A Biblical View of the Animal World

This was a ribbon snake I caught on February 15th, in Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park, Florida. Unfortunately, snakes receive a lot of unnecessary flack in western culture. One of the primary reasons for this is religious superstition. We've all seen the pictures of the snake tempting Eve, but none of us have ever read it in our Bible. How so? Read on.

While at college, I was asked, as a part of my zoology class, to choose five Bible verses that I believed were crucial to a Biblical understanding of animals and write about my the reasons I chose those verses. Here is what I came up with:

Genesis 1:28

And God blessed them and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

Genesis 3:14

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon they belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:

Leviticus 11:46

This is the law of the beasts, and of the fowl, and of every living creature that moveth in the waters, and of every creature that creepeth upon the earth:

Psalm 147:9

He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry.

Matthew 6:26

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

The twenty-eighth verse of the first chapter of Genesis records God’s first command to mankind: Fill the Earth and rule over the animals. Often Christians are tempted to conclude that this dominion is a license to exploit and use for our own personal enjoyment and pleasure. The reason so many acquire this perspective is found in verse six of chapter three. We seldom give thought to what we would consider a good ruler, someone who looks out for the interests of his subjects. Verse fourteen of chapter three records what is often incorrectly stated as a curse on a snake, thus giving excuse for men to abuse this amazingly designed creature on the premise that it was “cursed of God.” Simply reading the verse reveals that this cannot be the case; it would eat dust, and no snakes do that. Also, nowhere is it mentioned that the cursed creature would loose its legs. Indeed the phrase “upon thy belly thou shalt go” caries the idea of crawling, not slithering, which requires legs. It is to bad that it does not occur to most people that the word translated “serpent” is also translated as “dragon” in other parts of the Old Testament. It is not surprising then that Satan is referred to as a dragon in Revelation. Additionally, the context of the verse reveals that this is, in fact, a curse on Satan prophesying of Christ’s coming. So there is no Biblical excuse for women or anyone else to treat snakes with contempt. In Leviticus, chapter 11 a list of animals is given and the clean ones are stated as being “living.” This word in Hebrew is nephesh and caries the idea of a soul-life. Such nephesh living things are treated with more respect than other living things such as plants, which are merely described as “withering” rather than truly dying in the Bible. Interestingly, the list in Leviticus includes insects (verse twenty-two). Thus, in a Biblical perspective of life, to kill a grasshopper is equivalent to killing a horse. Finally, verses in Matthew chapter six and Psalm 147, in verse nine, record that God himself takes interest in and cares for the needs of animals. It is indeed a comfort to Christians that God loves us so much (as is the thrust of the Matthew verses) but many people miss the fact that God takes interest in the death of even a common bird sold at the market. Christians, likewise, should take their God-given responsibility to watch over God’s creatures seriously.