Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies by Ken Stone

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies by Ken Stone Michael Seufert ken stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018). Pp viii + 227. $24.95. Ken Stone's recent work brings the diverse field of "animal studies" into dialogue with a selection of biblical texts. The goal is to recover something of "the significance of animals and animal symbolism in biblical literature," which "has been significantly underemphasized by biblical scholars and underestimated by other readers of the Hebrew Bible" (pp. 3-4). After sketching the diversity of the field of "animal studies" in the introduction, drawing on Matthew Calarco's map of boundary construals between animals and humans (see Calarco, Thinking through Animals: Identity, Difference, Indistinction [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015]), S. proceeds with six chapters engaging biblical texts with insights and questions culled from this diverse interdisciplinary field. In chap. 1, S. offers an introductory exploration of the "enabling role of animal bodies." He highlights the recurring significance of animals in stories of Jacob, Israel's eponymous ancestor. He subsequently reads these stories with attention to Donna Haraway's "companion species" (The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness [Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2003]), the unstable binary of animal–human, and "carnophallogocentrism," the final two frames drawing from Jacques Derrida (The Animal That Therefore I Am [ed. Marie-Louise Mallet; trans. David Wills; New York: Fordham [End Page 714] University Press, 2008]). Haraway's insight attends to the complexity of culture's emergence in relation to "nature," insisting that the line between "nature" and "culture" or "nature" and "history" is blurry. The traditional animal–human binary is far more complex, though not entirely undermined, as Derrida observes. Early Genesis texts and the Jacob stories bear out this maintenance and complexification. For instance, humans are tasked with rule over the nonhuman creatures (whatever the specific contours of this rule). This assumes a fundamental distinction. Simultaneously, human and nonhuman animals are both nepeš, each designated "good" by God, and they receive the same command to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 1:22, 28). Derrida's neologism "carnophallogocentrism" suggests that "the exclusion of animals from ethical considerations cannot be separated from the exclusion of other humans from subjectivity and ethics, including women … feminized men … and other men deemed less than human on the basis of … race, ethnicity, nation, class or religion" (pp. 40-41). For instance, the classic distinction between "wild" and "domesticated" animals at the outset of the Jacob–Esau narrative "has gendered connotations," as masculine symbols attend Esau, while Jacob is (initially) effeminate (p. 41). In chap. 2, S. develops the complications of the animal–human binary from the viewpoint of dogs, specifically through the eyes of the dogs of Exodus 11 and 22 as evoked by the short essay "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights," by Emmanuel Levinas. These two biblical canine passages create a web of associations between humans and animals. The associations variously identify and differentiate animals and humans in ways that cut across the traditional distinction. In chap. 3, S. examines the sacrificial system, primarily with Derrida and Jonathan Klawans taking the lead (see Klawans, "Sacrifice in Ancient Israel: Pure Bodies, Domesticated Animals, and the Divine Shepherd," in Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics [ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton; New York: Columbia University Press, 2006]; idem, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006]). Stone explores the implications of the idea of sacrifice, which generates the category of a "noncriminal putting to death." This category potentially facilitates the ease of killing (physically and symbolically) any nonmember of the dominant group (summed up by Derrida's "carnophallogocentrism"). Klawans suggests an expanded view of sacrifice as a prolonged ritual including not just death dispensed but the intimate domestication process preceding it. The intimacy of this process appears in images of shepherd and flock, used—terrifyingly from this vantage point—of God's relation to Israel. This association, via the sacrificial exchange, invites further recasting of boundaries between God, humans, and animals. Stone closes with a quiet and reasonable reflection on how...