Hello, I hope you and your family have had a great weekend. When I say ‘your family,’ I do of course include any pets that you might own. They are definitely part of the family. Especially dogs.

As you know, I am studying animals as part of my PhD research—looking at animals in the Old Testament. This week I read an interesting chapter about dogs in the book of Exodus.[1] It always surprises me, when I study the Bible, how much I have missed in the past. I certainly missed the dogs in Exodus, even though they appear a couple of times. We can understand something of how ancient people regarded dogs.

Archaeologists find evidence of dogs and humans living together since the earliest times. Whether humans domesticated dogs to help them hunt, or whether dogs trained humans to feed them in return for protection, is unknown. The ancient Israelites certainly interacted with dogs, and they were listed as ‘unclean’ in the law, meaning they could not be eaten. (Which I have always thought made the animal disliked, but actually, it protected the animal’s freedom to some extent.)

The first mention in Exodus is near the beginning of the book, in chapter 11 (I am giving the English Bible references, the Hebrew Bible has different verse numbers). We have a description of the last plague in Egypt, when God’s angel of death was going to pass over the land, killing all the first-born people (and all the first-born animals, interestingly).[2] As children died, the people would wail and cry. But not the dogs. The dogs would remain silent. (In the Hebrew, it has something complicated, about not deciding to ‘tongue’ and tongue tends to be used for ‘speech’ and dog-speech is barking or growling, so that is how it tends to be translated.) Think about that for a minute. What does it mean? Dogs—which were kept to help with hunting and guarding—would not bark. Why? Did the dogs somehow know? Did the dogs recognise that this terrible happening was from God? Did the dogs understand something that the people did not recognise? I think they did.

Another mention of dogs is in Exodus 22:31. This has been linked by Jewish scholars to the verse in Exodus 11. It talks about when the Israelites find dead animals in the wild (road-kill of the ancient world), and they are told not to eat them, but to give them to the dogs. Jewish scholars suggest this meat is given as a reward to the dogs for keeping silent. It is owed to the dogs. I have never understood it this way before, but it is logical. God looks after people, and he looks after animals. Therefore animals have certain rights to certain food.

The book mentioned another scholar, a Jewish man who talks about his own experience with a dog.[3] He was a Jewish prisoner during the war, and forced to work in a work camp, where he describes being treated as if he was an animal. He says that Jews were viewed as animals by the guards—which in turn made the guards behave like animals. All very sad and dehumanising and wrong. But a stray dog wandered into the camp, and he managed to live there. When the prisoners returned from a day of hard labour, the dog would bounce around, joyfully greeting them. The dog made them feel human again. I can imagine the scene—I know what it is to be greeted enthusiastically by a dog. I can imagine how affirming that would be for prisoners who were hated.

In his book, Levinas suggests the dog viewed the prisoners as human (whereas the guards did not). Personally, I think the dog regarded them as dogs—one of the pack. We often ascribe human traits to animals. However, even if the dog was simply behaving like a dog, treating the men as one of the pack, it is still good. I think animals have much to teach us. We need to learn how to notice.

There are lots of animals in the Bible. Too often we don’t notice them, or assume they are simply metaphors and not an intrinsic part of the teaching. Yet the ancient world did not view animals as a mere commodity, and we should notice how they are used in the sacred texts. We might learn something.

Thanks for reading.
Take care.
Love, Anne x

Thank you for reading.
anneethompson.com
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[1] Ken Stone, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

[2] Stone suggests this shows the people/animal groups were divided by God according to whether they were Egyptian or Hebrew, not according to species.

[3] Emmanual Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997), 151.