The Bible: Human and Animal Souls are Equal
As the Torah annual reading cycle resumes on Simhat Torah with Genesis 1, the animal world begins to emerge with God creating “every living creature” – or “nefesh ha-khayah” as in the Hebrew, namely, ‘ensouled’ animal (Gen 1:21). On the sixth “day” of creation God proclaims the forthcoming making of more ‘ensouled’ species (v. 24). As my new book “Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible” (Wipf & Stock Publishers) points out the (Hebrew) word nefesh is commonly lost in translation; it is important, then, to note that animals in God’s creation possess a soul, even as we read in Proverbs (12:10) that “the righteous regards the soul of his animal.”
Significantly, the creator God observes twice on the fifth and sixth days that the creation of animals was “good” (with no strings attached), while no animal species was viewed as “bad” or “wicked.” Ultimately, God will define only the human species as one that “is prone to evil from youth” (8:20). Indeed, the term “an evil animal” surfaces for the first time in the Torah when Joseph’s brothers made it up in scheming to decieve their father Jacob and make him believe that Joseph was devoured by a predator, and not cast into a pit to his demise as they were plotting to do (37:20). In this episode Joseph’s brothers effectively become themselves “an evil animal”.
In the same vein, “the Torah regards a person who slaughters an animal either ‘in the camp’ or ‘outside the camp,’ but apart from the sacrificial system, as a murderer — ‘he has spilled blood, and that man shall be cut off from the midst of his people’” (Lev 17:4).
Is There a Difference Between an Animal and a Human Soul?
In my book I maintain that “the basic parity between a human and an animal soul may be learned from Abraham, who substitutes the offering of his son Isaac to God with a random ram he found entangled in a thicket (Gen 22:13); clearly, only an ensouled creature could be designated as a proxy for a human.” Similarly, the iconic biblical narrative, that of the Yom Kippur mystifying ritual that centers on the ‘scapegoat’ Billy goat which ‘receives’ the people’s sins and carries them into the wilderness of the Judean desert, attests to the idea “that a human soul is not different from an animal soul … To impute such a task to an animal testifies to the essential equality” of either soul to the other.
“Moreover, animals like humans are also subject to a heavenly reward or punishment as we find in the solemn liturgical ode for High Holy Days Unetaneh Tokef (“Now, we declare”). It relates to ‘the souls of all that live’ who pass before God who ‘decide[s] for each creature its cycles of life … [by writing] down its destined decree; for none can be exempt from justice’s eyes!’”
When the prophet Joel says that during a drought “Also the animals of the field desperately cry to You” (1:20), he too attests to the presence of a soul in other creatures besides the human species. “Similarly, God, in his dialogue with Job, refers to the raven’s hungry chicks who implore Him for food (Job 38:41), a point that the psalmist also makes (Ps 147:9). To express their feelings in such a way, those sentient animals must possess a soul. This concept reverberates clearly in the early morning Jewish liturgy, which praises God as ‘the master of all souls, in whose possession is the soul of every living thing, and the spirit of all flesh.’” Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) sums it up: both man and animal “have all one breath [or spirit]; so that man has no preeminence above an animal” (3:19).
