Ravens in the Ruins: Birdwatching in the Apocalypse

In the Hebrew Bible, depictions of famine, flood, and the destruction of civilizations are haunted by the presence of ravens. As Jewish and Christian interpreters read these texts, they found the birds who showed up at these sites of death “good to think with.” They considered ravens as they contemplated the pressures of food scarcity in the story of Elijah or the deaths that follow rising waters in the story of Noah. These ravens were neither simple victims nor passive witnesses to these catastrophic events; instead, like the human characters in these stories, they often played active roles in the devastation. This paper examines places in the history of biblical interpretation in which readers thought with ravens as they read these scenes of ecological destruction or precarity, sometimes seeing ravens as a threat to their own survival and other times as a mirror to the devastating impacts of their own hungers and predations.