Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 8 - The Tulsa Zoo will add a display featuring the biblical account of creation following complaints to a city board about other displays with religious significance, including a Hindu elephant statue. Read the Rest.
I don't obsess about creationism, despite my post earlier this week. But this story gave me one of those "what the #@%*" moments when I came across it. It raises a lot of questions, not least of which is how exactly you represent this event? Will they hire a local sculptor to fashion that "dome above the heavens" that became the sky? And how will they handle Eve's creation out of Adam's rib? That brings us to the issue of nudity, which might discomfit pious Tulsans. Maybe we'll only see Adam and Eve in their fur-clad, post-lapsarian phase.
Seriously, though, this is sad. Not because it's unscientific or outside a zoo's purpose (though a case can be made for these), but because it's a lost opportunity. Why not create displays of the fauna and habitats of the biblical lands? What about exhibits demonstrating the role that various animals played in cultures of the ancient middle east? ( I suspect the Hindu elephant statue is actually serving a function of that kind.) What exactly is, say, that "pelican of the wilderness" that a psalmist referred to, and what response might it evoke in audiences of the time? Exhibits of this type would be practicable, and not without spiritual value for those who sought it.
In Bruce Feiler's wonderful book Walking the Bible, an Israeli man considers the question of whether the Torah's stories are true, and concludes that establishing their literal truth is beside the point. Where he lives, he can see the places where the stories are set, where the heroes of the ancient Hebrews performed their deeds and the covenant relationship between God and his people took shape. For him, regular, immediate contact with these places gives the texts connected with them an authority and substance beyond what any doctine may confer. A number of writers have observed that landscapes validate the stories of Native American groups in a similar way. (See Barry Lopez's "Landscape and Narrative" and Leslie Marmon Silko's "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.")
The stories of the Bible are clearly important to many in the community this zoo serves. Seeing some of the material context of those stories might give them an immediacy, a materiality--and maybe even a dimension of truth--that reading alone does not. Imagine displays like "What Birds would Jesus Watch?" or "Running with the Bulls of Bashan." Aquarium tanks could display the sorts of fish that Peter and Andrew were hauling out of the sea of Gallilee (something I've always wondered about myself).
Whatever their potential appeal to Christians, though, such exhibits would be at least as much in the service of natural history as of faith. One wouldn't need to believe in a word of the Bible to appreciate them.
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