Introduction
From the very beginning, angels and animals have played mediating roles between God and Man. Just as the World was made three-tiered (Heaven, Earth, Deep), so the creatures were made (Angels, Men, Animals). Before Christ came to build the permanent bridge across the chasm between God and Man, various temporary intermediaries were sent to salve the relationship: sometimes this intervention was angelic, sometimes animal, and not infrequently, a mixture of the two. But to set the stage for man’s post-lapsarian existence, we must first quickly review the three Animal and Angelic interventions in the first three chapters of Genesis.
First, we have the role that animals played in teaching Adam his place. God brought all of the animals before Adam not just so that he could name them, but so that he would learn that he was different from them, that none of them were fit mates for him, and so that he would learn his need for a Woman to come alongside him in his task.
Second, we have a fallen Angel possessing or influencing an animal to give humanity the “push” that leads to the rift between God and man. Satan as serpent in the garden sought to supplant Adam as the head of Eve, leading her into sin even as Adam failed to lead her in righteousness. There is a mysterious symmetry between this descent of the Evil One, taking on the role of an animal leading to the Fall and the eventual condescension of God to human form playing the role of sacrificial animal on the cross. To systematize those two strokes of salvific history: the (fallen) angel took advantage of the animal and caused man to fall; to undo the fall, God became man and took the place of the animal.
Third, after Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden, we see A) Angelic guardians enforcing the exile and B) an animal victim providing symbolic and practical grace from God to cover both Adam and Eve’s sins and also their vulnerable bodies as they seek a new home in the wastes and wilds. Adam and Eve seek a “cheap” solution to their problem of sin and shame: weaving plant leaves together for clothing[1]. God graciously slays an animal and provides them new “skins” (Gen. 3:21) that not only cover their soft and vulnerable bodies more effectively, but also provide the first blood sacrifice, pointing forward to Christ’s final, efficacious sacrifice. Without the protective covering provided by the victim, Mankind would not have lived long enough in exile to learn the depths of its transgression or to see the eventual reversal of the curse. And that first victim was not the only animal that had to die for man’s sin, but the first in a long, bloody road to Golgotha. Man’s sin required him to learn the skills of a predator and pursue holiness through butchery.
So far, we have only to cast the narrative of the Fall in such a way as to foreground the Angelic and Animalian interventions in the story. However, I intend to show how these elements are essential in defining the entirety of salvific history.
Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a lion) or the effects of an army (stripping the land bare like locusts).1 And it would be a mistake to think that these metaphors are “just metaphors.” The fact that we live in a world where everything we see was brought into being by divine speech means that linguistic metaphor is actually a very serious thing that speaks to the ontological status and is not “just” a literary device.2 God is more leonine than any lion that ever lived. Similarly, an army could even outstrip the destruction of a swarm of locusts, killing man and beast as well as crops. It is this very metaphorical appropriateness of animals that make them fit replacements for man in the sacrificial system.[2] And in point of fact, animal involvement in salvation is explicitly not just metaphorical, for the main element of liturgical faithfulness before God in the time before Christ was the shedding of animal blood in place of human blood. I don’t anticipate that anything I’ve said so far will be too controversial. However, I believe that the centrality of these themes is not currently something that receives enough attention. I will therefore attempt to show that:
- Animals Have Spirits, Just Like Men. This adds a gravity to the system of animal sacrifice that is missed by many moderns.
- Sin is a Dehumanizing Impulse Exemplified in Extermus as Bestiality. We become conformed to that which we worship. Proper worship causes us to “become like God,” as was always intended. Idol worship represents a perverse worship of the beast, which is symbolically bestiality (for false worship is always referred to as adultery).
- Mankind’s Proper End: Marriage to the Lamb of God. Just as Paul interprets Deuteronomy 25:4, “Do not muzzle an ox while it is treading out grain,” as having greater application to humans than to oxen, so Scripture’s prohibitions on bestiality (in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy) have application for man’s spiritual state.3 4 5
Animals Have Spirits, Just Like Men
The fact that Man is the image of God can sometimes incentivize an overly sharp ontological distinction between Man and Beast.[3] But both classes of creature live and move and have their being in the Lord in much the same way. What the exact ontological difference between man and animal actually is, is not the purpose of this paper, though I will address it briefly. But first it is necessary to lay out the scriptural case for an equivalence between Animal and Man in the Soul/Spirit department. We will begin with the Hebrew word “ruach.”
I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:18–21, ESV) [ruach]
All three highlighted words are Strong’s 7307 ruach, frequently rendered “breath” or “spirit.” Despite the use of the 2nd and 3rd instances of “ruach” above to pose unanswerable questions, Solomon’s first use (translated breath, likely due to the squeamish theological sensibilities of the translators) declares in no uncertain terms, that the “essence” of the spirit in both man and animal is the same. So, now we would need to inquire, where did man and beast receive this spirit? Ruach first appears in Genesis 1:2 as the very “Spirit” of God. In other words, this Ecclesiastes passage seems to indicate that all animate beings “live and move and have their being” in God and are quickened by a donated exhalation of divine breath or spirit.
But Ecclesiastes is not our only biblical source for this perspective:
If [God] should set his heart to it
and gather to himself his spirit and his breath,
all flesh would perish together,
and man would return to dust. (Job 34:14–15)[4] [ruach]
This passage reiterates that “all flesh” are the recipients of God’s “ruach-Spirit” and that if the Lord were to recall this gift, man and animal would return together to their constituent elements. This passage also introduces another term which will be necessary to our study: “flesh” (Strong’s 1320 basar). Here as elsewhere, it is used to encompass the entire category of created beings—all animate, corporeal creatures, man and beast. And Job 34:14–15 is not unique in Scripture to make this grouping. God uses the word basar in his Genesis 6 decree to “destroy all flesh (basar) in which is the breath of life (ruach)” (6:17). Again, we see the entire set of animate creatures (man and animal) as being composed of fleshand full of the Spirit,which is God-breathed. The fact that both Genesis 6 and Job 34 employ “decreational” language only strengthens the link between the two passages and clearly are presented as contrasts to the Genesis 1–2 creation narrative. In other words, the spirit is given as a gift to man and animal at the beginning of creation, but in the destruction of the world in the flood (or in the hypothetical recall Job envisions) God takes back his gift.
The passages from Genesis, Job, and Ecclesiastes were selected because they provide the clearest equivalencies between man and animal’s joint quickening by the Spirit of God. However, since ruach is only used 377 times in the OT (the bulk of which are translated as spirit), it would not do to leave out a discussion of nephesh (Strong’s 5315) which appears 754 times in the OT and is translated alternately as “creature,” “being,” “breath,” or “soul.” Most notably for our purposes, it is the word used in Genesis 2:7 when God stoops to create Adam with his own hands and respire him to life. Previous to 2:7, nephesh is used four times, three of which are translated as “creature” (Gen. 1:20, 21, 24) and once as “breath” (1:30). I include the first four uses of “nephesh” in order to dispel the idea that Adam’s more intimate and particularized creation by God represents a process that is entirely other than what He did for the animals. The fact that the “breath” or “soul” (nephesh) that God imparts to Adam in 2:7 was translated three times previously as a created animal makes that interpretation untenable.
Far from being a counter-example of my thesis, God’s respiration of “nephesh” into Adam actually provides further linguistic equivalency between man and animal:
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. (Genesis 9:3–6) [nephesh]
There are a number of interesting things going on in this passage. First, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that a careless reader could come away thinking that the passage sanctions cannibalism. The opening presents to man “every moving thing that lives” as food. Taken literally, this category would include fellow humans. And the passage doesn’t do our notional careless reader any favors by seamlessly transitioning from a single restriction placed on the manner in which they may eat the animals (don’t eat the blood, in which is the life) to talking about the blood of Man.[5] The rhetorical transition is made by means of a middle term which both types of creature possess: the nephesh (life) in their blood. Clearly, the animals were not made to be God’s image, but the blood in them which contains the life given to both man and animal is holy unto the Lord and not to be treated as a common thing or made light use of. Just like the fat of the sacrifice, it is sacred to the Lord and not to be eaten by man (Lev. 3:16-17). Having made linguistic cases for animal-kind and mankind both being/having souls (nephesh) and spirits (ruach), let us now turn to evidence from narrative passages that touch on this topic.
In Genesis’ account of Noah’s flood, God counts the bulk of animals as worthy of destruction along with the bulk of humanity; likewise, He also counts a remnant of animals as worthy of salvation from the waters along with Noah’s family. In this instance, God deals similarly with both kinds of “flesh,” animal and human. This backdrop helps make sense of the otherwise comical details in the book of Jonah where the King of Nineveh sends out an edict for “man and beast” to repent through the outward forms of fasting and sackcloth (Jonah 3:6–10). This is significant for two reasons: first, it shows that the integration of human and animal life is so intense that there is a participatory nature in the degradation of both together, and second, that the humility required of ox and ass is the same required of the “semi-divine” king of the city. Lest anyone think that these details merely represent the benighted pagans’ confusion in ancient Nineveh, let us note that the Lord’s final words to Jonah vindicate the penitent actions of the King of Nineveh:
And the Lord said, “You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?” (Jonah 4:10–11)
Just as the Lord considers his animalian creations to be important enough to share the ark with Noah’s family, so He counts the saving of animalian life worthy of mention in the same breath as the sparing of 120,000 human lives.6
None of this should come as a surprise to us. Jesus emphasized the Father’s love and care of humanity by reminding them that, if He sees every sparrow that falls, how much more does He care for his human children. While the “main point” of the passage is to dispel doubts about the Father’s care for Man, that point relies entirely on the predicate that God really, really cares about animals too. This should cause us to reconsider the prodigal grace that the Lord showered on man, even in the OT system of animal sacrifice: shedding the blood of millions of innocent victims before He gave his great Son! The death of every bull, goat, lamb, and pigeon is precious in his sight.
Before closing this section, we will look at two famous stories (discussed in more detail in the next section) which give us insight into what it means for animals to have souls and/or spirits from an existential perspective. The first is Balaam’s talking donkey:
Then the Lord opened the mouth of the donkey, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you, that you have struck me these three times?” And Balaam said to the donkey, “Because you have made a fool of me. I wish I had a sword in my hand, for then I would kill you.” And the donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your donkey, on which you have ridden all your life long to this day? Is it my habit to treat you this way?” And he said, “No.” (Numbers 22:28–30)
The three details of note are the fact that, 1) the Lord did not give the donkey a “new mind” or a “spirit of understanding,” but merely “opened the mouth”; 2) it is not God or an angel speaking through the donkey; it is the donkey herself expressing her sentiments and observations; and 3) the donkey uses her newfound loquacity to describe her past service to Balaam and the fact that she had an intentional habit of treating her master with deference and obedience. All three of these observations indicate that the donkey was a self-aware, mute servant who only needed her tongue unloosed to be able to reason with her master. This will not be surprising to anyone who has had a bond with an intelligent pet; it is not just the master’s imagination that there are thoughts there behind the eyes waiting to be expressed.
As a counterpoint and boundary to the concept that animals have intelligence lurking beneath the surface obscured only by the inability to speak, we have Nebuchadnezzar and his bovine humiliation in Daniel 4:
“O King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: The kingdom has departed from you, and you shall be driven from among men, and your dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field. And you shall be made to eat grass like an ox, and seven periods of time shall pass over you, until you know that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and gives it to whom he will.” Immediately the word was fulfilled against Nebuchadnezzar. He was driven from among men and ate grass like an ox, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven till his hair grew as long as eagles’ feathers, and his nails were like birds’ claws.
At the end of the days I, Nebuchadnezzar, lifted my eyes to heaven, and my reason returned to me, and I blessed the Most High, and praised and honored him who lives forever, […] At the same time my reason returned to me, and for the glory of my kingdom, my majesty and splendor returned to me. My counselors and my lords sought me, and I was established in my kingdom, and still more greatness was added to me. (Daniel 4:28–33, 36)
The salient point here is that Nebuchadnezzar was deprived of his reason when he was made like an animal. So why the existential difference between Nebuchadnezzar’s “demotion” to the animal kingdom (without reason) and the “promotion” of Balaam’s donkey (with reason)? First, we would have to note that Nebuchadnezzar is made like an animal without changing his ontological state. Nevertheless, the fact that he is without reason indicates that some animals, at least, are without reason. Obviously, we have indications of this divide all the way back to the garden where the serpent is said to be “the most crafty” or “cunning” of all of the beasts of the field. C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain hits on a likely explanation for the difference we see in the animal kingdom:7
If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration…Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only ‘natural’ animal – the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this almost entirely to its master.
To expand on this, I would say the status of all men and all animals are constantly in flux. We are on parallel and infrequently intersecting tracks, but we are both either ascending or descending. When Man’s worship is ordered correctly, he is becoming more fully man, more like the Son of Man. When animals are properly husbanded, they are reaching their fullest potential as animate beings quickened by the very Spirit of God; untamed, they are brute beasts whose violence against man must be avenged.
All of the preceding is intended to emphasize the oft-missed importance of animal life in Scripture. But that importance does not erase the fact that man was told to take dominion over the animals and was given a glorious role and promise not given to the animals: that of being a race capable of counting the Second Person of the Trinity among their number. While the fact that God’s own Spirit gave life to the animals reminds us of the precious loss that every slain animal represents, Scripture nevertheless has plenty to say about the intended superiority of man over the animals. Despite that intent, the reality of the situation is frequently otherwise. The following two sections will explore the sad capacity of man to devolve to an animalistic state and commit trans-special blasphemies.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.
NOTES
- This same presumption of “cheap grace” is recapitulated by their son Cain in Genesis 4 when he attempts to atone for his sins with sacrifices taken from his crops. Just as Adam and Eve’s plant clothes had to be replaced with costlier animal clothes, so Cain’s plant offerings were bested by Able’s costlier animal sacrifice. ↩︎
- This is one of the core theses of Dr. Leithart’s brilliant book, Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1 (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2023). I will not be defending that thesis but assuming it. However, I think there will be much in this article to enjoy even if you feel unsure of that element of my argument. ↩︎
- I will consistently be referring to Man AS the image of God rather than “made in the image of God.” Theopolis Fellow, Christopher Kou Kou argues that man is not permitted to use any images in the worship of God because we ARE the image. We were always intended to BE God’s image on the earth in the same way that Moses was to be God to Aaron (Exodus 4:16) and Pharaoh (Exodus 7:1–2). Christopher D. Kou, “God’s Statute in the Cosmic Temple: צֶ֫לֶם and דְּמוּת in Genesis and the Plural Cohortative in Genesis 1:26 in light of Sanctuary Setting and Christological Telos,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 66, No. 1 (2023): 11–31. ↩︎
- Taking context-free quotes from the book of Job is always a bit dicey, as the speeches of Job and his three friends fill up much of the book, only to be refuted by God in the end, indicating that their pious sounding arguments were at minimum ill-timed or intended, or at worst baseless and false. However, the quote given above is from Elihu, who I believe to be the only friend of Job who is fully correct in his assessment of the situation. The micro-defense of this position being that: 1) God’s reprimand in the end of the book condemns only the other three friends and 2) God approvingly quotes from Elihu’s earlier speech against Job (34:45 and 35:16) in his monologue to Job (38:2). I hope to eventually contribute an article vindicating Elihu, as much calumny has been brought against him. ↩︎
- This single prohibition about eating the blood of animals is an echo of the single prohibition on eating in the Garden (no fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil). It could be that forbidding of the “lifeblood” is a permanent, symbolic reminder of being cut off from the Tree of Life after transgressing the prohibition against the other tree. Remember the reason God gives for banning man from the garden is: “Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever…” (Gen. 3:22). Of course, the ban on drinking the blood was lifted with the institution of communion, which gives us access once again to eternal life. ↩︎
- Because the passage’s plain meaning is contested, I relegate the following to a footnote. Leviticus 17:1–9 may strengthen the idea that animal life has value that is comparable (but not equal) to human life. In the passage from Leviticus, the Lord seems to be telling Moses to instruct the people that, while in the wilderness, any domesticated animal that was fit for sacrifice must be slain before the tabernacle; if any animal was slain elsewhere, the man killing the animal sheds the blood without proper reference to the religious significance of taking the life from a living thing: “bloodguilt shall be imputed to that man. He has shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people” (Lev. 17:4). The sin of slaughtering the animal improperly is treated as a murder! This points to the ancient world having a deep, unshakable sense that the power to give life and death properly resides only with God. The killing of man or beast must always be done at the behest of, with the permission of, or in the worship of the Divine King. The first animal killed outside of the garden by God inaugurated the slaughter of animals as a practice that is first, last, and always a religious event. The garbling of this message down through the faithless line of Cain (ideologically, if not genetically) led to the specific aberrations of animal (and human!) sacrifice practiced in Egypt which the Lord is now forcibly stripping from Israel’s lexicon. The point in all of this being that even the pagan nations knew that “the life is in the blood” and that there was something spiritual going on in the spilling of it. Obviously, the pagan rituals were in the service of demons and idols, but there was not a nation on the planet that didn’t understand the religious significance of severing a body/spirit union made by God. ↩︎
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, chapter 9. In the same passage, Lewis goes on to make a very interesting argument that is too involved to reproduce here. He speculates that animals may partake of the resurrection “through” their participation in humanity. A taste of the remainder of his argument is as follows:
“If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in”. I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead”. That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality [128]of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body”. In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know its master and, in knowing him, will be itself. To ask that it should, in any other way, know itself, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals aren’t like that, and don’t want to be.” ↩︎