Does God Save or Show Compassion to Animals?
The biblical pattern whereby man messes up and animals pay the ultimate price is observable in numerous biblical episodes. They are detailed in my new book: “Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible” (Wipf & Stock Publishers) on which this blog is based. This pattern begins with the devastation of all land and avian animals by the colossal flood that God unleashed for the sins of the human race.
A similar case where animals galore perish as a result of human depravity takes place when God “firebombed” the morally degenerate twin cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham wants the blameless folks of the doomed cities spared, yet he does not mention in his long exchange with God the inevitable collateral demise of animals there. Apparently, the lives of innocent animals were neither on God’s mind nor Abraham’s.
Similarly, this weekly Torah portion of Shoftim presents us with a biblical law known as the “beheaded heifer”. It prescribes the neck-breaking of a she-calf in a ravine as a required ritual for the nearest community in whose vicinity a corpse was discovered, but without any clues as to the identity of the slayer.
The dispatch of the innocent animal was to symbolize the townsfolk’s moral washing of their hands; indeed, a public admission that it was none of them who “shed this blood,” or even saw the killing as it happened (Deut 21:1–9 ). Yet, a heifer was to forfeit its life because a homicide was committed.
The most unfathomable ceremony of the Torah, known as the red heifer statute for neutralizing ritual defilement, is another prime example of ritualizing the cleansing of human contamination by killing a blameless animal, akin to the fate of the Yom Kippur scapegoat.
Such a rare red cow was slain just to have its blood sprinkled “toward the front of the Tent of Meeting” (the mobile sanctuary at Sinai during the Israelites’ long years of sojourning in the desert) before its carcass was burnt (Num 19:2–5).
The cow’s ashes were then used in an obscure fashion to spiritually rid the polluting impurities incurred by a person who touched either a human corpse or even a human bone or a grave, (or was present in immediate proximity to it).
An innocent young cow was thus slain so that persons in a state of procedural defilement would be fit to enter their sacred shrine (to bring in another livestock animal for a sacrifice), with severe divine retribution designated for violators (Num 19:13).
And when an Israelite warrior, one Achan son of Zerah, kept to himself from the forbidden spoils of Jericho, the first city in the promised land to fall into the hands of the Israelites, he, “his sons and daughters, his ox, donkey, and sheep . . . and all that he had” (Josh 7:24) were stoned and burnt by God’s decree, even in the valley of Achor.
Traditional exegesis explains that Achan’s children were his accomplices in either hiding the loot or at least keeping hush about it, thus deserving their execution. Nevertheless, no such commentary refers to the animals that were also killed due to their master’s culpability; though innocent, they, too, became collateral victims.
Like in Jericho conquered by Joshua, where the entire population “and ox, and sheep, and ass” were “utterly destroyed . . . with the edge of the sword” (Josh 6:21), King Saul is ordered by the seer Samuel to exterminate the whole nation of Amalek; a fate that had befallen their animals too.
Despite the psalmist’s assertions that God saves animals or shows them compassion (PSs 36:6 and 145:9), and the significant Mitzvoth seeking to validate and realize that ideal, again and again, it is the innocent animal that is to be dispatched when humans corrupt their ways.