The Animal at Unease with Itself. Isaac M. Alderman
is complicated, with both ubiquitous and culture-specific attitudes. In the ancient world as today, different animal species held particular meaning or value. Some were symbols of wealth, cared for and collected, while others were despised and avoided. Surveying the ancient attitudes to animals, we see that most animals that were regularly encountered were involved in the mundane realities of daily life and related to the necessities of food, agriculture, and labor. Other species, however, were deeply meaningful and imagery such as the bull, large birds, or pets of the gods, gave expression even to the apex of religious thought and practice. Animals played a role in many religious rituals, with animals being directly involved or with humans mimicking behaviors or displaying attributes of non-human animals. Aside from the realities of life, we also see the literary presence of animals, both real and imagined. Here we will examine the role of animals in some of the literary works of the ancient world. The narratives of the Bible’s historical books give small glimpses into the interactions of ancient Israelites with domesticated and wild animals. Apocalyptic texts sometimes present symbolic elements of animals and monsters. The wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible enmeshes humanity in creation. Animals are central to the issue of purity, both in causing impurity and in restoring purity. Finally, animals in Ancient Israel served some of the same functions as they did for their Egyptian and Mesopotamian neighbors, and it is important to note areas of connection and distinction.
Just as with the study of animals, a great deal of work has been done on clothing that is outside the field of biblical studies, and it is important to be familiar with the methodologies used in such discussions. Humans engage with clothing as a source of information. Appearance and presentation is an essential aspect of how we function, for a society of strangers requires the ability to know one’s relationship to another at a glance. We read clothes as signs, and therefore very much like a language; because we can read clothing, it is even possible to develop a “hermeneutics of dress,” in which one can read social concepts regarding identity, power, sex, gender, etc.[38] Clothing, then, is fundamental to knowing ourselves and our place in the world around us. Because this aspect of clothing is so foundational, clothing is dangerous and heavily regulated. In the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible, society engages clothing with regard to issues such as status, gender, and honor. There are many examples of how clothes operate within the larger society, and we can see how clothing can be used to distinguish humans from other animals.
The goal of this book through its first seven chapters is to demonstrate the basis for the claim that the continued maintenance and social enforcement of the unsustainable animal-human boundary is the result of a cognitive response due to a concern for our own mortality. In light of this, we should not be surprised to find expressions of these cognitively linked elements within an account whose primary concern is arguably the mortality of human beings. The final two chapters turn to the text of Genesis 2–3, which provides a striking constellation of those very elements which terror management theory asserts are impacted by death anxiety. In reading the many commentaries on Genesis 2–3, we see that these authors generally fail to connect important elements such as the concern for mortality, the relationship between the humans and the other animals, and the nakedness and eventual clothing of the humans. I am suggesting that we can indeed see unity among these elements and should not be surprised to find them all brought together in a narrative like Genesis, since the relationship to non-human animals and the concern to cover our animal bodies are, after all, cognitively linked to death anxiety as terror management theory demonstrates.
The final two chapters then turn to the text of Genesis 2–3 and attempt to draw together these elements linked by death anxiety. In chapter 8, I begin with a big picture view and, using the work of selected commentators on the text, seek to understand how the unit as a whole has been constructed and previously interpreted. I follow the structure outlined by the commentator Claus Westermann and divide the text into three narrative units. The first describes the account of the creation of the human, the animals, and a search for a suitable partner (Gen 2: 4b–5a, 7–9, 15–24). The second account concerns the humans moving from being naked to clothed (Gen 2: 25–3: 7). The final account is expulsion from the garden (Gen 3: 8–24). In each of the three accounts we find references to death, the superiority of the human(s) and the creation or reinforcement of the animal-human boundary. We see elements such as sex, clothing, the animals, the human body and even death are often subsumed under larger categories by commentators. We also see how often these categories have failed to account meaningfully for some of these elements. I suggest that the texts’ repeated and highlighted references to death as continually drawing the mind toward mortality.
The final chapter then turns to the individual elements of the Genesis text, focusing on the human body, animals and the animal-human boundary, and clothing, to see how terror management theory can help to better account for their presence in the text. While I assert that commentators fail to make certain significant connections among the elements and motifs that are united by means of terror management theory, these authors do present many valuable insights that can be even further elucidated by understanding the issues of death anxiety and animal reminder disgust. I believe that not only can accounting for death anxiety help us to better understand the passage in question, it also enables us to better understand many of the approaches commentators have taken to the text. By recognizing this cognitive connection as described by terror management theory, we are able to draw together the human interaction with non-human animals and the wearing of clothes by seeing these elements as interacting with and reinforcing the animal-human boundary, necessitated by our awareness of mortality. At the end of the account, the humans know that they will die. It is this new understanding that all human beings now share. Although we desire immortality, it is unattainable and we know that our bodies, like those of other animals, are destined to return to the ground. The cost of knowledge was the humans’ awareness of their animal bodies. They moved from being at ease with their nakedness and unaware of the inevitability of death to one of a state of anxiety, hiding, exerting dominance, and covering their bodies. Unlike other animals, humans are ill at ease with their bodies, with sex, with exposure, and with natural bodily functions. We seek to control all things that remind us of our animal bodies; we dominate our bodies and dominate each other because of the anxiety that we feel towards our bodies. The lengths we go to modify or hide our bodies, even beyond clothing, demonstrates just how much the awareness of our animal bodies disconcerts us.
Notes
1.
Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3.
2.
Derrida, The Animal, 4–5.
3.
Derrida, The Animal, 5.
4.
Derrida, The Animal, 3.
5.
Derrida, The Animal, 5.
6.
W. F. Bynum, Introduction to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Darwin (London: Penguin, 2009), np. This account of the debate between Huxley and Wilberforce is probably not true, although the legend was firmly established by 1900 and presented in anecdote form the growing divide, and the conflict model, of the relationship of science to religion. Alister E. McGrath, “Darwinism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, eds. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 686.
7.
The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, 1989, by the division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA and are used by permission. All rights reserved.
8.
Simon Howard, Dawn of Death: The Bible and Our Mortal Bodies (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 6.
9.
Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (London: Souvenir Press, 2011), 17.
10.