On the Urgent Matter of the Bible; Or, On How Vegetarians Should Use The Bible

AI-generated image depicting Genesis 27, emphasizing vv 16-17, inscribed on the skin of a goat.

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Abstract:
This essay explores how vegetarian and vegan readers might reframe their relationship to the meaty texts of biblical literature. Drawing on the works of Ken Stone, Carol J. Adams, Val Plumwood, and Martha C. Nussbaum, the essay interrogates the predator-prey dynamic inside and beyond the (Hebrew) Bible. The author proposes an alternative to the casual “naturalization” of the food chain: a vegetarian hermeneutics informed by queer (non)human animal desire. Testing a queer vegetarian hermeneutics through a reading of 2 Samuel 6, the author argues that while David’s refusal of God’s predatory behavior is inspiring, it does not go far enough. Our ongoing task is to reject the predator-prey dynamic and, building on David’s example, teach God to care about what all (non)human animals want. The author maintains that this and similar practices contribute to letting fall through “the sheet” of meat a new creation or image of anti-predatory (non)human animal relations.

“Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat” (Adams 2024 [1990], 180).

HOW SHOULD VEGETARIANS USE THE BIBLE?

New Testament scholar Stephen Moore draws our attention to a “notable interfacing” of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and biblical readings in Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (2005, 81). This “is one essay in which Bhabha is more than usually emphatic,” Moore observes, “that the colonized are engaged in active subversion of the colonizer’s discourse, in this case, the colonizer’s Scripture” (2005, 90).

Moore explains that in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Bhabha describes a gathering in May 1817 of “some 500 souls, men, women, and children, seated in the shade of trees [outside Delhi] and engaged in scripture reading and debate” (2005, 86). The souls gathered in the shade are taught by an Indian missionary, who tells them, “These books . . . teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they have printed it in our language, for our use.” Hearing this, someone replies, “Ah! no, that cannot be, for they eat flesh” (2005, 91, italics added).

The 500 agree to be baptized, but they refuse to receive the Eucharist “because the Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us” (Moore 2005, 91). They decline to complete the Catholic initiation process by receiving the vegetarian Meal of meals, the Eucharist, because Europeans eat meat, especially cow’s flesh.

But what do the Indian people, who believe cows are sacred, do with the Bible of the European meat-eaters? A second missionary observes that “[every Indian] would gladly receive a Bible. Why? That he may store it up with curiosity; sell it for a few pice, or use it for waste paper” (Moore 2005, 92).

For “every Indian,” the Bible of the Western meat-eaters is a collector’s item, a cheap commodity, or toilet paper. Moore describes such uses of biblical literature as forms of “resistant reading of the colonial Bible” (Moore 2005, 92, emphasis original).

Such resistant reading practices, “ones that resist by refusing to read,” hover over the surfaces of the Bible. They enable resistance “by remaining at the level of the material signifier, the papery substance itself—wondrously thin, almost transparent, yet wholly tangible . . .” (Moore 2005, 92).

The nearly 175-year-old example of 500 Indian Christian vegetarians, including children, might shock modern Western vegetarian readers of biblical literature into the realization that the Bible can be used in surprising ways, but it isn’t edible. While the contemporary Bible is plant-based, at least in its printed forms, papyrus is not the material condition of the Bible. The Bible is meatier than it first appears, at least to its modern readers.

As we will soon discover, the intuition of the 500 Indian Christian souls—that the Bible’s meatiness is inside-out—is more than confirmed by the texts that make up biblical literature. In fact, biblical literature is structurally wedded to a predator-prey dynamic. This presents a serious problem for the Bible’s Western vegetarian and vegan readers.

In what follows, I attend to the Bible’s material condition, to the reason for its textual survival—namely, dead animals. I then make the predator-prey logic that runs through biblical literature visible. Finally, through a (re)reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and 2 Samuel 6, I propose a queer vegetarian hermeneutics that refuses the “common sense” of predatory behavior and intervenes in it, letting fall through the meaty “sheet” of the Western Book of books queer possibilities for anti-predatory (non)human animal relations.

DISCERNING THE BIBLE’S ANIMAL MATTER

It is difficult to recognize the Bible’s meatiness for two reasons. First, the matter of biblical literature is not a biblical term. The Bible is silent about the character of its materiality. Therefore, reading biblical literature will not reveal the Bible’s matter.

Since the material basis of the Bible isn’t found in its various texts, it’s reasonable to assume that defining the Bible’s matter involves viewing it as a proper aesthetic object. The proper aesthetic object is its surface(s).

What, however, do you see when you look at your digital or printed Bible? You see a surface, a screen or parchment, with words on it. Are either, or both, of these surfaces the Bible’s matter?

You’re probably not convinced that your phone screen is the matter of the digital Bible. But is the code, or more specifically, the human coder “behind” the screen, the matter of the Bible?

Again, the answer must be no. The scribes (or coders) and authors (even God!) of biblical literature are the sources of the Bible’s text, not the condition or ground of its text.

Perhaps the paper, especially the tree it comes from, is the matter of the printed Bible? Yes, the paper or tree is a condition of the Bible’s text—but it is not the material condition of the Bible.

THE ILLEGIBLE CONDITION OF THE BIBLE’S LEGIBILITY

Hebrew Bible scholar Ken Stone reminds us that the wildly diverse texts collected in the Bible owe their existence to animals. In Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, Stone notes that parchment, unlike the more fragile plant-based papyrus, allowed for the “survival and transmission” of canonized biblical literature (Stone 2018, 44):

Famous biblical manuscripts . . . are all made from parchment. Their animal origins are still apparent from the presence of such features as hair follicle patterns . . . which . . . sometimes made it possible to determine the species from which a piece of parchment was created (Stone 2018, 21).

DNA evidence indicates that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including those containing biblical texts, “derive from domestic goatskins, and other pieces from the skin of the Nubian ibex, one of the goat’s wild relatives.” Stone also notes that “[w]hat we now call the Bible was literally created from animal skins, and the religions that relied upon it drew their life, in part, from the bodies of dead animals” (2018, 22, emphasis added).

The Bible’s material condition, its animality, can only be seen from the eye of the historical record. The “illegible condition of [the Bible’s] own legibility,” its materiality or animality, is almost always completely missing from the modern Bible surface(s) (Butler 1993, 11).

That leads us to the second challenge in defining the Bible’s materiality. The Bible is not a proper aesthetic object. It is an absent referent.

THE BIBLE IS AN ABSENT REFERENT

The absent referent is the theoretical cornerstone of Carol J. Adams’s provocative and unsettling text, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. The absent referent is text detached from its animal condition.

“Kid,” for example, is an absent referent. It is a term detached from its animal origin: the flesh of a butchered, less than one-year-old goat. “Parchment,” too, is scraped from its animal matter: the skin of a butchered goat.

“Through butchering,” Adams argues, “animals become absent referents. . . . The absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity; it also enables us to resist efforts to make animals present” (Adams 2024, 23).

One strategy Adams recommends for making animals present is “writing the literal” (2024, 61, 91). Writing the literal reconnects the piece of meat to the whole, independent animal. For example, imagine someone ordering wings of a chicken rather than chicken wings at Chick-fil-A.

MAKING ANIMALS PRESENT OUTSIDE-IN BIBLICAL LITERATURE

Making animals present to readers of the Hebrew Bible is the main goal of Ken Stone’s previously mentioned book, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. He starts by writing the literal; that is, by grounding biblical literature in its materiality or animality: the skins of goats that literally enabled its “survival and transmission” (2018, 44).

Reattaching biblical literature to goat skins explicitly connects the Bible to the lives of nonhuman animals beyond its pages. Goat skins are remnants of the “actual animals who lived alongside the writers of biblical literature, or the earliest scribes who put its pieces together” (2018, 44).

When the pieces are put together, when goat skins are reattached to actual goats, it becomes clear that goats roam throughout the (Hebrew) Bible’s many pages because they are roaming alongside and around the lives of the Bible’s many authors and scribes. The human creators of biblical literature lived and slept near animals, tended to them, slaughtered them for food, sacrificed them to God, and observed them in “the wild.”

Animals meant something to them. So, it’s no surprise that the animals in the Bible (literally) carry social meaning.

Animal studies, then, is not somehow an imposition on biblical literature (Stone 2018, 23). To the contrary, absenting animals from their biblical habitats effectively causes the extinction of some species of biblical meaning.

MAKING ANIMALS PRESENT INSIDE-OUT BIBLICAL LITERATURE

Stone reintroduces us to (un)familiar animals in their biblical habitats, starting with “companion species” such as goats, sheep, and cattle (2018, 30). Stone makes biblical (companion) animals present to us in three ways.

First, following in the footsteps of Donna Haraway, Stone challenges the culture/nature divide. Animals are always-already entangled in culture, and vice versa.

Next, Stone builds on Derridean deconstruction and challenges the human/animal binary. Animal otherness becomes (re)productive and expands across the binary. “Close attention to the multiple modes of life found among non-human animals,” Stone argues, “thus has the paradoxical effect of pluralizing the category of ‘animals’ while simultaneously destabilizing the singular boundary constructed between humans and all other animals” (2018, 35).

Finally, Stone highlights how some humans are more closely associated with animals/animality than are others. “[S]ome humans and groups of humans are associated with animals more than others,” Stone observes, “and frequently in ways that either stigmatize humans deemed insufficiently human or underscore their subordinate status” (2018, 40).

The story of Jacob and Esau serves as the main “character” in Stone’s first chapter, “Israel’s Companion Species and the Creation of Bibles” (Gen. 27). The story highlights the multiple—and sometimes conflicting—ways animals are used to determine who is and isn’t considered normatively human.

The hairy, manly Esau is clearly associated with goats. His mother, Rebekah, covers his younger, smooth, tent-dwelling brother, Jacob, in hairy goat skins to deceive Isaac, her elderly, nearly blind husband, into blessing Jacob (vv. 11–17). When Isaac touches Jacob, he feels his hairy skin and smells his gamey progeny. Therefore, he believes he is blessing Esau when he’s actually blessing Jacob (vv. 21–29).

The story is believable mainly because goats are a “companion species.” Goats are a common part of the ancient Near Eastern landscape. Furthermore, Rebekah’s strategy succeeds only because the difference between goats and humans “is not absolute” (Stone 2018, 40).

As the story of Jacob and Esau illustrates, animal associations can be used positively. However, animal associations are also employed to create (subtle) queer zones.

Jacob, for example, is initially depicted as the less masculine brother. Unlike Esau, he has a smooth body and is urbane. While Jacob’s masculine disguise conceals the maternal tricksterism linked to Israel’s origins, it does not eliminate it.

With the emergence of Christianity in the fourth century, Israel’s “femininity” is once again revealed. But in this version of the story, it is “femininity” that takes on an animal quality.

As attire for queer zones, animal associations are used to justify normative social controls. Said controls largely determine who among us is made to bear the mark of our shared animality at any given time in history.

Once marked, queers are subjected to predatory social policies. Queers are human-animals made vulnerable to the destructive social fires of sacrifice and use.

EDIBILITY; OR, ON BEING (MADE TO BE) USEABLE

Carol J. Adams situates (non)human animal useability or edibility within the realm of social meaning: patriarchy and meat eating are, for Adams, inseparable—and the “hierarchy of meat protein reinforces a hierarchy of race, class, and sex” (2024, 9).

Adams’s position may strike one as unreasonably “woke,” but animality, women, veganism, and vegetarianism are all manifestly interlinked terms in social and biblical discourse. For example, Ken Stone points out that while “meanings for the [biblical] names of Leah and Rebekah are obscure, ‘cow’ is sometimes given as a possibility for each” (2018, 41). Even if the exact meanings of biblical names are unclear, biblical narratives often portray women as commodities that men may both acquire and consume.

Adams’s feminist-vegan critical theory is based on the idea that the social positions of nonhuman animals and women overlap: they both are absent referents. “Sexual violence and meat eating,” Adams argues, “find a point of intersection in the absent referent. Cultural images of sexual violence, and actual sexual violence, often rely on our knowledge of how animals are butchered and eaten” (2024, 24-25).

The late Val Plumwood, in her haunting book The Eye of the Crocodile, is critical of what she defines as Adams’s “ontological veganism.” Ontological veganism, according to Plumwood, traces “all the problems of animal reduction” back to “a simple cause—ontologizing them as edible” (2012, 82).

Plumwood advocates for recognizing human animals as edible components of the food chain; that is, as inherently usable. Seeing ourselves through the “eye of the crocodile” means recognizing ourselves as “just another animal, a particular kind of food, food with pretensions,” instead of as superior, inedible, invincible, disembodied beings of reason or culture (2012, 18).

Plumwood further argues that “instrumentalism is mis-defined by Adams as involving any making use of the other, rather than reductive treatment of the other as no more than something of use, a means to an end” (2012, 82). Plumwood’s Kantian counter-proposal is that treating animals as ends in themselves and never merely as means does not exclude “respectful use” of animals, “an ecological universe of mutual use [in which] animals [are seen as] mutually available . . . in conditions of equality” (2012, 78).

Assessing meat-eating in the ancient Near Eastern world, “respectful use” is probably as good a description as any. In the story of Jacob and Esau, goats are killed, butchered, and eaten by humans. But meat, Stone notes, may have “made up a smaller portion of the average diet in ancient Israel than it does today” (2018, 30).

Furthermore, “factory farming” did not exist in the ancient world—so neither did the extreme “remoteness” that exists today between human hunger and its satisfaction (Plumwood 2002, 16, 74, 229). Slaughtering the family goat, the animal one has carefully reared alongside one’s toddler, for lunch, probably feels different from buying a kid from the modern butcher’s market.

The (presumed) presence of “intimacy” between the ancient human slaughterer and the slaughtered animal (an intimacy one may find on small family farms today) is certainly better than the extreme distance modern factory farming creates between human animal consumers and the nonhuman animals killed for food. Additionally, as Stone emphasizes: “Without [the slaughter of] goats and sheep, Israel’s story as we have it, and the religions grounded in that story, would not exist” (2018, 33).

SACRIFICE: ON BEING SMELLABLE TO GOD

Edibility or usability is a crucial factor in deciding an animal’s suitability for sacrifice. Additionally, eligibility for sacrifice is closely linked to domesticity in the Hebrew Bible.

“Only domesticated animals are considered appropriate for sacrifice,” writes Stone. “The animals that are sacrificed all come from Israel’s closest companion species,” herbivores such as goats, sheep, and cattle (2018, 33).

Only domesticated animals are sacrificed, but not all domesticated animals qualify for sacrifice (e.g., dogs). Moreover, some “wild” animals are considered edible but are not eligible for sacrifice (e.g., deer).

An animal’s eligibility for sacrifice depends on whether the animal is edible or inedible, clean or unclean, domesticated or wild, young or old, male or female, able-bodied or disabled, and so on. Similar distinctions are made between and among different types of humans eligible to sacrifice an animal and/or to receive an animal sacrifice.

One such distinction that Stone identifies is “[t]he exclusion of men with disabilities from offering ‘the food for his God.’” He notes how this criterion “penalizes . . . [a] type of difference among humans” (2018, 80).

Significantly, in the Hebrew Bible, humans are not excluded from the group of domesticated or “civilized” animals that are eligible for sacrifice (e.g., Exod. 22:29–30; Ezek. 20:25–26; Judg. 11:29–30, 35–36, 39). “Biblical discourse on sacrifice cuts across the barrier between human animals,” Stone notes, “making certain humans and certain animals eligible for ritual killing while eliminating other humans and other animals from such eligibility” (2018, 80, emphasis added).

Strangely, sacrifices (i.e., extrajudicial animal killings) are for God, yet God does not eat or taste the sacrifices made to God. However, God does seem to enjoy the sight and smell of them. In fact, God appears to prefer the sight and smell of meat over that of non-meat sacrifices or offerings.

Cain, recall, makes a vegetarian offering, while Abel makes an animal offering to God (Gen. 4:3–4a). God “gazed on Abel and on his offering, but on Cain and his offering [God] did not gaze” (Gen. 4:4b–5a). God prefers Abel’s offering, even before “God’s first explicit permission to eat animals in Genesis 9:3” (Stone 2018, 66).

Stone references W. Sibley Towner’s (2001, 59) commentary on Cain and Abel, specifically a comment he makes after looking “ahead to Genesis 8:21 (where God smells ‘the pleasing odor of Noah’s sacrifices),” that “the Lord apparently has always liked the smell of barbeque” (Stone 2018, 67).

I believe most readers of the (Hebrew) Bible find the practice of animal sacrifice, especially human sacrifice, to be upsetting—and for reasons not directly connected to the animals themselves (e.g., sacrifice is a gruesome or primitive practice). Stone highlights an aspect of our dislike of sacrifice that might escape our conscious understanding:

For among all the senses, the olfactory is arguably that which most distinguishes humans from other mammals. Images of God smelling savory sacrifices may frighten readers of the Bible not simply because they threaten to make God too human, but also because they threaten to turn God into an animal, a carnivore able to smell meat at a distance before devouring it with fire, a Chimera, appropriate perhaps for other ancient mythologies but surely not for the Bible (2018, 82).

THE S/SHEPHERD AND/AS P/PREDATOR: ON THE DIVINIZATION OF MEAT EATING

Criss-crossing the boundary of the quaint image of a shepherd protecting their flock, vigilantly scanning the field with its eyes and nose for the right mutton and the right moment to kill her, is a figure Stone refuses to sacrifice in his reading of the Hebrew Bible with animal studies: the wily predator.

Stone argues that the predator is always already internal to the relationship between the S/shepherd and their flock/people. Drawing on the insightful work of Hebrew Bible scholar Jonathan Klawans (2006), Stone highlights that sacrifice in ancient Israel isn’t a gimmick to get God’s attention and draw God’s presence for the benefit of paying fans. Instead, as Klawans sees it, sacrifice is filled with a longing for love and mutual exchange between all animals and God.

Israel’s sacrificial politics of care and dependence is expressed in two interconnected ways: 1) Humans see themselves reflected in the animals they sacrifice. “They are the flock of God, who are bred, raised, cared for, and protected, but also killed, on occasion, by God” (Stone, 2018, 87, emphasis added). 2) Humans also see themselves in God, the Shepherd/Father, who cares for the flock and sometimes kills a lamb for their purposes.

The S/shepherd, or F/father, or M/male imbued with the power to kill members of the flock extrajudicially, is a problematic aspect of (Klawans’s understanding of) Israel’s politics of sacrificial love and reciprocity. “The idea that care, control, and killing of one’s closest subordinates can go together is disturbing[!],” writes Stone, “when we encounter it in extreme representations such as the story of the daughter of Jephthah [Judg. 11]” (2018, 87).

Indeed.

However, what Klawans (and, I believe, Stone) proposes is the idea that when we read texts like Judges 11 with sufficient attentiveness to the facts—such as recognizing that Jephthah’s father is genuinely “distraught” over her death, and that Jephthah is his daughter (rather than, as Adams [2024] might suggest, a piece of meat)—we may consider the possibility “that the cultural tolerance for a ‘non-criminal putting to death’ of the subordinates one cares for . . . may have made such exceptional stories . . . easier to imagine for the Israelites than they are for us” (Stone 2018, 89).

In any case, my point does not rely on how one interprets Klawans’s reading of sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible. My point is this: the S/shepherd in the field with his sheep, like the wolf, is a symbol of predatory desire.

Stone explicitly links God and predator in chapter 5 of Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies, “Israel’s Wild Neighbors in the Zoological Gaze.” The “zoological gaze” is a term created by sociologist Adrian Franklin (1999) that describes how humans observe and understand animals, including other human animals, in their environment.

It is because the wild is a zone of exclusion, a human-made place where civilization does not exist, that the zoological gaze may be trained on both the wolf and the human. “During the era of European colonial expansion,” Stone reminds us, “‘non-Europeans’ were often represented by Europeans as ‘animal-like’” (2018, 120).

Stone makes several observations that call into question God’s preference for “the civilized” or even for human civilization itself. The first is that “God is . . . aligned with the creatures of chaos [e.g., wild cats, ostriches, hyenas, Leviathan]” and vice versa (2018, 27, 136).

In fact, God and wild creatures have a direct relationship, “independent of humans.” And, finally, their relationship is quite “natural” because God is the mother of the chaos or wild places (2018, 132-133).

One way the Mother of chaos connects with her wild and wily children is by providing for them. Referring to Job 38:29, Stone argues, “The point here is clearly that God rather than Job finds prey for the lions.” Stone also notes that in Job 39:1, it is strongly implied that God knows where the prey, specifically goats and deer, give birth to their young (2018, 133-134).

“What does it mean,” Stone asks, “that, when pressed by Job and his friends to give an account of human suffering, God calls their attention to the existence in God’s creation of predators and prey?” (2018, 139).

INTERVENING IN PREDATION: OR, WHAT DO (NON-)HUMAN ANIMALS WANT?

 Plumwood (2012) is very familiar with the suffering of prey caught in a predator’s jaws. In The Eye of the Crocodile, she reflects on being attacked by a saltwater crocodile in 1985 while canoeing alone in Australia’s Kakadu National Park.

She cannot recall the crocodile’s size, as only their head was above water. “I now know,” she writes, “that an animal that can give its intended prey a misleading impression of its size, can help them to a less misleading sense of who and what they are” (2012, 10).

One reason Plumwood chose to write about her terrifying experience is to “defend the crocodile’s right to eat humans who strayed into their territory” (2012, 17). That is one implication of “[leaping] through the eye of the crocodile” (2012, 13).

From the crocodile’s point of view, “we are food: juicy, nourishing bodies” (Plumwood 2012, 10). It was not until she was looking “into the eye of the crocodile” that Plumwood realized she “had given insufficient attention to this important aspect of human life, to my own vulnerability as an edible, animal being” (Plumwood 2012, 36).

Looking through the eye of the crocodile, we learn a valuable lesson: humans are also prey. Prey, too, has a perspective.

According to Plumwood, prey understands that their bodies are not their own. Prey knows that they are always available for another’s use. At any moment, we may be recalled, like a book we have checked out from a library—and before we have “even finished reading it . . . ” (Plumwood, 2012, 36).

Plumwood is, I think, mistaken on this point. There is simply no evidence to suggest that gazelles, for example, see themselves as recallable books, as prey.

Perhaps I’m wrong, and gazelles do understand themselves as prey. On what basis are we to believe that they want to be prey?

Plumwood is also wrong, in my view, about predation. Even if we grant that humans or gazelles are edible, it does not follow that animals are food; that is, it does not follow that animals are for eating.

Again, I may be wrong. So, let’s also assume that animals are a form of food. From that premise it certainly doesn’t follow that animals should be eaten.

I do agree with Plumwood on this point: “We often know [prey] animals are individuals who often value and know themselves as such and it is important that we do the same” (2012, 44). But how do (non)human animals, including predators, see themselves? What do (non)human animals want?

Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum (2022) helps us understand what animals want and the implications of their desires for animal justice. In her carefully reasoned and impassioned book Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility, Nussbaum shows that the concepts of justice, significant striving, and animal sentience are connected to what animals want.

First, justice. Nussbaum defines justice by contrasting it with injustice: “[T]he general intuition [is that] injustice centrally involves significant striving blocked by not just harm but also wrongful thwarting, whether negligent or deliberate” (2022, 8, emphasis original).

Significant striving is closely connected to the concept of (in)justice. It refers to what animals want for their lives (e.g., shelter, food, health, love, religion, etc.). “Significant striving,” Nussbaum argues, “includes subjective perception of things that are helpful and harmful (the world looks like this to the animal), plus a variety of subjective attitudes, such as pain and pleasure, and, in addition, numerous other subjective states that motivate behavior: desires and emotions” (2022, 140).

Unjust thwarting of significant thriving is the intentional—or by negligence—blocking of an animal’s deliberate movement to obtain what is important to them (Nussbaum 2022, 18). If little Bobby intentionally destroys a bird’s nest, he wrongfully thwarts a bird’s striving. Similarly, if his father stands by while he destroys the nest, his father’s inaction or negligence constitutes wrongful thwarting of the bird’s striving.

Just as significant striving is related to (in)justice, so is sentience intimately connected to significant thriving. “What I am saying is that my core notion of injustice can apply only to creatures who are capable of significant striving, and that involves [sentience]” (Nussbaum, 2022, 119).

Sentience is often defined as the ability to feel pain, which is very harmful to sentient beings. However, it also involves having an opinion of yourself and perceiving others in your group, as well as other objects in the world, in a certain way. Additionally, sentience means intentionally moving in ways that reflect your sense of self and your understanding of how objects in your environment relate to what is good or bad for you.

Most animals, “including all mammals, all birds, and teleost (hard-boned) fish, are sentient” (Nussbaum 2022, 119). It is unlikely that most insects are sentient (though bees, for example, might be). Therefore, we don’t need to worry too much about justice for, say, flies or spiders, though flies, spiders, mosquitoes, sharks, trees, lettuce, and so on deserve other kinds of human animal concern.

As Nussbaum notes, the concept of sentience is essential as an ethical boundary because, without it, we lack a solid theoretical foundation to justify serious ethical thought about animal wants or intervening in (non)human animal predation. Additionally, without the idea of sentience, we lack a clear boundary to prevent a slide into absurdity (2022, xxv).

Adams’s theory lacks a concept of animal sentence, and she comes precariously close, it seems to me, to recognizing the suffering of lettuce in The Sexual Politics of Meat (2024, 80). More problematic, in my view, is that without the concept of sentience, Adams cannot justify why we should care about the wrongful thwarting of nonhuman animal desires as an injustice in its own right. Is butchering nonhuman animals morally wrong only because it is connected to the butchering of women and minorities associated with animality by the dominant culture?

Stone, too, does not explicitly address animal sentience in Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Although he carefully avoids making any controversial claims, Stone seems to share many of Plumwood’s views. An acceptance of the predator-prey dynamic that Plumwood describes in The Eye of the Crocodile appears to underpin Stone’s interpretation of (non)human relations in the Hebrew Bible.

We observed the predator-prey relationship in the story of Esau and Jacob. The goat is used “occasionally” for food and clothing. We also identified the predator-prey dynamic in the context of sacrifice. There, we learned that (non)human animals are “occasionally” killed by those responsible for their love and care, that occasionally killing the ones you love is just a feature of intimate relationships between various (non)human animals and even God.

The predator-prey dynamic is most evident in Stone’s reading of the Book of Job, where God takes the predator’s side and appears as the predator. Like the crocodile, God does not seem to give a shit about the pretensions of prey, including human animals.

Stone and Plumwood seem to assume that the predator-prey dynamic is somehow a natural fact. Referring to Isaiah 65:35, a well-known passage about the wolf and lamb feeding together, Stone notes that while many scholars acknowledge that this text—and other passages like it—presents an “attractive” vision of peace, “they also assume a negative view of ‘the food chain and the ecosystem as we know it'” (2018, 125). Yet, like “scientific objectivity,” the “food chain” is also a human invention.

It is also unclear to me why, after reading Stone, we should not only notice animals in the (Hebrew) Bible but also take their desires seriously. Why, that is, should we move from animal hermeneutics to animal ethics, as Stone encourages us to in chapter 4 of Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies?

What compels us to care about the protests of Balaam’s donkey (Num. 22:22-38), the subject of Stone’s chapter 4, “From Animal Hermeneutics to Animal Ethics”? Does Balaam’s donkey, like Wilbur in E.B. White’s (1952) Charlotte’s Web, merit serious ethical concern only because they effectively communicate in the language of humans?

Why should we “look at our animal ‘brothers’ today as they look back at us,” as Stone suggests we should, “and ask how our own world is constructed through new chimeric monsters of our own making, and the matter of dead animals” (2018, 90)?

Perhaps the only strong ethical claim made by both Stone and Plumwood is that we, human predators, kill (non)human animals all too brutally and all too often. It would be no small achievement, indeed, if we learned to kill more humanely and much, much less often—but that strikes me as a rather anorexic, if you will, ethical vision.

Looking back at us, what are our fellow animals trying to tell us? And why should predators, like God, give a shit?

Nussbaum, for example, demonstrates that all of the best evidence (including that gathered with your very own eyes) clearly shows that sentient animals, including predators, desire two basic things: 1) to be where they are, and 2) to live, and freely pursue, over their lifetimes, the relationships and projects that reasonably matter to them.

Sentient animals, like all animals, may be edible, but they do not want to be food. Justice for animals, then, involves actively supporting sentient creatures, including intervening in predatory behavior (even in the so-called “wild”), in their efforts to obtain what they desire for themselves: unique, reasonably pleasurable species-specific lives.

AN EXTINCTION OF VERSE? OR, ON THE BIBLE IN THE GLASS CASE

Stone’s reading of the Hebrew Bible more than confirms the intuition of the 500 Indian Christian vegetarian souls we encountered at the beginning of this essay: the matter of biblical literature is inside-out. Thus, vegetarians and vegans may collect, sell, or use the Bible as toilet paper, but it isn’t edible.

By refusing to “eat” biblical literature, 500 Indian souls exemplify vegan politics 173 years before Carol Adams discusses it in The Sexual Politics of Meat. As for Adams, she describes the vegetarian and vegan political goal as imagining “alternatives to the texts of meat” (2024, 180).

In the West, however, refusing to read biblical literature isn’t quite the same thing as creating alternatives to its meaty stories. The Bible is, to slightly overstate my case, the language of Western culture.

Whether we like it or not, those of us immersed in Western society have eaten biblical literature. We have consumed its pages, even though we may have thought they were terrible.

Now that we are sufficiently stuffed with it, what can we do with biblical literature? I propose that we let its text fall from our system.

In a well-known, enigmatic short essay, “Crisis in Verse,” Stéphane Mallarmé (2007 [1897]) represents the stormy logic of letting words fall.

On a rainy day, Mallarmé writes, “A minute ago, dropping my hand . . . I let fall—without curiosity, though it felt as though I had read everything twenty years ago—the string of multicolored pearls left by the rain, reflected in a glass case full of books” (2007, 201).

The words (“multicolored pearls”), notice, do not fall from him. They drop from a source “below” him, on the other side of the page or glassy surface, “a case full of books.” Mallarmé’s first sentence evokes a soul letting fall words from an unconscious reservoir.

The “glass case full of books” he read twenty years ago is a “saturated rain cloud,” releasing its “multicolored pearls . . . against the window” (2007, 201). The pearls Mallarmé lets fall are themselves fallen words—words that have emerged from “many a work, under the beaded curtain” (2007, 201).

Letting the words fall away, the writer becomes a reader like any other. She follows irredeemable, flashy words across the page as “one follows storm lights across the sky” (2007, 201). Words are always-already fallen because their meaning cannot be located in any authority or power beyond where the words fall.

Letting fall words implies yielding, according to Mallarmé, “the initiative to words” rather than to external authority (2007, 208). The meaning of fallen words is created by “the clash of their ordered inequalities.” They “light each other up through reciprocal relations like a virtual swooping of fire across precious stones . . . replacing the personal feelings driving the sentences” (2007, 208).

Fallen words are their own authority. That is why “[l]iterature is here undergoing an exquisite and fundamental crisis,”—by which Mallarmé means, recalling the event of Jesus’s death in the New Testament—“a trembling of the veil in the temple, with significant folds, and, a little, its rendering” (2007, 201).

Verse is in its Lenten season. The temple veil (i.e., authority) is wrinkled, “and, a little,” torn. The slight rending of the veil reveals that God (and Victor Hugo) is no longer obsessively policing “the Ark of the Covenant.”

Mallarmé suggests that an unfailing loyalty to a veil drained of beauty, “a refusal to expose worn-down threads, repetition,” promises an age of radical boredom. That age, that cloth, is (potentially) an “[e]xtinction” of verse (2007, 202).

Isn’t that surprising? Jesus’s death isn’t usually read as an extinction-level event. Yet, if a few verses from Acts, a story about what happens after Jesus’s death and resurrection, are any indication, Jesus’s afterlife is not good news for new verse.

In Acts 10:11-13, we read that Peter “saw heaven opened up and something like a large linen sheet being lowered to the earth by its four corners. Inside the sheet were all kinds of four-legged animals, reptiles, and wild birds. A voice told him, ‘Get up, Peter! Kill and eat!’”

The events of Jesus’s death, traditionally understood as the Sacrifice of sacrifice, the act of a willing, innocent ewe offering himself up to the predatory passion of the Shepherd to save the entire flock from death, and resurrection certainly did not usher in a golden age of veganism or vegetarianism. In fact, Acts 10 makes even more animal lives available for human consumption, at least to Israelites like Peter.

FINALLY, FALLEN WORDS ON ANIMAL SENTIENCE, (NON)HUMAN AND DIVINE

 Mallarmé’s free verse may inspire us to reimagine what we can do with a cloth or sheet that is wrinkled and, “a little,” torn. Such a temple veil inspires, I think, a rapprochement with the Holy of holies, with the Predator thought to live behind the veil.

2 Samuel 6, a story about David escorting the Ark of the Covenant (later housed in the Temple and concealed by the Temple veil) into Jerusalem, is similar to Mallarmé’s veil in two ways. First, some verses are worn out.

For example, 2 Samuel 6:13 reads, “Whenever those bearing the chest [or Ark of God] advanced six steps, David sacrificed an ox and a fatling calf” (v. 13, CEB). The number of animals David sacrifices on the journey depends on how the Hebrew text is translated. It matters whether the text reads, like option (a), “whenever they advanced six steps, two animals were sacrificed,” or like option (b), “after they had gone six steps, two animals were sacrificed.”

The travel distance from Gath, where the Lord’s chest is exiled by David, to Jerusalem could have been as long as fifty miles. So, in the case of option (b) above, David sacrifices two animals to ensure a safe journey. Or, if we take the text less literally, David makes several sacrifices along the way to satiate God’s desire for barbecue, recalling Tower’s earlier comment. So, more than two animals are sacrificed by David, but far fewer than in option (a).

In the case of option (a), what appears to be a minority tradition, David sacrifices countless animals. Here’s the math: Let’s say a step is two and a half feet. One mile = 5,280 feet, so fifty miles = 264,000 feet. Thus, sacrificing two animals every six steps, or every fifteen feet, for fifty miles means David sacrificed 35,200 animals.

In addition to animal sacrifices, David famously dances (or cavorts) before the Lord, and lets fall his junk from out of his robe, scandalizing his wife, the former king’s daughter, Michal (vv. 14–16, 20–22). His dance apparently gives her the “ick” (v. 16).

All these events surrounding the second attempt to bring the Lord’s chest into David’s City are driven by fear. Three months earlier, as the chest was heading toward Jerusalem, “Uzzah reached out to God’s chest and grabbed it because the oxen had stumbled” (v. 6).

Unlike Plumwood (2012), Uzzah did not survive to tell his story. For some reason, Uzzah’s well-meaning gesture angered God. “God struck him there because of his mistake, and he died there next to God’s chest” (2 Sam. 6:7).

The oxen are not punished for stumbling, but Uzzah is unfortunately killed for grabbing the Ark. It’s an all too familiar story, but it is like Mallarmé’s veil in another way: there are some tears in the veil.

Notice, God’s behavior angers David. David strikes back at God for their mistake, and he exiles God’s chest (along with God) to “the house of Obed-edom, who was from Gath” (vv. 8, 10–11).

David does not accept God’s antisocial or predatory behavior. In the eye of David, “occasionally” killing those one supposedly loves and cares about is morally repugnant. Instead, “David got angry because the LORD’s anger lashed out against Uzzah. . .” (v. 8).

David’s anger is akin to what Nussbaum (2016) defines as “Transitional Anger.” By leaving God behind in the country, David takes responsibility for his “companion animal.” As a good animal citizen himself, David takes action to ensure that nothing like God’s murderous outburst happens again.

Nussbaum argues that “the citizenship idea would impose on human companions. . .  specific duties to promote the capabilities of the animals who live with them” (2022, 206). She further argues that “since citizenship is reciprocal, it would impose duties on [nonhuman] animals as well: not to bite people or other animals, not to urinate or defecate in inappropriate places . . . ” (2022, 206).

The saltwater crocodile that attacked and nearly killed Plumwood (2012) did not, as she acknowledges, behave inappropriately. Intervention in “wild” predatory behavior does not, in fact, depend on the eye of the crocodile. However, God is a type of nonhuman animal companion that can be expected to behave like a good citizen and be held responsible, along with their human companions, for their behavior.

There is a second hole in the temple veil of 2 Samuel 6. Erotic desire. In First and Second Samuel, we learn that God is, like human animals, driven by eros.

First Samuel is surprising in that God is consistently portrayed as choosing young men to lead based almost exclusively on their physical attractiveness. Saul is described as a “handsome young man. No one in Israel was more handsome than Saul, and he stood head and shoulders above everyone else” (1 Sam 9:1–2). David, we are told, “was reddish brown, had beautiful eyes, and was good-looking.” Noticing this, “the LORD said, ‘That’s the one. Go anoint him’” (1 Sam 16:12).

Referring to texts like 1 Samuel 9 and 16, the late theologian Theodore Jennings, Jr., in Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel, makes a compelling and orthodox case for describing God’s relationship with David as an erotic love affair. Jennings contends that David is God’s “young companion” or “boy” (2005, 38).

In the eye of Jennings, David’s dance before God takes on a new, interesting, and erotic dimension. “David displays his body to the one who first desired him for his beauty” (2005, 42).

David’s motivation for exposing his attractive body to his Lover also takes on a surprising and erotic aspect. Recalling David’s anger with his Lover for killing Uzzah, Jennings notes that while there “are many ways to read [David’s decision to punish God by leaving God in the country], it looks as though what has happened is that David’s sulky withdrawal has taught Adonai a lesson” (2005, 43).

Left in the country by David, God learns to treat animals with respect and dignity. “For instead of bursting forth in murderous rage,” Jennings notes, “the ark gives bounty and blessing” (2005, 43).

Seen in this light, David’s “cavorting,” his “goat-demon”-like dance before the Lord (a reference to a text Stone also interprets, Isa 13:1–22 [2018, 126, 206n26]), “is not so much seductive entreaty to rekindle an old flame but a kind of reward for Adonai’s good behavior. Now that [God] is tamed, the love between them can be consummated” (Jennings 2005, 43).

2 Samuel 6 is a wild story about second chances, at least for God and humans. Punished by David for killing Uzzah, God is offered the opportunity to try again. When David allows the Ark to continue its journey into Jerusalem, God chooses to accept the obligations of animal citizenship and refrains from killing humans. This time, the oxen (and calves) are the unlucky ones.  

Queer erotic desire and David’s refusal to accept God’s predatory behavior are small tears in the old veil, letting fall through “the sheet” new possibilities for (non)animal relations. Nonetheless, David’s courageous refusal of God’s predatory behavior does not go far enough. He continues to sacrifice nonhuman animal lives to his Lover, the volatile Predator of predators.

Our ongoing task is to reject the predator-prey dynamic and build on David’s example. The citizenship principle requires humans to teach God to care about what all (non)human animals want. Then, we might consummate our love for God, (potentially) letting fall a new creation or image of (non)human animal relations through “the sheet” of meat.

 WORKS CITED & REFERENCED:

 Adams, Carol. J.        

2024. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Original work published in 1990.

Bhabha, Homi.           

2004. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Boyarin, Daniel.        

1999. Dying For God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Butler, Judith.           

1993. Bodies That Matter. London and New York: Routledge.

Derrida, Jacques.       

2004. “‘Eating Well’ or on the Calculation of the Subject.” In Points. . . : Interviews, 1974-1994. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, et al. Edited by Elizabeth Weber, 255-287. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Franklin, Adrian.       

1999. Animals and Modern Culture: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity. London: Sage.

Habel, Norman          

2009. An Inconvenient Text: Is a Green Reading of the Bible Possible? Adelaide, AU: ATF Press.

Haraway, Donna.       

2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003.

2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jennings, Theodore, Jr.

2005. Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel. New York and London: Continuum.

Klawans, Jonathan.    

2006. Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mallarmé, Stéphane.  

2007. “Crisis in Verse.” In Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson, 201-211. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Original work published in 1897.

Moore, Stephen. D.    

2005. Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern. In Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections. Edited by Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, 79-96. London and New York: T & T Clark International.

Muraskin, A. and Luse, B. 2025

“Did your date give you ‘the ick’? Here’s the science behind the Feeling.” NPR (website). December 4, 2025. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/02/nx-s1-5273847/dating-ick-psychology-relationships-disgust.

Nussbaum, Martha C 

2016. Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice. New York and London: Oxford University Press.

2022.  Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Plumwood, Val.         

2002. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London and New York: Routledge.

2012. The Eye of the Crocodile. Edited by Lorraine Shannon. Canberra, Australia: Australian National University E Press.

Stone, Ken.                

2018. Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Towner, S. W.            

2001. Genesis. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.

White, E.B.                

1952. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Harper and Brothers.