From Laws For Donkeys and Oxen To Laws For Humans

The suffering of a donkey “sprawling helplessly under its burden” (Exod 23:5) which must be alleviated is an important concern for the Torah that powers over a person’s conflicting sentiments against the animal’s owner whom he considers as a nemesis. The issue at stake is not about the estranged donkey’s owner, but the innocent animal who needs to be promptly helped, even if the owner was not present at the scene or is indifferent to his donkey’s plight. Similarly, this weekly Torah portion Ki Tetse prohibits punitive measures against a blameless child of a parent who did wrong, or vice versa when the parent is innocent (Deut 24:16); the connection between these two laws is apparent, if not evident. Inasmuch as the animal should not suffer adverse consequences for its owner’s sour relations with another man, so is the human who must not bear the comeuppance of another person who did wrong; the earlier law from Exodus about a donkey in plight seems to have led by an analogous inference to the latter law about humans.

Similarly, the Torah in this week’s portion presents a unique law throughout the ancient Near East that outlaws the yoking of any two animals (e.g., the ox and the donkey whose sizes or weights are considerably different) to the same farming or agricultural tool (22:10). Hence, the smaller animal should not be under stress and pain by keeping pace with the bigger animal, or perhaps the bigger animal should not have to work even harder due to the inability of the smaller animal to match the bigger one’s output; either way, such a pairing is a verboten practice. Other traditional commentators suggest that the ox’s ability to chew on its cud must not be allowed to frustrate the non-regurgitating donkey upon seeing its fellow ostensibly nibbling on food, even as they pull together the plowshare.

Additionally, animals like the ass and the ox must not be muzzled while laboring in a field (25:4) lest they be prevented from snacking on the agricultural produce while doing their work. According to the Talmud, thanks to the Torah’s prohibition on muzzling these animals, human laborers at the same site were also entitled to eat whatever came to hand from the ripened and unharvested crop. As my book “Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible” notes, this is another example how nimbly the Rabbis inferred analogically from laws pertaining to animals to a new law they enacted that relates to humans; they thus recognized the moral equality of animals and humans. Or in the words of Ecclesiastes: “They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over the animals” (3:19).