Eden's Other Residents: The Bible and Animals by Michael J. Gilmour

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eden's Other Residents: The Bible and Animals by Michael J. Gilmour HyeRan Kim-Cragg michael j. gilmour, Eden's Other Residents: The Bible and Animals ( Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014). Pp. xvii + 169. Paper $24. Animals are everywhere in the Bible, not only as props for the stories but also as actors in important relationships with others. Michael Gilmour demonstrates that the Bible has much to teach contemporary readers, not only about the human relationship with God but about human relationships with animals as well. Gilmour admits, however, that animals and the Bible are rather a strange choice of subject (p. 10). By strange he means a low priority for biblical studies and Christian life. This is partly because what the Bible says about animals is complex and ambiguous. G. makes various references that affirm God's ḥesed (mercy and love) toward all creation, while also providing passages that minimize the value of nonhuman creatures in the Bible. A bigger problem, he adds, is the anthropocentric view in the Bible and in most Christian theological traditions. Gilmour's methodology is complex and diverse. His reading of biblical literature is deliberately provocative and disrupts dominant "reading habits" that exclude animals from commentaries and Christian discourse (p. 15). This disruptive approach is most obvious in chap. 2 (e.g., Judg 15:4-5). G.'s presentation is thematic, ranging from "creation," "animal sacrifice," to "visions of eschatological peace and restoration." He closely examines translations of important concepts and words such as "subdue," "manna," "a herd of swine," and "another gardener," and combines these with contextual and historical exegesis. He takes a transdisciplinary approach, engaging classic literary texts and authors (e.g., the Odyssey, C. S. Lewis, Anne Brontë), and historical tales (e.g., Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins's journal). His wide range of sources draws together to weave a variety of cultural threads that address the place of animals in the Bible and in the world. Gilmour's intertextual readings disclose the scarcity of explicit references to animals in the NT but nonetheless are able pick up the echoes of their presence. To do so, he borrows postcolonial cultural critic Edward Said's "contrapuntal" reading strategy, which refers to ideas in the text that become "figures whose writing travels across temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries in unforeseen ways to emerge as part of a new ensemble along with later history and subsequent art" (pp. 30-31). An example of such reading is 1 Cor 9:9-10, [End Page 340] where Paul's teaching on Deut 25:4 ("You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain") transforms a teaching about the treatment of animals into an argument that Christian preachers deserve to be paid. The passage from Deuteronomy is one of the Hebrew Scriptures' most explicit teachings on human responsibility to animals, and one may despair that Paul has replaced this meaning in the NT interpretation. "But all is not lost," G. consoles (p. 33). To offer a contrapuntal interpretation of 1 Cor 9:9-10, he travels back to the broader context of Deuteronomy, whose key message is the well-being and the dignity of the defenseless, which includes people and animals because to "speak of caring for laboring animals is to speak of caring for vulnerable human beings" (p. 34). G. applies the "prophetic suggestiveness" of Said to Paul, who did not abandon the message of Deuteronomy but proclaims that "God is not concerned with oxen only in Deut 25:4, any more than other laws demanding generosity, hospitality, protection, and compassion are about human beings only" (p. 35). Ultimately, G. establishes the relationship of animals–humans–God as a "triptych" (p. 38). Codex Vaticanus, one of the oldest parchment manuscripts of the whole Christian Bible, he suggests, is an example of where animals serve as the nexus for an encounter between the divine and the human (p. 58). Triptychs are covenantal relationships that require faithful commitments in which humans and animals are cocelebrants (p. 119), in which God is revealed to humans through animals (p. 131), and in which humans are not independent of animals (p. 145). Although there is cruelty...