Did Timothy take Paul’s advice about water?
The headline on the tabloid said, ‘Britain running out of water’. I don’t believe this. Indeed, I never believe scare stories about the world going to pot. But water is a fascinating subject. Considering how important it is to us, we know extraordinarily little about it. G.K. Chesterton used to say, ‘There is something inherently comic in the fact that our water is brought to us by who knows what from who knows where, often hundreds of miles away.’ There are more than 1,408 million cubic kilometres of water on the earth’s surface, and this total has changed little in the whole of geologic time. But nearly all of it is in the oceans (97.25 per cent). All the rain and clouds contain less than 0.001 per cent, and lakes, no matter how big, only 0.01 per cent, while rivers — including giant ones like the Amazon and Mississippi, even less — under 0.0001 per cent. The ice caps and all the glaciers put together amount to only 2 per cent of the total and so even if they melted completely — highly unlikely — the sea level would not rise much.
Years ago, in summer, I used to borrow a delightful little stone whitewashed house overlooking Buttermere in the Lake District. It had a wooden verandah, covered in, and I would sit there in the evenings in all weathers, watching what happened. Everything was to do with water. Across the lake were Red Pike and other gigantic mountains. When it rained, black and pewter-coloured clouds would crash into the tops and release water in prodigious quantities. It would cascade down the gullies in foaming becks, waterfalls and spouts, often leaping high into the air and bringing down with its force countless minute pieces of rock, so not just rain-water but a substantial part of the mountainside was moving downhill into the lake. The lake boiled and bubbled in these storms, greedily gulping down the vast quantities of liquid matter plunging into it. Then on calm days the sun would come out, lake and mountainside would be still, and the becks would dwindle down to a trickle. But the water was still in imperceptible motion, being absorbed by the sun, moving upwards as vapour and forming clouds, and then precipitating itself as rain, and beginning the process all over again. I never tired of watching what I could see of this endless process — part of the hydrologic cycle, as the experts term it — whereby every year nearly 500 cubic kilometres of water evaporate from the land and ocean surface before falling as rain or snow. It takes half of the sun’s total radiation to effect this transformation. Once the evaporated water is in the atmosphere, it is precipitated in about ten days. But if rain-water gets into the oceans via rivers, it is there for an average of 37,000 years.
The Darwinian fundamentalists say that human beings are of no more significance in the deterministic process of nature than pieces of rock or puffs of dust. But at least a chunk of rock has a kind of individuality. So I suppose, briefly, has a raindrop or teardrop. But an undifferentiated drop of water — constantly mingling with other drops of rain, or in streams and lakes, then becoming vapour and clouds, running with countless other drops into oceans for thousands of years of liquid nonentity — can have no such persona. Yet the Darwinians say we are essentially the same as those minute dribbles of liquid. How do people who believe such things live with themselves? What do they think about last thing at night or when they first wake up in the morning? Perhaps their thoughts are no odder than other fundamentalists’ — an Islamic suicide-bomber, for instance. But I wouldn’t like to be one of them, would you?
Fundamentalists — by whom I mean all belief-obsessives, whether deists, atheists or militant agnostics — have peculiar notions about water, and often use it for weird ceremonies. It’s true of course that water and magic go together. Or rather still water. Running water was supposed to make enchantment ineffective. In Burns’s marvellous poem ‘Tam o’Shanter’ (1791) Tam is at one point chased by witches. But he is able to escape from them once he is halfway across the Brig o’Doon because it is a fast-rising river.
In the Book of Numbers, in the Old Testament, there is a sinister water ceremony described in Chapter V. This chapter begins with the Lord telling the Children of Israel to expel from their camp all lepers, and all women with an issue, and ‘whosoever is defiled by the dead’. But it then gets on to the perennially fascinating subject of sex, and adultery in particular. It discusses the case where ‘a man’s wife go aside and commits a trespass against him’; and ‘a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and kept close’, yet the husband is suspicious, ‘and the spirit of jealousy came upon him’. In this case, says Numbers, the priest must ‘take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water’. The suspect woman is then brought before the Lord, with a ‘jeal ousy offering’ (unspecified) which is burnt on the altar. Then the woman drinks the special water. If she is guilty, ‘her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot, and the woman shall be a curse among the people’. But if she is innocent, ‘she shall be free, and shall conceive seed’. This is known as the ‘bitter water’ test, the mixture as ‘the water of jealousy’. In the Bible, water is sinful or a sign of evil only when it is mixed with impurities. Pure water is invariably holy, fruitful and innocent. The righteous man is like a tree planted by streams of water, and the longing of the soul after God is likened to thirst for water. Psalm 63 says, ‘My soul thirsts for thee ... in a dry and weary land where no water is.’ Jesus says in St John’s Gospel, ‘If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink.’ Hence the ceremony of baptism by water. The Book of Revelation says that, even in the Heavenly Jerusalem, there is water. The rivers of the water of life, ‘bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the Street of the City’. When I read this passage, I always think of Damascus, where streams indeed flow through the middle of the streets, for this beautiful city is perched between the desert and the snowy mountains of the Lebanon.
But I am rambling, as I tend to do when I get on to the topic of the Scriptures: they are so mysterious, and often difficult to fathom, even with the help of learned commentators. For instance, in St Paul’s first letter to Timothy — the pious young man whom the Apostle had appointed to look after the affairs of the church in Ephesus — much of the text consists of sound spiritual advice and sensible pastoral hints about dealing with difficult elders or flamboyant widows. Then, suddenly, between a verse condemning physical assault and one warning against those who sin openly, there occurs the only statement in the entire Bible, Old or New Testament, condemning water, and in a medical context too: ‘Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine other infirmities.’ Needless to say, the comments on this odd verse are unsatisfactory. When I was enjoying myself in Ephesus some years ago it is one of the finest of all ruins — I inquired whether the water there was particularly bad, which might explain Paul’s injunction. I was told that, on the contrary, it was especially good, and always had been. Obviously, if Britain really is running out of water, we’ll have to look again at St Paul. Meanwhile, I wonder if Timothy took his advice?
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