Kosher in the Greek: The Giraffe and the Snake-Fighter

''Studies in Honour of Mária Ivanics'' - University of Szeged, Department of Altaic Studies , 2020

This study aims to demonstrate some groups of animal names that appear in the Book of Leviticus of the so-called Gözleve Bible translation, which was published in Crimea in 1841. The translation presents a mixed vocabulary for the animal names, which consists of Oghuzic (e.g. gelinčik ‘weasel’ etc.), Kipchak (e.g. ečki ‘goat’ etc.), Hebrew (e.g. ꭓagav ‘locust; grasshopper’ etc.), Arabic (e.g. ꭓïnzïr ‘pig, swine’), Persian (e.g. šepere ‘bat’) and some undefined words (e.g. göz tökä prob. ‘chameleon’). Therewithal, the distribution of the Kipchak, Oghuzic and non-Turkic elements will be compared with their equivalents in other Books of the Gözleve Bible, and a recently-published critical edition of another Crimean Karaim Bible translation.

Currents in Biblical Research, 2020

Animal Studies refers to a set of questions which take seriously the reality of animal lives, past and present, and the ways in which human societies have conceived of those lives, related to them, and utilized them in the production of human cultures. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible are increasingly engaging animals in their interpretive work. Such engagement is often implicit or partial, but increasingly drawing directly on the more critical aspects of Animal Studies. This article proceeds as a tour through the menagerie of the biblical canon by exploring key texts in order to describe and analyze what Animal Studies has brought to the field of Biblical Studies. Biblical texts are grouped into the following categories: animals in the narrative accounts of the Torah, legal and ritual texts concerning animals, animal metaphors in the prophets, and wisdom literature and animal life. The emergence and application of zooarchaeological research and a number of studies focusing on specific ...

Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures, 2018

This issue of Interfaces explores the question of how Jewish and Christian authors in pre-modern Latin Europe thought and wrote about some of the animals mentioned in the Bible. To them, thinking about animals was a way of thinking about what it means to be human, to perceive the world, and to worship God and his creation. Animals' nature, animals' actions and animals' virtues or shortcomings were used as symbols and metaphors for describing human behavior, human desires, human abilities and disabilities, and positive or negative inclinations or traits of character.Both Christian and Jewish medieval and early modern scholars wondered about how they could possibly delve into the deeper layers of meaning they assumed any textual or extra-textual animal to convey. Not surprisingly, they often had to deal with the fact that a specific animal was of interest to members of both religious communities. A comparison between Jewish and Christian ways of reading and interpreting bi...

In this contribution I will focus on bestiaries as privileged subject-matter to analyze semantic variations deriving from the translations of the Bible as a space of cultural encounter. Through specific examples-such as formicaleon, deer-goat, behemoth, sirens and so on-the semiotic value of monstrous creatures in the Hebrew Bible, in the Greek Septuaginta and eventually in Jerome’s Vulgata, will be investigated. I will explain the reasons why processes of cultural interaction become more evident in the case of monstrous or “aporetic” animals (i.e. animals that cannot be included in ordinary taxonomies). Finally, with reference to Christian commentaries ad loca, I will show the cultural proceedings underpinning the translation and the interpretation of the biblical bestiary.

Journal of Hebrew Scriptures, 2021

Repeated and varied treatments of animal firstlings in Deuteronomy’s cultic laws (Deut 12:17–18; 14:23–26; 15:19–23) reflect a succession of attempts to place firstlings within Deuteronomy’s centralized cult. Based on comparison of Deuteronomy’s firstling regulations and informed by the history of their interpretation, this study reconstructs the process of amendment that produced this set of laws and places this process within the larger context of the legal hermeneutics of the Pentateuch.

Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 2021

This paper is a continuation of a previous study that presented the names of mammal, insect, and reptile species appearing in the Book of Leviticus of the so-called Gözleve Bible. The present study aims to survey the rest of the animal names in the corpus, representing bird species. The translation shows a mixed vocabulary and therefore the distribution of the Kipchak, Oghuzic, and non-Turkic elements will be compared with their equivalents in some of the other books of the Gözleve Bible, a recently published critical edition of another Crimean Karaim Bible, and some Ottoman Turkish Bible translations.

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.

Talking Animals in Ancient Literature, 2020

The ancient Israelites had a close but strictly functional relation to animals, oriented on benefit and fostering. Beyond that general subordination of animals, the Hebrew Bible presents a few cases of metaphorical animal speech, but only two stories of animals that talk verbally with a human voice. These two stories of the primal serpent in the Garden of Eden and the donkey of the seer Balaam will be examined within this article in view of their communication situations, to reveal additional aspects of human-animal-relation, their theological message and literary effect. With additional insight on examples of the stories' early Jewish reception in postbiblical and rabbinic literature it will be further considered how even talking animals remain functional beings, stay unheard in an androcentric human society.

Anthropologists and biblical scholars have long sought to understand the rationale for the categorization of animals in Leviticus 11. The text itself provides no overt answer; rather, it presents the reader with a systematic taxonomy. This paper seeks to demonstrate how the priestly authors conceptualize ṭāmēʾ (unclean”) and šeqeṣ (“detestable thing”) as identifications for different sets of animals in Leviticus 11. The system of differentiation and classification itself, as it is expressed in the compositional layers of Leviticus 11, provides the best way forward for determining the Priestly justification for distinguishing between permissible and impermissible animals for eating. After tracing the compositional history of Leviticus 11, I argue that the taxonomy has a clear focus on land quadrupeds, which may hint at the agenda of the Priestly authors, namely to theologically undergird Israel’s sacrificial practices. Additionally, the taxonomy directly corresponds to the systematic ordering of the world in Genesis 1, reflecting the Priestly ideal that Temple life is woven into the fabric of the created cosmos.