Love for Animals? Glimmerings in the Bible

Abstract

Love for Animals? Glimmerings in the Bible Peter Heinegg The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. Is. 11.6‐9 (RSV) In light of the contemporary ecology‐and‐animal‐rights movement, the Bible's view of nature has come under some harsh questioning. The best known instance of this may still be Lynn White's “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967). White was a medieval historian who saw the Middle Ages as the starting point for the systematic technological exploitation of nature, especially as promoted by European monks with their Benedictine “work ethic.” He linked this in turn to the locus classicus of Gen. 1.28: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” It should be noted, however, that the first ten generations of humans, from Adam to Noah, were not permitted to eat meat. In Gen. 1.29, God gives humans “every plant yielding seed” and “every tree with seed in its fruit” to consume. The same goes for animals and birds—“everything that has the breath of life” (1.30). Only after the Flood, and after Noah offers a host of bird and animal sacrifices, does God declare that, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (9.3‐4), so long as the meat has been (anachronistically) koshered by draining the blood, which means the animal's life and which belongs to God alone. Genesis draws no moral from this, but since the first patriarchs were larger‐than‐life figures, it might be surmised that the changeover to carnivorousness marked some kind of falling‐off or perhaps a concession to weak humans. Nonetheless, though nature, including animals, was to be admired as God's handiwork and evidence of his power and wisdom, it was objectified, instrumentalized, and readied, as it were, for the Industrial Revolution. One had to look through the creature and focus on the Creator behind it, not on his sometimes distractingly beautiful creations. Historians, ecologists, and scholars of every description quarreled with all or parts of White's thesis; but it seemed to have an at least a crude intuitive validity. In addition to giving humans dominion over all living creatures, in Gen. 2.19‐20 God lines up all the beasts and birds before Adam, so he can name them; “and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” Naming = defining and controlling. True, Lev. 11 and other passages declare some creatures off limits for eating. But this is not done out of any concern for camels, hares, pigs, eagles, vultures, etc., only because there is simply something not “right” about them, just like anything “in the waters” that lacks fins or scales (11.10). In Acts 10, a thrice‐repeated solemn vision from heaven informs Peter that kashrut is now rescinded, and believers can eat any animal they please, including swine. (The ban on pork in Lev. 11.7, as in the Qur'an 5:3, while lowering the total human consumption of pigs, has led to the outrageous defamation of that intelligent, agreeable animal.) Oxen, asses, and cattle are freed from work on the Sabbath (Dt. 5.14), but since their masters were under the same prohibition, they could hardly have been expected to labor all by themselves. Dt. 24.4 declares, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” which sounds reasonable. And in an odd mixture of...