Mouth of the Donkey: Re-imagining Biblical Animals

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 ...

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.

In this article, the stories of Balaam's donkey (num. 22.22-35) and the man of God from Judah (1 Kgs 13) are analyzed independently and are also compared for similarities. Features that are common to both accounts include: the importance of the word of Yhwh, the employment of animals as literary characters, the motif of death, and the portrayal of animals as divine agents. This study argues that the literary function of animals as divine agents is a distinctive characteristic of the so-called preclassical phase of biblical prophecy.

Christian Century, 2022

Buy from Bookshop.org When I was in seminary, I took care of a preschooler most days of the week. She knew that I was going to school, and one day she asked me, "What are you going to be?" I asked her if she knew what a minister was. She thought hard. Then, undoubtedly recalling her board book about the nativity story, she replied, "It's something to do with donkeys."

T&T Clark eBooks, 2023

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Animals in the New Testament: Perspectives from Animal Studies and Ancient Contexts, 2025

Intended to be a conversation starter, legible for the scholars and an appropriate inroad for students, this first chapter of the offers an orienting walkabout in the subject of Animals in the New Testament. Responding to the perception that the New Testament landscape is devoid of animals, it aims to reacclimate readers to finding them in unexpected places. It accomplishes this by showcasing the diverse methods, tools, and frameworks of Animal Studies.

Animals in the New Testament: Perspectives from Animal Studies and Ancient Contexts, 2025

The daily lives of ancient Jews, Christians, and their neighbors were filled with animals-in their physical spaces, stories, and abstract thinking. Given this ubiquity and the untold influence of the New Testament upon the West, remarkably little scholarship has been devoted to understanding the place of animals in the New Testament. This is an introduction chapter to an edited volume that represents an intervention into this unfortunate state of affairs. Here in the introduction chapter, we are concerned with fleshing out the theoretical framing, describing the trajectories that have led us here, and offering an orientation to the relevant scholarship. We begin first by exploring why we are interested in questions of animals to begin with-the turn to animals. We then survey the Animal Studies scene, finding where the New Testament is situated in these broader scholarly conversations about animals. An overview of chapters then sets the contributions in context.

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...