“The meek shall inherit the Earth” is a well-known biblical phrase that has always made me wonder. It’s 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? How have those who currently ‘own’ the Earth been vanquished so that it can be ‘inherited’? Are we talking about another global catastrophe where God selectively punishes the ne’er-do-wells, but leaves the pious alone, such as ostensibly occurred during the Great Flood? Or is the inheritance supposed to occur as a result of the Rapture? I think we can eliminate the latter as a possible interpretation, because wouldn’t the meek be the first to be raptured, thereby implicitly not granting them the Earth?
I would like to propose a radical idea. Jared Diamond, in his 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 extremely resilient to adverse climatic events. Droughts, for example, which decimate crops, livestock, and 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 exactly illustrates what “the meek shall inherit the Earth” is meant to suggest — that when the next catastrophic event hits the Earth (the next Carrington event, the next great flood, the next meteor strike…), those of us reliant on artificial infrastructures and systems for our food supply — those of us who have become disconnected from our natural environment and have lost the skills required to navigate and live in harmony with the natural world — will perish in untold numbers, bearing out the horrors of every post-apocalypse story ever told. And it is 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, quite literally inherit the Earth, since all other ‘civilization’ will have collapsed and been extinguished.
Moreover, 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 enamored with or reliant on our technological creations. Nature will set things level again and knock us literally back to the stone age once more. And having still not understood the lesson, in our hubris we will begin yet again to rebuild our laughably fragile ‘modern’ civilization.