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Paradise—For You?The Watchtower—2004 | October 15
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a Denis Baly in The Geography of the Bible says: “The nature of the vegetation pattern must have undergone very great changes since Biblical times.” The cause? “Man had need of wood both for fuel and for building and therefore . . . he started to cut down the trees and thus to expose the land to the onslaughts of the weather. The result of this interference in the environment was that the climate . . . was gradually turned into the most important factor in its destruction.”
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Paradise—For You?The Watchtower—2004 | October 15
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16, 17. (a) How did the Promised Land in ancient times differ from the land in more recent times? (b) Why can we believe that the Promised Land was once like a paradise?
16 If you base your view on what much of that region has been like recently, you might imagine an arid land of sand, rocky deserts, and parching heat. However, there is reason to believe that overall the region was quite different in Biblical times. In the journal Scientific American, water-and-soil expert Dr. Walter C. Lowdermilk explained that the land in this region has been “damaged by a millennium of abuse.” This agronomist wrote: “The ‘desert’ that took over the once-flourishing land was the work of man, not of nature.” In fact, his studies indicated that “this land was once a pastoral paradise.” It becomes evident that human abuse has damaged what was “a pastoral paradise.”a
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