Caring for Unclean Animals in Ancient Israel: An Ecological Perspective (original) (raw)

Complex Attitudes towards Animals in the Hebrew Bible

T&T Clark eBooks, 2023

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Respect for Animal Life in the Book of Leviticus. How Green Were the Priestly Authors?

Old Testament Essays, 2011

The article engages with Leviticus 11 and with some of the ways in which it has been used in the ecotheological debate. Leviticus 11 is part of the Priestly text and Priestly theology has mostly been criticised for its legalism and ritualism as well as for its stifling of spontaneity. Recently our understanding of the priestly worldview has vastly improved and scholars tend to show more appreciation of the priestly cosmology, where Israel finds its place amongst other nations, but where there is also a place for animals in relation to humanity. The well-known Torah scholar Jacob Milgrom has insisted for more than forty years that there is an ethical system of "reverence for life" behind these laws. And the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued that a respect for animal life is part and parcel of the priestly world-view and is clearly expressed in the priestly sacrificial system. This article attempts to critically engage with these two contributions to biblical scholarship.

Animal Studies and Ancient Judaism

Currents in Biblical Research, 2019

Animal studies has its origins in philosophy but extends to all fields of the humanities, especially literature, history, and anthropology. The central concern of animal studies is how human beings perceive other species and themselves as one among them. Animal studies in ancient Judaism has generally not been undertaken in a critical mode, with notable and increasing exceptions. This essay covers work from the past decade (2009-2019) that deals centrally with animals, from ancient Israel to late antiquity, spanning the Hebrew Bible, apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, library of Qumran, rabbinic literature, and material culture. Topics addressed are animal sacrifice and consumption; literary depictions of animals; studies of individual animal species; archaeology and art featuring animals; animal ethics, theology, and law; and critical theoretical approaches to species difference. The conclusion considers future directions for animal studies in ancient Judaism.

Every living thing: daily use of animals in ancient Israel

1998

Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel Oded Borowski The agricultural world of Old Testament Israel swarmed with animals?birds, insects, fish, pack animals, pets, animals for hunting, and domesticated herds of sheep, goats, and cattle. Using information from the Bible, Ancient Near Eastern documents, anthropology, and archaeology, Borowski synthesizes what we know about the use of animals in biblical times for food, clothing, transportation, and even cultic practices. This comprehensive catalog is a convenient desk resource for any reader_whether biblical scholar, archaeology student, or layperson. Essays on pastoral systems, cult, and agricultural economics, makes this also an important tool for researchers. Download Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Isr ...pdf Read Online Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient I ...pdf Download and Read Free Online Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel Oded Borowski

The Rationale of the Laws of Clean and Unclean in the Old Testament

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, 2000

Ritual cleanness and uncleanness (associated with the Heb. roots t a h e r and t a m e ’ ) represents a major theme of the Pentateuch. Purity rules describe the rituals, varying according to the “severity” of the impurity contracted, for ceremonial uncleanness due to skin disease, bodily discharges, touching unclean things, and eating unclean foods. The rationale for these laws is never clearly spelled out, but several explanations probably have some validity, including hygiene, the need to dissociate oneself from disgusting or pagan things, various other ethical lessons, the association of Yahweh with life and wholeness rather than death or disorder, the separation of worship from expressions of sexuality, and the need for Israel to be separated from the Gentiles. However, this paper argues that the most important message conveyed by these laws is that God is holy, and man, conversely, is contaminated and un ̃t, in and of himself, to approach a holy God. All this, in turn, served t...

Animal rights within judaism: The nature of the relationship between religion and ethics

Sophia, 2003

The general concern of the paper is to ponder whether religious views inform ethical views? This is explored through the issue of animal rights within Judaism. There is not only a great divergence, even today worldwide, on the realm of freedom that non-humans may enjoy, but historically this group of individuals has been most restricted in their behaviour, and level of value, by the Western religious worldviews. Hence it would be instructive to see to what extent an ethical attitude toward animals is present, or absent, and whether the religious prescriptions are justified by moral reasoning. And where we have found textual basis, as we have here, for taking the moral considerability of animals seriously, the next question is: has our moral sense been informed by a religious tradition? And has this led to changes in our secular understanding of ethical treatment toward animals? Or has there been a moral intuition there all along in humans, which has incidentally been expressed in a ...

Jewish Ethics and Nonhuman Animals

Journal of the Institute of Critical Animal Studies, 2007

Westerners have long admired the nature-friendly qualities of Eastern spiritual traditions, such as ahimsa and reincarnation, which tie human beings to the circle of life that reaches across species and which requires a compassionate approach to all living beings. Yet we have often failed to acknowledge this same beauty—teachings of compassion toward allliving beings—in Western traditions. This article examines Jewish morality with regard to nature, specifically to human relations with nonhumans. The article focuses on creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, and on fundamental moral teachings such as compassion and peace. The point of the article is not so much to be critical of Judaism, but rather to reveal how much we might learn from the spiritual and moral teachings of the Jewish tradition about our place in the larger universe. Moreover, as Jewish morality from the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) remains important to Christians, this article reveals the ethical standards to which others might hold both Jews and Christians accountable in their relations to animals and the world as a whole Cite as: “Jewish Ethics and Nonhuman Animals.” Journal of the Institute of Critical Animal Studies 5.2 (2007)

Animal rights – Jewish perspectives [English]

The Turn: Zeitschrift für islamische Philosophie, Theologie und Mystik, Nr. 3 , 2021

This article begs the question why is it that despite Jewish tradition devoting much thought to the status and treatment of animals and demonstrating strict adherence to the notion of preventing their pain and suffering, ethical attitudes to animals are not dealt with systematically in the writings of Jewish philosophers and have not received sufficient attention in the context of moral monotheism. What prevented the expansion of the golden rule: “Love your fellow as yourself: I am the LORD” (Leviticus 19: 18) and “That which is hateful to you do not do to another” (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat, 31a: 6; Jerusalem Talmud, Nedarim, 30b: 1) on to animals? Why is it that the moral responsibility for the fellow-man, the neighbor, or the other, has been understood as referring only to a human companion? Does the demand for absolute moral responsibility spoken from the face of the other, which Emmanuel Levinas emphasized in his ethics, not radiate from the face of the non-human other as well? Levinas' ethics explicitly negates the principle of reciprocity and moral symmetry: the 'I' is committed to the other, regardless of the other's attitude towards him. Does the affinity to the eternal Thou which Martin Buber also discovers in plants and animals not require a paradigmatic change in the attitude towards animals? This paper examines attitudes to animals in Jewish thought. The article opens with a discussion of man's special status in Creation, as created in the image of God, and explores, on the one hand, the challenges of this approach (human supremacy), and, on the other, its inherent potential (human moral responsibility). The short discussion on the attitudes toward animals in the Hebrew Bible teaches that moral responsibility does not derive from the special status awarded to humans in Creation, but rather is rooted in God’s own relationship to animals. The heart of the article is devoted to discussing the treatment of animals in Jewish law, how biblical laws that deal with animals were understood among halakhic thinkers, and, especially, the meaning of the ancient term “the suffering of living creatures” (tza’ar ba’alei chayim). The basic premise is that halakhic discourse can provide fertile ground for a philosophical- religious discourse on animals.