Animal Sacrifice and the Death Penalty

Giosuè Ghisalberti

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781666703870, 9781666703887
• eBook ISBN: 9781666703894
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

The slaughter of animals as a religious ritual and the execution of human beings as a judicial one was an interrelated phenomenon in the ancient world. Writings from different traditions had to be interpreted in relation to each other for the connection between two sacred rituals to be made. The history of the death penalty within the textual traditions of Judaism and ancient Greece could be traced to specific commandments beginning in Genesis and in laws specified as early as in Hesiod's Theogony--in each case, however, with far from unambiguous conclusions despite their divine origins in YHWH or Zeus. An ever-present uncertainty in the nature of the death penalty pervades the writings of the Bible from Genesis to the Gospels of Jesus, as well as in the mytho-poetic world of Hesiod, the tragedy of Aeschylus, and Socratic philosophy as represented in Plato's dialogues. Scholarship has not considered the importance of these two interrelated traditions insofar as both expose the specific characteristics of violence and killing within the institutions of religion and the law. The creation of religious rituals and the acts of the law are inseparable and essential to the authority of the politico-religious state. Animal sacrifice and the death penalty serve as the pillars of social legitimacy in the ancient world.

Chapter 1

The Animals in Genesis 1–3

No single interpretation of the Hebrew Bible has been more decisive in establishing an absolute worldview than the unfolding of events in Genesis—from the moment when, after the beginning in ordinary time, the man and the woman are banished from the garden of Eden; no single interpretation has been more influential in defining the essence of a human being and the condition it has imposed on itself, forever, as a consequence of one act of ingestion whose meanings have all too readily been defined according to a language that will be decisive for all future understanding of the truth; and no single interpretation has been more responsible for determining the meaning of the entire sequence of complicated events once a four-part relationship is established between God, nature, animals, and human beings.

In the beginning was the logos.

God said, “Let there be light.”

But for reasons related to the fragility of theological speculation, ecclesial orthodoxy, or the inability to extend our hermeneutic obligations, Genesis 1–3 has remained within the limits of either an empirical history or a mythic account of creation whose inner logos, as its revelation, has consigned perception to interrelated limits. Despite the intricacies of what the logos announces, an enduring metaphysics has been absolute. Alternatives have been discouraged and virtually inconceivable; which makes a parakletic hermeneutics all the more necessary for an interpretation motivated only by the possibility of another decision, another verdict, and so attempt to release it from its perpetual bind to tradition. While meanings have been determined by the historical necessities of doctrine (for example, on the idea of a “fall” or “original sin,” or with the one exclusive, and by no means exhausted, translation of the “serpent”), other possibilities remain to be articulated from out of Genesis itself once the world and reality it represents can appear differently than all assumptions. Without, here, relating Genesis to its vital, dynamic relationship with other writings in antiquity; without drawing upon the historical documents of even more ancient civilizations (for example, the Babylonian Enûma elish,33 “when above,” or the Epic of Gilgamesh as at least partial antecedents as it concerns certain events like the flood) the world of Genesis is not isolated and closed in on itself.

The limits of Genesis cannot be either historical or textual.

The dynamics of its transference makes it infinite.

For one of our purposes, Genesis 1–3 will be read individually and then compared to an equally meaningful myth in ancient Greece and, in particular, two of Hesiod’s poems: the Theogony and Works and Days, seventh-century compositions on “the genesis of the gods” and on the life of a farmer no different that Adam and his son Cain.

Their myth and logos are inseparable; they are inspired and revealed.

The intersection of meanings between two foundational myths of Western metaphysics is going to be consequential—leading in two different and complementary directions. Each begins with religion and piety as a problem.

The problem is singular. It will begin, in Genesis and the Theogony, with the death of an animal and the creation of a ritual defined as sacrifice and with the language of euphemism nowhere adequate in concealing the nature of divine worship. One translation: sacer facere. Religion, in one of its manifestations, will be the attempt to “make sacred,” that is, to create the sacred in the world by killing, slaughtering, butchering, and eating. Hesiod and Adam, two farmers and both responsible for the earth and its growth no less than for their pastoral relationship to domesticated animals, are not accidentally at the beginning.

The events in Genesis, and their specific chronology, have to be followed as God, the world of nature, animals, and human beings emerge from out of the language of creation—and with a first reminder that the animals in general and one above all in particular (Nachash, or other transliterations, nāhās, a verb meaning to “observe signs”) have been taken for granted, their existence and their meanings closed, penned in, by the understandable human preoccupation with its own life and future. Already and prior to all impositions of guilt or sin—that is, moral attributes sometimes evading the nuance of the human as, essentially, incomplete and self-divided—the tendency is to be self-preoccupied at the expense of a more complete perception. The overwhelming pressures of existence have reduced the limits of human seeing and enclosed it within the assurance of a dogmatic truth, as if to protect it by one absolute definition.

In the meantime, animals have been an afterthought; the omission has been grave and ongoing. Our existence has consigned the animal to a strange periphery: in the wilderness and in the lives of human beings as a pragmatic object and yet, nevertheless, with unavoidable reminders, of a back-and-forth empathy. Adam, for one, creates the category of biology, a bios in no way reflective of life. Most theological considerations have made the animals nothing more than a by-product, not at all essential, simply to be used according to the earliest directives, in life and in death, for work and food.

Eating animals has been the most anthropologically obvious reality in history and one used to rationalize a certain conception of terrestrial existence as irreducibly material.

The metaphysics of killing and eating animals remains a problem to be deciphered. Jewish and Greek sacrifice, once read as a relation, begins to reveal other historical institutions.

Ecclesial interpretations have been preserved and handed down with a restricted vocabulary that has made it virtually impossible to rethink their theological impositions no less than its conclusions—for example, both with the neglect of animals as a whole and then with a much-maligned creature whose relation to the logos has been entirely forgotten; either that or never acknowledged to begin with. Nachash, the animal who speaks, who reasons, has not been acknowledged for its unique singularity. Before our singular animal can be understood instead of accused, judged, and condemned, on its own or in relation (to God, first and foremost, and with a characteristic to be compared with others—ārum, that is, its wisdom) there will be a necessary return to Genesis with a hermeneutic motivation that is parakletic. One has to be an ad-vocatus for the figures, animal and human, who have been condemned to serve a purpose for our self-understanding. They have been sacrificed in more ways than one. A parakletic hermeneutics will “speak,” at once objecting and interjecting, and doing so by turning not a preestablished law but from the logos embedded within Genesis itself as the first of other examples to be deciphered in Greek myth, tragedy, and philosophy and, finally, in the gospels.

Without reducing a particular reading to a systematic “method,” and most especially in a work devoted to the conjunction of animal sacrifice and the death penalty in antiquity, a parakletic hermeneutics will be used insofar as it devotes itself to a defense and advocacy (and in the end, a plea) and makes the attempt to confront the law that has proclaimed itself absolute and without so much as the possibility of its amendment or, to take it to its conclusion, its abolition. The law will do everything in its power to preserve itself, whatever the cost. A parakletic herme...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Animals in Genesis 1–3
• Chapter 2: Abel, the Death of a Sacrificial Killer
• Chapter 3: Prometheus in Hesiod’s Theogony
• Chapter 4: The Execution of Socrates
• Chapter 5: The Abolition of the Death Penalty in the Gospel of John
• Chapter 6: Roman Law and the Christians Damnati ad Bestias
• Bibliography