On Humans and animals in the Bible

My newest book Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers) addresses a surprisingly under-explored and little discussed topic; it explores the relationship between humans and animals through biblical and Rabbinic lenses, and approaches familiar narratives from a completely fresh perspective.  The following is not an author’s personal review – only a report about the book’s main themes.                                                                                                                                          ***                                         I was drawn to this biblical Anthro-zoological subject in response to the common instinctive human reactions to human-perpetrated atrocities by calling them (or those who carried them out) the likes of “human bestiality”, “predatory animals”, and “human animals”.

This despite the fact that predatory animals – in contrast to humans – do not engage in mass ravening of lives lacking the energy, motives, let alone the tools, that humans who commit acts of utter cruelty and devastation have. The Torah does not prohibit us from behaving like predatory animals because there are no examples of such animals wolfing en masse on humans, unless doing God’s (rare!) bidding.

***                                                                                                                                                The story of creation keeps reminding us that God endowed all animals with a soul (nefesh), like the one that humans possess.  Indeed, the Torah even defines at some point secular slaughtering of animals as “bloodshed”, the same term used for humans (Lev 17:4). To drive home this message, God blesses animals with fecundity and enters with them the rainbow covenant.

As the Torah shows, a mother animal (or bird) is not essentially different in her maternal feelings than a human mother. Hence, God prohibits certain actions that could, even if symbolically, distress a mother animal. Also, my book sends the reader to animals that the Bible identifies as paragons of emulation for humans (e.g. the ant, the eagle, migratory birds, the ox and the donkey). God also recruit animals (e.g., a fish, a worm, a donkey) to be His emissaries.

 Significantly, God observed twice that the creation of animals was “good”; this very word is glaringly absent from the two narratives that inform us of God’s creation of humanity. The latter did not merit even a different “day” to distinguish it from the day on which other animal species came into being. 

***                                                                                                                                              While there is a tendency to blame the mysterious (or mythical) garden snake as the one creature most responsible for the “fall of man”, my book makes the point that Adam was destined to eat from the forbidden fruit irrespective of the snake’s role in this iconic story. To be sure, the snake did neither pan nor denounce God’s prohibition, or incite the two humans to violate it, yet, God sentenced it most severely.  Henceforth, we will see more and more biblical evidence of the reality whereby people mess up, while innocent animals pay the ultimate collateral price.   

***                                                                                                                                                My book reverses the common presumption of God making garments of leather for the first humans before their expulsion from the garden.  These were not garments of animal skin (orr in Hebrew); they were to cover the humans’ skin but not made of (animal) skin. 

***                                                                                                                                           Given God’s effective prohibition from the start of creation against killing animals, the book argues that Abel’s animal offerings that God accepted were not slaughtered, but gifted in some form alive; likewise, most of the Patriarchs’ altars were bloodless; a sacrificed animal is not the very essence of serving God; as the Bible maintains, one’s moral conduct is.

Noah’s post-flood sacrifice of animals was neither called for nor praised by God; au contraire, God reacts to the first biblical human slaughter of animals by confessing the exclusively-human impulse toward “evil”.  Nonetheless, it is at this juncture that God mysteriously permits Noah and all humanity thereafter to kill animals for sustenance. However, the permission to do so was neither a requirement, nor a value to uphold.  

Still, it was a radical shift from God’s standard of the exclusive all-plant food from the beginning of creation as all species were forbidden to eat meat. This authentic food regimen was kept intact for ten (human) generations through the end of the flood. It is during this era that humans sustain unchanged and long lifespan; it will start to plummet rapidly from the time of God’s reversal on meat. The rigorous dietary laws were given much later to curb man’s obsessive desire for meat eating; by and large, its consumption throughout the Bible was only reserved for special occasions.  Hunting does not seem either as a popular activity among the Israelites.

 Finally, the book concludes with Isaiah’s vision that would return creation to an improved state of the intra-animal and human-animal interactions that characterized the first ten generations since creation. It will be a meatless world and of utter harmony between the species.   

Postscript: Dr. Neal Barnard, founder and President of PCRM summed up the book: “You’ve done an amazing job in providing this information so clearly.”