Animals in Israel

Drawing from Robertson Smith, Howard Eilberg-Schwartz lists numerous biblical characters with animal names (The Savage in Judaism, 116): Eglon means calf, Nahash is a serpent, Oreb is Raven and Ze’eb is a wolf. 

Seir the Horite has Shobal (young lion), Zibeon (hyena), Anah (wild ass), Dishon (antelope). Leah is “bovine antelope,” while Rachel means “ewe.”

From this he concludes that the analogy of human and animal was one of the root metaphors of the Israelite imagination, and from that he explores a number of narratives, rituals, and laws, with much illumination.

Dietary laws, for instance, depend on dominant analogies between Israel and animals of the herd and flock: “cloven hooves and chewing the cud are precisely the traits that distinguish the kids of animals that routinely serve as metaphors for Israelite society” (125).

Resident aliens are neither ovine or bovine but asinine: “like the resident alien, the ass is a longer, for it does not herd or flock with others of its kind but lives alongside the herds and flocks” (126, suggesting that Israel is symbolized by sheep and goats and bovines because these are social animals).

This analogy, he thinks, is behind the story of Dinah, who is seduced by Shechem the son of Hamor – since the latter’s name means “ass” (Genesis 34). Intermarriage between the Shechemite prince and Dinah would be a kind of bestiality, an unequal yoking of cow and ass. The sons of the Ass are circumcised, becoming members of the flock of Israel, but they are still slaughtered like outsiders (126-7). Similarly, the fact that Absalom and Solomon ride on mules hints at the mixed heritage of David, grandson of a Moabitesss.

The same root metaphor lurks behind prohibitions of boiling a kid in mother’s milk, taking a mother bird and her young, and sacrificing an animal and its offspring on the same day, all of which Eilberg-Schwartz takes as symbolic rules about maternal incest (128-134). Some of this interpretations are iffy (he gets Jacob wrong), but much is illuminating. Judah

pays Tamar a kid, the child he owes her but hasn’t given her (131). Joseph’s
brothers kill a kid goat to get blood to fool their father: “the goat serves as
a symbolic replacement for the boy. When Jacob sees the coat he exclaims, ‘Joseph
was devoured by a wild beast,’ when in fact it was the goat that was devoured
by the beasts who were Joseph’s brothers” (248, fn 23).

The logic of sacrifice depends on the same metaphor. Normally, animal analogies work directly: How Israel treats animals is how they are to treat humans. Sacrifice works in the opposite direction: “one does to one’s animals what one is not required to do to oneself.” This “instills in actors the feeling that they should also be sacrificed,” and the fact that they escape through a substitute demonstrates “the divine capacity to forgiven human failure” (135).

Eilberg-Schwartz suggests that this helps us understand the prophetic critique of sacrifice. It is not simply hypocrisy; rather, Israel’s sin has become so flagrant that the sacrificial substitutes are no longer acceptable: Yahweh no longer overlooks sin, and Israel becomes “God’s sacrificial victim” before Yahweh the predatory (136-7).