the pious alone, such as is said to have occurred during the Great Flood? Or is the inheritance supposed to occur as a result of the Rapture where, I guess, somehow the meek don’t get raptured? You’d think it would be the meek getting raptured first, no?
I have a different idea about what that phrase means. Jared Diamond, in his excellent book The World Until Yesterday points out that people who live off the land as hunter-gatherers and have done so for hundreds of generations are very resilient to adverse climatic events. Droughts, for example, which decimate the crops and livestock of modern economies are barely noticed by so-called ‘primitive’ tribes-people who know how and where to find water and the foods available to harvest under virtually any conditions. I think this resilience illustrates what “the meek shall inherit the Earth” is meant to suggest: that when the next catastrophic event hits the Earth (e.g. another Carrington event, great flood, meteor strike, etc…), those of us who have no idea how to feed ourselves except by going to the mall will die in untold numbers, bearing out the horrors of every post-apocalypse story ever told. And it’s only the meek — the tribes-people in the Kalahari Desert, the Amazonian jungle, the New Guinea highlands — that will remain after whatever form that shock takes drives its final nail into the coffin of our global ‘modern’ culture. These people, then, will literally inherit the Earth, since what we call ‘civilization’ will have been obliterated.
I’ll do you one better, though. I think it’s entirely possible that this exact thing has already happened at least once in human history. Numerous eerily similar cultural myths from all over the world describe up to five ‘ages’ of man in which civilization is wiped out time after time by various catastrophic events (one age ends in floods, one by fire, etc.). It makes sense that the bible would record a warning to the future about the dangers of becoming too reliant on our technological creations. Nature will set things level again and knock us literally back to the stone age once more at some point. And with stories becoming legend, and legend becoming myth, in our hubris we will begin again to rebuild our laughably fragile ‘modern’ civilization, to start the cycle once again.