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61 5 Domesticates of the Ancient Israelites, Assyrians, and Scythians DOMESTIC ANIMALS IN THE OLD TESTAMENT Politically, the most important development of the Levant in the early first millennium bce was the establishment of the Israelite state.1 Its history is told in the Old Testament, beginning with the Book of Genesis, perhaps around 1500 bce, and ending with the Books of Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles sometime before Alexander the Great in the fourth century bce. However, the Books have no established chronology, and it is impossible to date any of them with any accuracy. In ancient Egypt, the period covered by the Old Testament may have begun with the Eleventh Dynasty (2040–1991 bce) of the Middle Kingdom, and it ended with the Ptolemaic period. In archaeological terms, the time span of both the Old Testament and ancient Egypt extends from the Middle Bronze Age into the Iron Age. The laws and many other descriptions in the books of the Old Testament give a remarkably detailed insight into the way of life of this Bronze Age civilization, from the Israelite kings with their horses and chariots in battle to the pastoralist herders with their flocks. Almost as much is written about domestic animals and the laws covering them as is portrayed in the images and hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt for the same period. In both regions, religion dominated the way of life of the people, but the traditions and rules of the two religions were extraordinarily different from each other. In ancient Egypt, useful animals, from cattle to cats to hawks, were protected by their sacred status. This prevented them from being killed, except by the priests under special circumstances, and there was the extraordinary custom of mummifying those animals that died or were sacrificed to the gods. For the ancient Israelites, species of animals were not sacred, and the attitude of the people to the animal world differed from that of the ancient Egyptians, although most of the same domestic species and many of the same wild ones inhabited both regions. Even so, the Israelite priests kept as firm a hold on the people as did the Egyptian priests, as shown in the laws written in the Books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy. These laws distinguish between the clean and the unclean of almost every species of living animal that the Israelites were likely to come across, from birds of prey, chameleons, lizards, moles, tortoises (unclean) to beetles (clean and therefore edible). With so many species, large and small, terrestrial and aquatic, that were untouchable, did the countryside teem with wildlife? Although there are lists of every species of animal mentioned in the Bible to be found on the Web, there has been little written about the interactions of people and their domestic animals, and for this the work of Canon Tristram has never been surpassed. In his book of 62| Chapter 5 1889, Tristram claimed to have written “a description of every animal and plant mentioned in Holy Scripture,” and he is still the original authority for references to the ethnozoology of the wild and domestic animals of the Bible.2 Seventy years later F. S. Bodenheimer published his Animal and Man in Bible Lands, which ranges over literary sources, science, and folklore. It is an interesting book, which ends with chapters on the Israelite sacrifices and a review of Frazer’s (1854–1941) analysis of biblical folklore in his renowned work, The Golden Bough.3 Dogs Maybe because the ancient Israelites were not hunters, their attitude to dogs was always different to that of the ancient Egyptians, who valued their hunting and pet dogs very highly. Tristram states that there are forty mentions of dogs in the Bible, but they are all spoken with aversion. As at the present day, probably every Israelite town and settlement had its population of scavenging dogs who were useful for clearing debris, so they were tolerated but given no care or attention and lived as more or less “pariah” animals. However, the pastoralists did use dogs to protect their flocks from the indigenous wild wolves and jackals, although without affection, as shown in, “But now they that are younger than I have me in derision, whose fathers I would have disdained to have set with the dogs of my flock.”4 Equids Horses were of little use to the nomadic pastoralists in the relatively contained, hilly, and arid country of Palestine, and they are only mentioned in the earlier books of...

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