Why did the animals die in the flood?
Ubiquitous human violence that filled the land made God decide to snuff “them” all out, both humanity and all nonaquatic living beings, by a colossal deluge. Surely, no animal could have played any role in the openly and rampantly violent robbery or the petty crime that polluted and consequently doomed the human race – and collaterally all land and avian beings – to annihilation by water.
In my new book Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf & Stock Publishers), I quote Rabbis of yore who nonetheless chose to link the animals to the overall state of human decadence; Viz. animals “too must have ‘certainly’ acted immorally when mating unnaturally with different species. Rabbi Azariah (quoting Rabbi Yehudah Bar Simon) knows to say that ‘the dog mated with the wolf and the rooster did the same with the peacock’; thus, they too corrupted their ways.”
However, the Talmudic Rabbi Yochanan comments that it was humans who forced their animals to mate with a different kind, and perversely even forced themselves on animals. Thus, humans, guilty of evil acts they perpetrated on each other, also destined the animal kingdom to a calamitous submergence.
“In the Levitical legislation that prohibits either a man or a woman from mating with a livestock animal that the Bible exclusively condemns as ‘perversion’ (Lev 18:23), both the human and the animal must be stoned to death, even though it is clear that the animal was forced against its will into such a coupling. Hence Rashi’s rhetorical question (per Lev 20:15): ‘If the person committed a wrong, what wrong has the animal done?’ [Yet] …killing the animal is required because by enticing the human it became ‘the cause of the sin’ …
Indubitably, no animal deliberately seduces a human to engage in sexual intercourse, yet the animal must pay with its life for the depravity of the domineering human. What the rabbis’ commentaries amounted to was nothing but imputing humanity’s culpabilities to the animals with no biblical allusions to animals’ degeneration to back up such a narrative. The animals were, thus, predestined to perish in the forthcoming mega tsunami as collateral victims for man’s moral collapse.
The Talmudic Rabbi Yehoshua ben Karcha offers a different perspective, though still supportive of the logic behind the decimation of animals, by taking the anthropocentric view. To wit, animals were destined to perish because their subservient role in creation was to benefit humans. Therefore, the latter’s forthcoming demise would render the animals dispensable and redundant with the extinction of humanity by water; hence, their collective death jointly with the humans they served would make sense.
Such a human-centered perspective is not unlike the ancient pagan Egyptian practice of killing food animals like ducks and geese, and then mummifying them for burial next to deceased humans to provide them with food in the afterlife.” Animals thus had to die because humans did; and so it was by flood as the Noah weekly Torah portion narrates.