Abbreviated Introduction to the Series
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). 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.1 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. 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.
Mankind’s Proper End: Marriage to the Lamb of God
In the very beginning, God brought all the animals to Adam that he might name them. The Lord paraded each productive pair before him in order to teach Adam more about himself, to teach him what he was and what he wasn’t (this being yet another example of the tutelary role of animals discussed in Part 2). God intended to show Adam that he was not just another animal and that there was no helper fit for him among their number. It was only after the full cavalcade of animals had passed him by that Adam was able to “name” the lack that he felt—loneliness. Before God presented Eve to Adam to name and marry, he presented the animals. This was partially a rhetorical exercise, teaching him what a mate was and how none of the existing creatures could fill this role. But it was also intended to actually heighten his awareness of his need for a mate. The passage is worth reproducing in full here to demonstrate how crucial the educational role is in the exercise:
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,
“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. (Genesis 2:18-25)
Notice how immediately after God states his intention to make a helper for the man the narrator brings up the creation of the animals, not Eve. This is not a false start in God’s plan to make a helper. God already knew that there would not be a fit helper for Adam from among the animals, but he wanted Adam to reach this conclusion himself, and the naming exercise was well-suited to emphasize this point. After bringing all of the animals to man to be named, the woman is herself brought and Adam gives her a name that is a glorified version of his own name (the English: “Man” and “Woman” retain a similar relation to one another as do the Hebrew “ish” and “ishshah”). Adam gives Eve his name (and then some) and this event is the proper basis for a woman taking a man’s name in marriage. Also, we see in the elaboration and glorification of Adam’s own name the earliest basis for Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 11:7 that “woman is the glory of man.”
Eve’s belated presentation as the final work of God’s glorious creation does more than just heighten Adam’s anticipation for his wife, it also casts Eve, the Bride, as a kind of eschaton of the first creation. Eve parallels the Bride of Christ to be revealed in Revelation, who descends as the New Jerusalem, uniting the New Heavens and New Earth (Rev. 21:2). Christ, like Adam, requires a Bride drawn from his own side, capable of a one-flesh reunion. That reunion only comes after the whore of Babylon is first past the mind’s eye of the reader, reminding us what an unfit bride looks like, much like Adam was shown the animals before Eve. Ironically, though, Eve’s sin causes her to serve as the first biblical example of spiritual harlotry. Genesis 3 gives no indication of physical congress between Eve and the Serpent, but in the moment she chooses to follow the serpent’s lead instead of her husband’s she becomes the archetype of all of Israel’s future spiritual dalliances.2 Ezekiel 16 and Jeremiah 2 present dramatizations of the true nature of Israel’s idolatry: bestial adultery.
The prophetic story being told about Israel in Ezekiel 16 did not “literally” happen, but as it comes straight from the mind and heart of Yahweh, we cannot help but conclude that it is the truest description of the ultimate significance of Israel’s infidelity. The story begins with Yahweh discovering Israel like a foundling in the wilderness: “When I passed by you and saw you wallowing in your blood, I said to you in your blood, ‘Live!’” (Ezek. 16:6). Yahweh raises the young girl and when she comes of age, He takes her in marriage. But Israel does not prove a faithful wife, whoring after anyone and anything that catches her eye: “she played the whore in the land of Egypt and lusted after her lovers there, whose members were like those of donkeys, and whose issue was like that of horses” (23:19–20). When man rejects the Living God for a graven image, he loses his own humanity and all his noble instincts are reduced to sheer animalistic urges. Jeremiah takes the metaphor even further, casting Israel herself as a wild animal: “[Israel is] a restless young camel running here and there, a wild donkey used to the wilderness, in her heat sniffing the wind!” (Jer. 2:23–24). By the time of Jeremiah and Eziekiel, adultery was already the established analogue to idolatry3, however these passages intensify the metaphor by painting habitual idolatry as the even more heinous sin of fornication with animal lovers. It is in this sense that Leviticus 18:23 can be interpreted more broadly, “You shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion.” Just as Paul interprets Deuteronomy 25:4’s prohibition from muzzling an ox while it treads out grain to be talking about ministers (1 Tim. 5:18 and 1 Cor. 9:9), so we have cause to see that Leviticus 18:23 is more fully a warning to Israel and the Church to avoid the descent into idolatry, which is spiritual bestiality. Sadly, Israel did not heed this warning. Again and again she turned to her idols and refused to obey the stern but loving warnings stop. Because she would not put away her idols, Yahweh put her away in divorce (Jer. 3:8). The only hope for returning to intimacy with God is through union with Christ in his death and resurrection. And we see the bloody parallelism in the downward and upward slopes of Israel’s story as God’s bride: after being found wallowing in her blood, she was cleaned and wed, and yet it is only through wallowing in (and even consuming!) the blood taken from Christ’s side on Calvary that she might become again a fit Bride for God. Christ had to be slain as the last animal sacrifice to make a way out of the grave and purge her from her flesh-defiling relations with animals. And so Christ was put into a death-sleep like Adam, new life plucked from his side to cleanse, purify, and make human once again his wayward, animalistic bride.4
Nor are the Old Testament prophets the only place in Scripture where metaphorical bestiality is used to depict ruinous, late-stage idolatry. Revelation 17 is the capstone prooftext for this thesis. The immoral woman, “Babylon the great, mother of prostitutes” has taken the Beast as her consort. In verse 2, she is described as the one “with whom the kings of the earth have committed sexual immorality.” Later, in verses 9-12, the “kings of the earth” are identified with the “heads” and the “horns” of the Beast on which she rides. The shocking implication seems to be that the “mother of prostitutes” is using the horns and heads indecently. And after she has debased herself with her animalistic lovers, they turn on her: “The ten horns that you saw, they and the beast will hate the prostitute. They will make her desolate and naked, and devour her flesh and burn her up with fire” (Rev. 17:10). The Beast uses the woman as an unholy sacrifice: killing, burning, consuming. God’s vengeance here allows for a sick reversal of the created order, an animal sacrificing a human.5
If I have successfully demonstrated the significance of zoophilic imagery in depicting those abandoned to idolatry, then it ought to come as a shock to be reminded that Revelation ends with the true Bride being wed to… the Lamb. Revelation 19’s description of “the marriage supper of the Lamb” clearly depicts a picture of a human bride. Lest anyone would argue that we should be imaging the Bride as a ewe lamb, I will point out that she is described as performing the following human-exclusive action, she “clothes herself in fine linen” (19:8). So I believe we are to imagine a wedding feast with a human woman and a bloody lamb sitting at the head of the table receiving toasts from all party guests. As surprising as this is, Revelation is not actually the first time that we see animal imagery used positively in a symbolic erotic context. The Song of Songs compares the bride and her lineaments to: a mare, doves, goats, fawns, gazelles. The groom is compared to a gazelle, a stag, an unnamed grazing animal, a dove, and a raven. And yet, so far from containing the stain of shame that the Jeremiah and Ezekiel passages contain, these analogies are presented as a means of heightening the strength, purity, and passion of the love between Solomon and his bride. So clearly the association of animal imagery with romance is not completely absent from the Bible apart from depictions of idolatry. How is it that similar imagery is used in such diametrically opposite ways?
There are three main ways in which I will attempt to explain the apparent contradictory uses of the images. They are: 1) the mystery of the Cherubim, 2) the Bible’s use of taboo to highlight great mysteries of salvation, and 3) Satan’s habit of mimicking God’s good plans.
I posit that one element of the Cherubim’s significance is a symbolic representation of God’s rule over the earth through man. The faces of the Ox, Eagle, and Lion are also present to represent man in his dominion over the created order. I will remind the reader that when I say “symbolic” I do not thereby mean unreal. These are four very real living creatures (or unnumbered creatures with four faces each) who reflect a symbolic truth. To unpack this, we need to explore why the Ox, Eagle, and Lion are fit representations of man’s dominion. The lion is a “beast of the field,” the ox is classified as “livestock” and the eagle is a “bird of the heavens.” Notably missing is a representative creature from the sea and a representative of the third land-based animal kind “creeping thing.” In Genesis, the animals are broken into three primary “domains” (land, air, and sea) and then further broken down into “kinds.” However, as the land animals are the only animals immediately relevant to Adam’s natural domain (land) they are the only group whose “kinds” are fully given: beast of the field, livestock, and creeping things. Notably, when Adam names the animals one of the land “kinds” are not listed as being named by him (creeping things) and one entire domain is excluded (sea creatures). Again, I would say that creeping things and sea creatures were left out because they were less immediately relevant to Adam’s rule. Additionally, we could note that of the three domains (earth, sky, sea/deep) the sea is the one domain which does not persist in the New Heavens and New Earth (Rev. 21:1)6. These earlier exclusions of “creeping things” and sea creatures explain their non-representation in the faces of the Cherubim.
Taken together, I believe that the Four Living Creatures are symbols of Man’s dominion on the earth, which is itself a living picture of God’s reign over the earth. This has bearing on man’s corporate destiny to be married to “the Lamb.” Man cannot be said to truly fill his God-given role on the earth unless he is properly exercising dominion over and properly in relation to the animals given to him to rule. Therefore, man in his “final form” will be something closer to the four-living creatures than the naked and weak creature that crawled out of the garden. The fact that the Cherubim posted at the entrance of Eden was an acceptable replacement for man to “keep” the garden indicates a compatibility between the two. However, at the end of time, the replacement will go the other way as man is given rule over the angels, becoming better Cherubim. Thus it is slightly less shocking to use imagery of a human/animal union in the “marriage supper of the Lamb” because man is already a creature whose final form will be comparable to that of the Cherubim.7
The second explanation as to the appropriateness of the “shocking” depiction of the Bride being married to the Lamb is the Bible’s use of taboos to draw attention to future, glorious, exceptions to a rule. There is not space in this paper to list them all, but a few prominent examples pertaining to man’s salvation are as follows: 1) the curse upon any man who hangs upon a tree being transformed by Christ’s most blessed death on the cross 2) the prohibition on eating flesh with the blood in it ending in the command to take and eat Christ’s flesh and blood 3) the God who is incorporeal becoming man and 4) the God who cannot even look at sin (Habakkuk 1:3) becoming sin (2 Cor. 5:21). And so now we could add to that list of shocking reversals a union between a people whose holy law forbids the union of man and animal celebrating the marriage of the Bride and the Lamb.
The third explanation is Satan’s penchant for mimicry. 2 Corinthians 11:14 tells us that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. In that guise it is possible to mistake the “morning star” of Isaiah 14:12 (Satan) for the “bright morning star” of Revelation 22:16 (Jesus). Because Jesus is the Lion of Judah, Satan stalks the world as a “roaring lion.” Satan presents counterfeit miracles (Ex. 7), counterfeit gospels (Gal. 1:8), counterfeit spirits (2 Cor. 11:4), counterfeit teachings (2 Jn. 1:10), and even counterfeit prophets and christs (Mt. 24:24). Therefore, it is not surprising that Satan would attempt to cause God’s chosen bride to whore after a “beast of the field” in order to distract from the true groom, the Lamb. Those earlier distractions and counterfeits were all validly prohibited by the law and can make it challenging to see the marriage supper of the Lamb truly.
To recap: 1) the Cherubim remind us that we do not yet fully understand the final heavenly form of Man and his resurrection body and role 2) The Bible’s use of taboo remind us of the fact that the Bride’s marriage to the lamb may be presented because it’s shocking, in order to highlight the glory of the utter uniqueness of the event in history and 3) Satan’s mimicry remind us of the fact that many earlier counterfeit “unions” sully our understanding of the true union that Revelation points toward. But there is a final element that is even more essential to the imagery of any marriage. A marriage is the creation of a “one-flesh” union. In this world, God has mandated that marital union is to only exist between two creatures who share the same “kind” of flesh. Man to woman. Beast to beast. Bird to bird. The strangeness of the marriage of the Lamb and the Bride points to an even more shocking truth, that God will plight his troth to Man. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:31-32). The blessed return to union between God and man was begun when the Son condescended to take on human flesh to be our Savior. But it will be finished when the wedding bells have rung. His depiction as a Lamb and not a man highlight the deeply humiliating way in which Christ earned his bride: allowing himself to be treated and killed in a manner not befitting a man, but as a sacrificial lamb: “Oppressed and afflicted, he opened not his mouth; like a lamb to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth” (Is. 53:7). And yet now it is his greatest glory. As we saw in part two, whenever man arrogantly takes divine prerogatives upon himself, he is humiliated by being treated like an animal. Christ on the other hand willingly played the part of the sacrificial lamb, earning his elevation to the right hand of the Father. Let us follow in his train.
Jonathan David White is a 2021-22 Theopolis Fellow. He lives in Annapolis, MD with his wife and two sons.
NOTES
- 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. ↩︎
- Admittedly, it seems as if “Adam’s silence” is equally to blame. ↩︎
- Setting aside some of the more controversial assertions from his thesis, Andrew Rillera has helpfully pointed out that there are no prescribed methods of atoning for murder, adultery, or idolatry in the levitical system. Eve’s sin of listening to the voice of the serpent instead of the voice of her husband was in a sense a violation of all three: she was covenantally unfaithful to her husband (adultery), she bowed to the counsel of one who was not God (idolatry), and decided to take a course of action that God had told her would lead to death (murder). ↩︎
- It must be noted that there are “positive” examples of animalistic metaphors for love in Scripture. The Song of Solomon is wild and wooly with animal imagery, comparing the Bride’s every feature to some specific animal, even one specific passage that almost resembles the graphic Jeremiah 2 passage, “I compare you, my love, to a mare among Pharaoh’s chariots” (Song 1:9). Presumably, Pharaoh’s chariot horses were only allowed to mate with the lustiest of mares. I think we’re supposed to imagine all of the stalled war horses neighing and stamping amorously as the “mare” is brought by. The image Solomon seems to be conjuring up is racy to say the least. How exactly we are to separate the “appropriate” usages of animalism in understanding sexuality is something that a finer Bible exegete than myself will have to present. ↩︎
- The context of bestiality is not often associated with Romans 1, but I think that the non-specificity of the female sexual perversions is telling:
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.” (Romans 1:22-27)
The disgusting rise in popularity of “monster romance” novels targeting the younger fans of traditional bodice rippers gives a pretty good proxy for this same phenomenon at the human, personal level (though Babylon and Israel/Church clearly are operating at a corporate level). ↩︎ - The extension of man’s domain over the fish of the sea only comes with Christ’s ministry, who teaches his disciples to be fishers of men. The great god of the sea, Leviathan, a type of Satan, is not tamed, but destroyed: “In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1) ↩︎
- Paul’s extended reflection on the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15:35-49 is relevant here. “There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another” (15:40). The glorious arrangement of eternity future will be very different from the one we see now. ↩︎