Part I -- Chapter Three

Four Sins of Genesis
The Shame of Natural Discourse

The Bible tells me so...

And, to be sure, in few cultural settings is the invention and function of clothing so clearly and explicitly revealed as in the ancient belief systems of the Near East to which most Western religious traditions owe their origins and values. The Christian (Jewish) Pentateuch, a clear and notably meticulous record of an extensive breakdown and reordering of discursive parameters in ancient human community, frames the issue in terms of an explicit metaphor. Everyone is familiar with the biblical story of original sin which featured, among its initial consequences, the shame of the body, the sole instrument of discourse among living organisms. Eve, the 'first woman' in this Bronze Age tale of creation (See Dürer representation in Plate I at right), picked and ate the fruit of the forbidden tree of moral knowledge, sharing it with Adam, the 'first man'. And with this violation of Divine edict she brought sorrow, pain, and subjugation to subsequent generations of her own sex and species (in addition to clothing for their naked bodies). Salient details of this ancient narration follow.

Plate I

Although the first human female's mischief was a simple act of disobedience, one must not minimize the gravity of the act in its mythic and historical dimension. Obedience was a matter of singular concern to the early prophets. For some time, land-owning herders-cum-farmers had been engaged in consolidating political power within the framework of the patriarchal 'family'. An immediate objective of this ongoing effort was to bring women more securely into the sphere of male virtue and dominance. Blaming the first woman for all the 'problems the flesh was heir to', as in the Greek version of the origin of human travail, helped serve that end. (In the latter account the motif was differently constellated. To the Greeks Pandora's 'box' was a narrative vehicle to explain human suffering. The Greeks did not view Pandora's disobedience as an 'original act of sin', bestowed upon the helpless [and hopeless] generations of humanity who were to follow.)

The material in question is the residue of events which had shaken Eurasian culture much earlier, perhaps as early as the closing millennia of the Pleistocene. (This idea was touched upon previously and will provide a fruitful avenue for further exploration in Part II -- Chapter Five.) In my mind, Genesis is so much the reflection of a difficult cultural moment of the past that it pays, I believe, to pick this much discussed text up once again and view it in the light of our evolving theory of human discourse. Though the written presentation is clumsy, awkward, and frequently contradictory -- the culmination of a priestly tradition (a certain indication of 'late times' and a fragmented collective awareness) -- the material is nonetheless spooky in its metaphoric precision. It has left us with a basis for useful insights about community in crisis.

The mythic content of the Bible is revealed in images which are archetypal (in a Jungian sense) and transcend their 'original form' (however that is envisioned). They seem to survive bad translation and the idiosyncrasies of individual languages. For my own analysis I have chosen the King James Version of this material because of its broad cultural influence in recent times. Its impact on the English language, and the consciousness of speakers of that language, has been powerful and continuous over the past four centuries, the period during which English political and economic interests experienced extensive reordering while achieving unparalleled dominance in world affairs.

The 'sin of disobedience' is coupled with the first among many Old Testament references to nakedness as a moral abomination. Clothing comes into being, evidently, not to protect Adam and Eve from low temperatures and inclement weather but as an artifactual remedy for an evil inherent in nature. (The Old Testament would become expansive and vitriolic on the topic. We are told one 'despises' those whom one sees in their natural state [Lamentations 1:8]. Human nakedness, indeed nature in general, is associated with 'harlotry', 'lewdness', and 'filth' [Ezekiel 16:36 and 22:10].)

Handmade, manmade...

Prior to the 'Fall', there was no basis, the Bible tells us, for moral distinctions and thus no need for clothing. (Thus there was, before the Fall, no basis for good and bad behaviors respectively. Not having the capacity to make moral judgments, humans could scarcely have known the difference between the two. To my way of thinking, this puts the whole story of the 'original sin' on a rather shaky foundation.) Humanity had acquired neither the conceptual-analytic capacity to isolate itself from natural process nor the technical prowess to give these structures of the imagination a material representation. In the restricted Biblical imagination, the evolving capacity for moral judgement, an aspect apparently of 'awareness' (which it selectively distributed), seems bound up with the emergence of the material artifact. Here we encounter a confluence of structures which has received little attention by researchers. In the account of Genesis, artifact and high moral value are immediately and repeatedly coupled:

The earth was without form, and void... Then God said 'Let there be light...' And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness (Genesis 1:2-4; emphasis added.)

Henceforth only that portion of the world created by quasi-human entities, or humans themselves, had 'form' and high moral substance. Contemplating the works of creation individually, God notes that they are good (Genesis 1:4, 1:10, 1:12, 1:18, 1:21, 1:25) and, upon completing this enormous task, he assesses his work as a whole and finds that "...indeed it [is] very good" (Genesis 1:31).⁽¹⁾

After partaking of the fruit of knowledge, the collective eyes of humanity, too, were

...opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (Genesis 3:7).

Later the Lord would replace this make-shift arrangement with actual clothing: 'tunics' which he fashioned from the 'skin' of an animal (Genesis 3:21). Thus the first items in the artifactual environment of the human being, like the works of creation themselves (which serve as the template for human creativity), were the handiwork of the Lord.

It may be noted that in the King James Version of the Bible the word 'field', with its meaning of 'artifact', occurs as something of a euphemism for the natural 'forest'. The word 'forest' does not occur in the Authorized Version of the Pentateuch nor does the word 'nature'. Where the need arises to derogate 'wild nature' specifically, the derogant 'wilderness' is typically used, i.e. nature 'unmanaged'. In 'neutral' and positive usage the artifactual designation is preferred. The natural setting of human life, before the 'Fall', is referred to as a 'garden', which is likewise a designation for 'nature' as artifact.

A one-way street...

In the Book of Genesis (and in Biblical imagination generally) a discursive conduit is presumed to be open between human beings and the Lord. However, the flow of the information is notably one-directional. Moreover, the 'moods' which dominate the Lord's speech are sharply restricted: consisting (besides the indicative) of either the imperative or what could be called the inquisitorial interrogative, the closest he comes to an attempt at genuinely interactive discourse. (The Lord proceeds mendaciously, like an experienced attorney in a courtroom, asking only questions to which he already has answers.) Also employed regularly are those future tenses -- thou shalt (ye shall) + verb -- associated, forever (in the minds off later speakers of the language), with the haughty diction of the Law. This quasi-tense form has the same alienating effect as the imperative mood. In recognition of the imperious tone of the document, it is often referred to by the devout as the 'Word of God', as though no-one else had anything to say.

There is another biblical channel which is at least an option, though it is not exactly used with great frequency: humans do speak to each other upon occasion. Adam speaks to Eve for example. And Eve, in one or two instances, appears to speak to Adam, although the humans who take it upon themselves to speak to other humans are usually males.

Interspecific Discourse...

However, prior to what Western scholarly convention calls the 'Fall', another channel appears to have been open, and here we approach a topic of considerable interest. Before that moment of 'descent', nature was still capable of engaging humans in intelligible discourse. The serpent spoke to First Woman (not yet named Eve). First Woman answered and the serpent spoke again. The prophets, in their narration of the Fall, put their finger on a familiar feature of primitive narrative technique. Comparative mythology reveals that exchanges between animals and humans (or human-like entities) were commonplace. When traditional oral accounts of creation are reviewed, one discovers the boundaries of discourse to have been remarkably fluid. To find non-human animals engaged in chats with each other, and with humans, fully accords with expectation. (It should not be necessary to point out that the issue has never been whether animals really talk. The narrative representation of animals as 'speaking entities' serves to acknowledge their presence and full participation in the discursive reality of human experience. The obvious means to signify this discursive fluidity, and to preserve such a representation of discourse for generations of the future, was through metaphor, in this case through verbal dialogue in which animals participate.)

In many traditional stories, unmanaged nature plays a central and instrumental role. In the aftermath of creation, non-human animals often perform an indispensable service. They function as mediators between humans and the 'spirit world'. (The relation is taken for granted in Native American cosmogonies.) Thus, with respect to the interaction between First Woman and the serpent, a common animal of the forest, one must acknowledge that Genesis begins in a typical fashion. Let us consider the particular instance more closely.

A brief moment of interaction...

Being more knowledgeable than any other 'beast of the field', the serpent immediately lives up to his reputation for guile and treachery. This, at least, is the conventional interpretation of the episode and its underlying meaning. The serpent of Genesis, intriguingly, is a male animal. It must be a male, perhaps, because to identify the serpent as a female, a distinct possibility in view of the wide-spread association of the serpent with the human female in world mythologies, would have precluded, in the conventional imagination, any possibility that the discursive relationship between the two had a sexual dimension. The insinuation of a lasciviousness on First Woman's part may have served to justify the need for male control, about which the Lord, in the sentencing phase of the trial, would be explicit. (By the way, at least one of the Biblical serpents, who make later appearances, is a female [Psalms 58:4].)

But let us return to the passage in question. The serpent wonders, aloud, if God really

...said, 'Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden'? (3:1)

First Woman immediately replies:

We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, 'Ye shall not eat it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.' (3:2-3)

However, the Serpent, with his superior 'subtlety', as the KJV narrator puts it, pooh-poohs this thinking out-of-hand. (Later English translations would consistently use the word 'cunning'. Where non-human animals are concerned knowledge, revealingly, is represented as 'cunning', a linguistic cognate, inevitably derogated, of the verb 'to know'.) He suggests, remarkably, that the Lord's pronouncement was basely motivated. It had no other purpose, he seems to say, than to preserve its author's unique status as a morally conscious being:

Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods [note the plural], knowing good and evil.(3:4-5)

This appears to be the basis for First Woman's later claim, offered in an attempt to shift the blame for her disobedience, that the serpent 'deceived' her.

However, what started out as an ordinary interspecific exchange, now takes a turn which is anything but typical when viewed in the context of the world's mythologies. It happens that these were the last words spoken by the serpent in question. And, with few exceptions (which we shall address in a moment), all non-human animals were silent from that point on.

Nature in general, nature in particular...

The precise turning point in the text was not the moment of human disobedience but is to be found rather in the supreme entity's Judgment which is rendered swiftly following a perfunctory phase of what lawyers nowadays call 'discovery'. It consists of three parts, the first having to do specifically with the 'sentencing' of the serpent. It is clearly not the case that only two species--a particular category of reptile, on the one hand, and a newly established subspecies of primate on the other--are on trial here. Nor is there textual support, or corroboration external to the text, for the medieval idea that the tempter was actually 'Satan' or some similar supernatural entity who chose to inhabit the body of a particular animal (as prescribed by medieval convention), in order to lead humanity into 'sin'. In one typical construction of the event, if the dim memories from my Sunday School days are to be trusted, Satan targets the human female because she is, so the story goes, the 'weakest' link.⁽²⁾ It seems obvious, in contradiction of the usual interpretations, that the serpent is cast here in the large role of nature itself, wild nature specifically: i.e., the nature which, prior to the 'Fall', still possessed the capacity to vocalize.

In the minds of the writers and the prophets the serpent called to memory the hated animist construction of nature, the nature which still possessed the capacity to 'speak' to humanity. The textual evidence for such an understanding is substantial. In the Old Testament frame of reference, according to which value is typically assigned on the basis of the moral principle of 'first-come-first-serve', the ordering of events and divine pronouncements is of crucial significance. What comes first is consistently the most important and the most-deserving of our attention.⁽³⁾

Thus, when the Lord, in pronouncing judgment, turned first to the 'serpent' it must have been because that animal was somehow foremost on the Divine agenda:

...Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field⁽⁴⁾; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her Seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel⁽⁵⁾ (Genesis 3:14-15).

To carry the argument a bit further, Genesis would not have singled out a particular animal for condemnation if the name of the species did not evoke a much more general meaning in the popular imagination, a meaning which was already heavily loaded with metaphor, negative and/or (more interestingly) positive. (There are intriguing possibilities in this regard which I will attempt to deal with in another context.) The twin objects of the Lord's wrath were certainly nature in general and the human female in particular. The 'enmity' which the text predicts would exist for all time between the serpent and Eve's 'male descendants' was an attempt by the prophets to explain the status quo in the lives of humans. In particular, the relation of humans to nature and the relation of the human female to the patriarchal family, facts of contemporary existence which this text served to highlight and to rationalize. But the ultimate recipient, in mytho-conceptual terms, of the Lord's 'curse' was nature unprocessed, nature unmodified through male intervention and ingenuity.

The sin of natural discourse...

At bottom, First Woman's 'crime' was, of course, not her alleged disobedience but her discourse with the serpent, i.e. her voluntary association and interaction with nature. Her punishment was the pain of giving birth and the extensive loss of personal autonomy:

I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee (3:16).

As the final item on his agenda, the Lord addresses Adam:

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded three, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (3:17-19).

Note that the earth, too, is cursed here for Adam's sake. Cursed is the very ground which gives life to animals and plants. Living nature, it appears, is the sinful burden the noble male must carry to his grave.

In the pages which follow I will ask the reader to consider the 'shame of nakedness' as the surface manifestation of the 'shame of natural discourse'. The principal moral objective of the First Book of Moses was to hide this shame and to rationalize the objectification of nature. After the so-called 'Fall', discursive boundaries are firmly in place. We shall see that these serve to highlight (and to give legitimacy to) the immensely restricted range of discursive 'channels' now available to human interaction.

The dispossession of 'soul'...

It happens also, as a consequence of the same mytho-political constraint, that lines were now drawn between language in particular, which the social system regarded with special favor, and other modes of human discourse. Although the Bible has more than its share of 'weeping', as an expression of anguish (which is often public and disingenuous), this grim text provides no instance of someone engaged in the ordinary act of 'smiling'. Meanwhile, what appear to be bursts of 'laughter' turn out, more often than not (upon closer inspection), to be expressions of derision and rejection.⁽⁶⁾

As an additional consequence of this gross simplification of the socio-discursive reality, the structures, which, in mythological traditions world-wide, serve to join one living creature to another, disappear from the screen of human perception altogether. From Eve's disobedience forward, the very creatures upon which the well-being of the community of the faithful depend are de-animated, dispossessed of 'soul' and the capacity to express feeling. From this point on, the living works of creation assume a character which better corresponds to the sterile vision of their Creator. Mute and ultimately tractable, they comprise a massive 'objective structure' over which those, whom the Lord has legitimately empowered, can assert 'dominion' (Genesis 1:26).

Inevitably, one is inclined to compare this astonishing 'silence' with the living universe as constructed by traditional hunters and foragers. To be sure, the presence of the observer makes it nearly certain that the culture one wishes to describe will be a culture in transition, as anthropologists have repeatedly discovered to their dismay. Good evidence is thus hard to come by. Nonetheless, even when the culture in question is highly contaminated by the values of the intruder, a pattern emerges which may hold for foraging communities generally. The gist of the idea (generally recognized, I believe, by ethnographers and others): the object of the hunter's pursuit is invariably a subject in its own right. The hunter invariably perceives the prey as an experiencing and ultimately 'speaking' entity, a conscious being who is seen to participate in his or her own ritual sacrifice.

Evidence for what amounts to a remarkable discursive relation between humans and nature -- we err, I think, if we take these structures to be latter-day fabrications entirely -- can be found close to home for many of us. The intensely personal relation of the Plains Indian to the buffalo is an example familiar to school children in America and elsewhere. In indigenous narratives, buffalos routinely engaged humans in discourse and had personal names moreover. Buffalos were known to 'steal' Indian women, on occasion, and even 'marry' them. When the immense herds of buffalo were exterminated, more than the economy of a people came to an end. A discourse was destroyed. A state of collective integration, astonishing to us in retrospect, existed no longer.

People of Northern Europe and Asia, who were dependent upon the bear for a goodly portion of the protein in their diet, are known to have venerated this heroic and relatively solitary animal. (Something is known about the mixed systems of these semi-nomadic agriculturists because, like Native Americans, they were Christianized only in recent centuries. As with certain groups of indigenous Americans, useful records of early contacts with the Laps, or Sami, have been preserved.) These hardy individuals, adapted (many of them) to conditions north of the Arctic Circle, invested the bear with every human quality and faculty, including the power of speech, it seems. They bestowed upon this magnificent creature the honor and respect normally due the elders in traditional community. They threw 'parties' for the beast which written accounts describe with gusto (cf. the Finnish Kalevala.) In Arctic lore, the bear was often addressed as older 'brother' or, more frequently, 'grandfather'. The bear was included, it appears, in a system of human kinship which, though it took its departure from biological affinities, was culturally delineated to a great extent, as kinship usually is in human society. Steven Mithen comments on the Inuit propensity to view the natural world in social terms.

Consider the Inuit and the polar bear. This animal is highly sought after and is 'killed with passion, butchered with care and eaten with delight'. But it is also treated in some respects as if it is another male hunter. When a bear is killed the same restrictions apply to activities that can be undertaken as when someone dies in the camp. The polar bear is thought of as a human ancestor, a kinsman, a feared and respected adversary...⁽⁷⁾

The silence of the lamb...

In early Jewish-Christian tradition, by contrast, animals appear to have been treated essentially as commodities, as surface structure with little capacity for interaction with humans. Non-human animals were items of personal ownership to be appraised as to value, categorized, and listed. This despite their undeniable value as icons in religious functions of one kind and another; their obvious importance, for example, in ritual sacrifice, itself certainly the corrupted vestige of an older tradition. Note, however: the discourse is specially constituted in the Biblical version of the sacrifice. Here the principal participants are the humans, on the one hand, and a divine personage on the other, the all-powerful entity to and for whom the offering is tendered. The item presented--animal or plant part--has no role itself in the ritual conceived as a discursive structure.

The lambs, the ewes, the sheep, the rams, the cows and calves, the goats and their kids--all of these animals were of utmost importance to the economy of the times and must surely have been the practical focus of daily routine, the mytho-conceptual center of life. The folks, whose lives we must presume are revealed in the Biblical narrative, had to lead large flocks of animals to and from pasture. They had to tend them during the day and at night, giving them special attention when they were sick. They had to assist them when they gave birth to their young, milk them, clean them, provide fresh bedding, etc.

Yet, the words 'birth', 'bear', 'beareth', 'born' do not occur in this text with reference to animal 'reproduction'. The Bible ignores this function of animal life as it ignores all discursive interactions and effects involving non-humans. All expressions of 'blood relationship' are reserved for the social structure of the human being which is conceived solely in terms of 'blood relationship'. In the so-called Bible -- Old and New Testament alike -- the words 'mother','father', 'brother', 'sister' refer specifically to human systems of kinship, a matter we shall take up again in the pages below.

The exception which springs immediately to mind, the language of the dietary law which proscribes the combining of meat and milk in food preparation -- "Though shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk" -- appears to be a solitary exception and may have been introduced for its shock value, its undeniable mnemonic potency. (The first of several citations of this graphic injunction is to be found in Exodus 23:19.)

Only two passages have come to my attention which indicate, perhaps, a discursive intimacy between animals and their keepers. The remarkable passage in 2 Samuel 12 which, in its animist sensitivity, could have come from any compilation of folk tales:

But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had brought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

The other is from the New Testament. Sheep appear to have been given personal names, if the metaphor from John 10:3 (in which the Lord calls the chosen home) is to be so interpreted:

To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.

Is it not provocative, therefore, that these animals -- so important to their owners for their bodies, their flesh, their hide, their wool, their milk (perhaps even their companionship) -- are as silent as the serpennt itself after the 'Fall'?

When it comes to herding and management, goats are not exactly the docile 'sheep' of the conventional imagination. Their natural curiosity, and independence of spirit, leads them inevitably into interesting (and often entertaining) conflict with human purpose. Yet, the Biblical representation of these sometimes exasperating animals, with whom the prophets must surely have 'interacted' on a daily basis, is notably two-dimensional, showing little capacity for experience beneath their surface appearance and mien. The Biblical account reveals no trace of internal process, no hint that these creatures had voices and minds of their own. How can one avoid the inference of a socially exclusive structure of the imagination -- a mechanism which worked here to organize discourse along a narrow and decidedly ideological line? Why was discourse with (and in) nature so feared?

It is not just that the domesticated creatures of Biblical times lacked the capacity to 'speak' with a human voice, as non-human organisms might have spoken (and, in fact, did speak) in animist constructions of the social reality. Truly astonishing is the fact that the domesticated creature's own discursive nature was effectively disabled. No calf cried for its mother. No lamb bleated, or gave audible protest, when weaned or shorn; and there was, incredibly, no lowing of cattle in this community of agriculturists. Meanwhile, wild life appears to have been similarly restrained. Birds did not sing of their own volition, nor were the songs of the locusts and grasshoppers to be heard. Even dogs, a ubiquitous adjunct to human community world-wide, failed to disturb the night air with their distinctive vocalizations. (There is good reason, by the way, to believe that the dog's characteristic sounds were discursive adaptations to human companionship. Wild dogs do not 'bark'.)

Vocalizations of 'livestock' and others...

This gross distributional peculiarity is worth further consideration for no other reason than the fact that the exceptions, taken as a whole, do permit an instructive overview of the problem as well as greater depth of understanding. I hope the reader will stay with me for a few paragraphs and not be distracted by the details (which may be as tedious to review as they were to compile).

My inquiry into the language of the Authorized Version has revealed a remarkably impoverished lexicon in the area of non-human vocalization, an area which has traditionally provided a rich opportunity for human invention -- and would have done so in this case, too, if myth had allowed the imagination of the prophets to roam at will. (I cannot emphasize enough that my observations with respect to 'Biblical community', and its values, are valid only to the extent that the Authorized Version is an accurate reflection of its Hebrew and Greek sources. Please consider these and the following observations in that special light.)

In the Pentateuch, which comprises about one fifth of what Christians call the Bible, the semi-generic 'cattle', or 'kine', are followed more particularly by cows, bulls, oxen, heifers, calves, bullocks, goats, she-goats, he-goats, kids, sheep, ewes, lambs, rams, and asses (male and female), all of which make occasional and in some instances frequent appearances. In addition there are domestic and wild swine, domestic dogs and hyenas, camels, lions, birds (both tame and feral), ravens and a few pigeons. Also represented are numerous unnamed species which are subsumed (we may suppose) under the more general designation 'beast', a category which probably includes all of the above (and much more). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2^nd Edition) the word beast was intended originally to replace Old English deór (cf. Modern English deer and German Tier) which had probably become heavily derogated, in the familiar pattern, but was later replaced itself, for the same reason I assume, by the Latin form animal. The earliest usage of the word beast (a borrowing from French), which survives in many English dialects, was the most inclusive. The word took in humans at the upper end of the scale and insects and vermin at the other and included sea animals as well. KJV usage appears to apply the term in a relatively more modern sense which excludes humans and insects, though it appears to include sea animals.

I did not read this twelve-hundred page text from beginning to end and likely missed some stray references. I did not worry too much about insects except for locusts and grasshoppers which, though non-vocalizers, produce song with their legs and have an auditory capacity. The compilers of the material dismiss worms and other small animals as unclean categorically and not worthy of description or even mention. In general terms, the distinction between 'clean' and 'unclean' is determined by the animal's legs, their shape and number. On larger creatures the structure of the hoof is important. If the hoof is 'divided', the animal is 'clean' if it is a ruminant. The camel is unclean because he "...divideth not the hoof though he cheweth the cud" (Leviticus 11:4). Of special significance is the mode of locomotion. Insects which jump and leap seem to be OK but those which 'creep' or 'crawl' are an abomination and undeserving of mention. The details are of little interest in this context.

Finally, the solitary serpent of Genesis is joined by a multitude of ordinary, or non-speaking, serpents which make regular appearances in this text as messengers of evil. These take their place alongside a modest assortment of presumably related creatures--the adders, vipers, and asps--all silent, to be sure, if deadly and fearsome to the biblical imagination.

The count itself...

Let us begin our brief summary of the findings with the domesticated animals, the core of the Biblical economy and largest category of references by a respectable margin. The Authorized English Version (KJV) reveals fourteen designations for categories of animals which occur with some frequency and which probably formed the economic basis of community life.

Organization of the data...

Table I (pages 28-30) orders these fourteen word-types according to their distribution in the three major portions of the data: the Pentateuch (P) or what Jews call the Torah; the books of the Old Testament other than the Pentateuch (R); finally, the section of the Bible Christians call the New Testament (NT). I separated P from the rest of the 'Old Testament' because of the presumed earlier origin of the material, because of the clarity of the mytho-ideological program it sets forth, and because of the enormous impact of the latter on Western thought and perceptions. The parameters, which would determine the future discourse (and perception of discourse) in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the principal religions of Europe and the Near East, find their most explicit expression in this seminal document. I sought evidence, in the Pentateuch and in the rest of this remarkable Bronze Age text, of non-human vocalization but discovered in its stead a silent world. Exceptions are few and appear in bold print in the table. (In the P corpus, expression of 'feeling' by farm animals is limited to a single instance--'Balaam's ass'--which will be discussed in a later context.) All anomalous verses are foot-noted and quoted in their entirety.

Table I⁽⁸⁾

Domesticated Livestock

Animal Type	P	R	NT	Total
sheep	0/ 57	2/ 88	0/ 42	2/ 187(9)
lamb(s)	0/111	0/ 42	1/ 33	1/ 186(10)
ox(en)	0/ 69	2/ 87	0/ 10	2/ 166(11)
ram(s)	0/113	0/ 45	0/ 0	0/ 158
cattle	0/100	1/ 51	0/ 2	1/ 153(12)
ass(es)	1/ 58	1/ 84	1/ 8	3/ 150(13)
bullock(s)	0/ 99	0/ 50	0/ 0	0/ 149
goat(s)	0/ 85	0/ 31	0/ 6	0/ 122
kid(s)	0/ 37	0/ 13	0/ 1	0/ 51
calf(ves)	0/ 13	0/ 27	0/ 7	0/ 47
kine	0/ 17	1/ 7	0/ 0	1/ 24(14)
heifer(s)	0/ 11	0/ 8	0/ 1	0/ 20
bull(s)	0/ 1	1/ 9	0/ 2	1/ 12(15)
ewe(s)	0/ 8	0/ 2	0/ 0	0/ 10
Totals	1/779	8/544	2/112	11/1435

The relative frequency of references to domesticated animals can be appreciated by considering, as a ratio, the total number of references divided by the size of the text as measured in pages. My printing of the Authorized Version has 1211 pages. If we divide the total number of references to 'farm animals' (1435) by the total number of pages in the text (1211) we obtain a value of one-point-one-eight (1.18). In other words, on an average there is in excess of one reference per page to farm animals of one sort of another. (In my edition a typical page contains twenty-four [24] verses.)

To be sure, this finding does not mean a great deal in the absence of appropriate materials for comparison. However, the relatively high frequency of references to domesticated animals tends, at least, to remove doubt as to their practical significance in the lives of these agriculturists. Moreover, relative values, computed on the basis of the number of pages in each of the three corpuses, serve to draw our attention to a statistically significant oddity in the data: frequencies decline from a high value of 3.33 references per page for the Pentateuch (234 pages of printed text) to .56 references per page for the 'rest' of the Old Testament, an astounding difference which probably reflects a greatly reduced dependence upon livestock as Biblical society matured. The decline continues into the period represented by New Testament writings (289 pages) where we find a scant .39 references to 'farm animals' per printed page. If the prophets and the composers of the 'Hagiographa' had begun to turn their attention away from the mundane matters of village life (and sought a larger stage for the expression of their religiosity), Christian writers seem to have abandoned the real world altogether. Here the familiar animals of the domestic scene, where mentioned at all, serve as symbols of the Divine or as allegorical props in the struggle of Good against Evil.

Dam, Cow, and Ewe...

The fourteen word-types (singular and plural forms are combined) occur with absolute frequencies ranging from one-hundred-and-eighty-seven, for 'sheep', down to a mere ten for 'ewe(s)', a lexical item which occurs, curiously, not at all in the New Testament. (The word lamb has a strong iconic value in the language of the New Testament. It is used, more often than not, in the sense of the 'Lamb of God', i.e. as a symbol for Christ. Perhaps the very mention of the word ewe would have tied the motherhood of Christ to the biology of animals, an association which was perhaps intolerable to early Christians.) In the Bible as a whole, Ewe is at the bottom of the rank ordering according to frequency and cow, with only six (6) occurrences, is not represented at all. (The list is cut off at ten occurrences.)

One must wonder why these two common nouns are used so infrequently. It can scarcely be argued that cows and ewes were peripheral to the concerns of these agriculturists and domestic animal breeders. Sheep (with one-hundred-and-eighty-seven occurrences [187]) is number one on our list, lamb (with one-hundred-and-eighty-six [186]) is number two, and ox(en) (with one-hundred-and-sixty-six [166]) is number three. The mother of every sheep and every lamb was certainly a ewe while the female parent of every ox was, just as evidently, a cow. It is thus puzzling that the distribution in question manages to orphan these animals which were so important to the Biblical economy.

It was likely the case that cow and ewe were too obviously associated with parenthood. As observed elsewhere in this writing, lexical resources seem not to have been available to designate biological kinship among animals. As a matter of fundamental principle, it seems, the 'farm animals' of the Biblical imagination were allowed neither fathers nor mothers. Although these folks were herders and skilled breeders of animals they reserved the concept of 'blood relationship' (in seemingly open contradiction of their means of livelihood) for the organization and mystique of the human family, the patriarchal family in particular. The only instance in which the Bible takes a general term of biological relationship and applies it to non-humans is the verse already mentioned: the dietary injunction against boiling a baby goat in his or her mother's milk [Exodus: 23:19 and passim]. This is interesting in view of the fact that there is a similar injunction which occurs elsewhere in the document:

And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying: When a bullock, or a sheep, or a goat, is brought forth [take note of the participle 'brought forth' for 'born'], then it shall be seven days under the dam; and from the eighth day and thenceforth it shall be accepted for an offering made by fire unto the LORD. And whether it be cow, or ewe, ye shall not kill it and her young both in one day (Leviticus 22:26-28).

One thing stands out in the above. Although the KJV avails itself of the possessive 'her' for the 'mother' of the sacrificial offering⁽¹⁶⁾, it avoids use of the word mother itself in these instances, preferring designations which refer specifically to non-human animals: dam, cow, and ewe.

Kinship expropriated...

If the above were the full extent of the data, one would naturally assume a biologically based (and linguistically recognized) system of kinship among animals: one which, in the Biblical imagination, ran parallel to the system for humans but was essentially separate from it. The occurrence of the word dam might suggest that such a system was in place. Parallel terminologies have served, in diverse languages and cultures, to keep the biology of 'less advanced' life forms separate from human functions and features of human anatomy.

However, the larger view of the data reveals that this was not the case in Biblical perceptions. The word dam has a paltry five occurrences in the Pentateuch (Exodus 22:30, Deuteronomy 22:6, Deuteronomy 22:7, besides the passage already quoted) and none elsewhere in the KJV. Clearly, there can be no discussion here of 'parallel terminologies', no talk of a perceived need for 'separation' at a presumed surface level of conceptualization. In P the very notion of biology has been commandeered for purposes of human reference. If it happened that these breeders of livestock were forced to provide grudging recognition of the concept of 'motherhood', in the few negligible instances cited above, their denial of fatherhood, as a fact of animal biology, was certainly categorical. Sire occurs not at all in the Bible, Old Testament or New.

In the English of the 16^th Century the verb 'to gender' was often used to designate the production of offspring among non-humans. (The verb refers usually to the role of the male animal.) In the KJV, however, the verb occurs only twice in this sense: "Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind..." (Leviticus 19:19); and "Their bull gendereth, and faileth not; their cow calveth, and casteth not her calf" (Job 21:10).

The verb 'to calve', with reference specifically to the role of the 'cow' in the production of offspring, occurs only four times. In addition to the example above from Job there are the following:

Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? (Job 39:1 [note the verb with its avoidance of the direct biological reference]), and

The voice of the LORD makest the hinds to calve... (Psalms 29:9 [note that all discourse is is the hands of the LORD]), and finally

Yea, the hind also calved in the field, and forsook it, because there was no grass (Jeremiah 14:5 [note the use of the reproductively neutral 'hind' in the two examples above]).

These skimpy results might be compared to the two-hundred-and-thirty-eight occurrences of beget, begat, and begetteth, all of which refer to the so-called 'reproduction' of humans.

It is important to bear in mind that these folks were herders of sheep in the main. Yet incredibly, there is no shred of evidence, internal to the text, to indicate that the ram, the adult uncastrated male sheep, had anything at all to do with reproduction and the maintenance of the herd. Although he makes one-hundred-and-fifty-eight (158) appearances in the text, the ram is simply another domestic animal which, in keeping with religious traditions of one kind and another, is sacrificed upon frequent occasion. It appears that no structure of the mind emanating from the realm of 'base nature' was allowed to smudge the pure and sacred image of the 'father'. The patriarchal family, and the distorted and one-sided concept of 'blood relationship' (upon which this peculiar social artifact was constructed), managed to steal all available space in the imagination of kinship and biology.

Strong brother, weak sister...

In the Authorized Version (KJV) there are fifteen-hundred-and-eighteen (1518) references to human father(s) and two-hundred-and-fifty-two (252) references to human mother(s). For those who may wonder about the conceptual origins of the epithet 'weak sister', it may be instructive to note that there are nine-hundred-and-thirty (930) references to brother and a mere one-hundred-and-twenty-eight (128) references to sister.

The above distributions are useful to dramatize the low value the Bible attaches to the human female relative to the human male. The father (i.e. the male 'head of the household') occurs approximately six [6] times as frequently as his spouse. While the son, the patriarchal 'seed' and principal heir to the wealth of the family, is referred to more than seven times as frequently as his female sibling! One might expect that even the children of present-day believers would be disturbed by the flagrancy of the imbalance and would complain to their parents and to the clergy who purport to minister to the family's moral and religious needs. Perhaps they do. However, my guess is that this would be a rare happening. Such inequities, no matter how pervasive and invidious they are in their social effects, are so familiar, so much a part of the background experience of the community that their presence goes unnoticed, like the music of the spheres. (The importance of 'blood relationship' in setting the boundaries of human kinship and discourse will be explored further in our review of the Second Sin of Genesis, Cain's killing of Abel.)

Explanation vs. Justification...

As Genesis and the accompanying materials demonstrate, the LORD's pronouncement served two purposes: it combined an 'explanation', of sorts, with an important moral determination. As a special dispensation of his 'sentence' for 'incitement', the serpent lost his legs; and, as an apparent (though unstated) consequence of the same misconduct, this despised animal lost his larynx as well: i.e. his pre-lapsarian capacity for vocalization. The Biblical episode 'explains' how and why this evolutionary catastrophe occurred. As a folktale entitled Why the Serpent has no Voice (or How the Snake Lost its Legs) Chapter Three of the First Book of Moses would attract no special attention.

But, in the case of Genesis, the explanatory phase turns out to have been only the beginning of the story. The text had a more basic agenda. Its practical intent was not simply to shed light on certain features of the serpent's anatomy or physiological constitution, features which may have puzzled primitive perceptions. It used the episode of the Serpent and First Woman to underscore a moral lesson of great import. It hoped to rationalize a certain state of discourse in post-lapsarian human community. Its purpose was to justify an alienation from natural process which already existed in the society of the day (even though to do so meant appealing to the least charitable side of 'human nature'). It asked its constituency to accept the proposition that Evil was essentially incarnate: i.e. the body, as the principal medium of natural discourse, was the source of Evil. This, of course, has been the conceptual bugaboo of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through most of the long history of these powerful and exclusive ideologies. We cover our bodies because they seem determined to lead us astray. They open doors to forbidden discourse. In an extreme manifestation of this primary injunction, women must cover the part of the primate anatomy which is acknowledged to be the most expressive, the face.

Sin and the mutilation of the body...

Moreover, the LORD sought retribution. In order to hold Evil at bay, and in the interest of fundamental justice, nature had to be punished in its physical aspect. The carnal entity or offending body -- the body of the woman, the body of the serpent, the body of nature -- had to be mutilated in a manner and degree which was somehow commensurate with the offense, an often stated principle of Biblical Law ('...if thine eye offend thee pluck it out'). Because of her discursive indiscretion, the human female had to suffer pain and death in childbirth (an ugly consequence of her shameful interaction). We discover later, as the legalistic detail of the documents is spelled out, that women must subject their bodies regularly to rituals of 'purification' which are applicable to her sex alone.

Let us not forget that in the moral framework, which the Pentateuch labors to assemble, the birth of a child, though always a polluting affair (being 'natural'), is especially so when the child who emerges to the light of day is a girl:

If a woman have conceived seed [note the use of the word 'seed', immediately explained in the clause which follows], and born a man child: then she shall be unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation for her infirmity shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall then continue in the blood of her purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled. But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her separation: and she shall continue in the blood of her purifying threescore and six days (Leviticus 12:2-5; emphasis added).

Meanwhile the serpent, deprived of his legs and the capacity to elevate his body much above the ground, is forced to spend his life in dusty proximity to the earth which is likewise degraded as a consequence of the original transgression (Genesis 3:17). Recall that squamata serpentes is deaf. Unable to detect rapidly undulating patterns of movement in the air, the basis of intelligible vocalization, the snake unashamedly uses the length of his/her entire body to capture low-frequency vibrations which she/he assimilates through direct contact with the earth upon whose surface she/he has been forced to 'crawl'. Genesis is acutely aware, at some level of perception, of the quintessentially discursive dependence of the serpent upon the earth, a relationship which is as direct as the dependence of voice on the air. Hence the contrasting metaphors. The earth is naturally condemned while the air, medium and essence of the human (read male) spirit, is extolled.

As wanting as it may seem as moral instruction, the passage is still not egregiously at variance with tradition. A Folk Tale entitled How Humankind Came to Hate the Snake, though demonstrably false in its underlying constraint, would not be otherwise out of place in an anthology of traditional lore. What makes the message of Genesis uniquely pernicious is the extraordinary sweep of the malediction and the exclusive force of the moral judgment. (Keep in mind that the LORD of Genesis is a dictator whose judgments are delivered in an atmosphere which is hostile to dissent and countervailing opinion.) As I have indicated, the denunciation comes down on a much larger segment of the natural world than the province of a single species. A goodly portion of the earth and its content is hereby repudiated: reduced to the silent status of the Biblical serpent, the solitary forest animal who possesses no natural capacity for vocalization.

Balaam's ass and kine which low...

In actual fact, my survey turned up several verses in which the rule of silence, which the LORD imposed on nature's kingdom, appears to have been compromised. Table I lists eleven (11) exceptional references to vocalization by 'farm animals' (Footnotes 9-15). However, two of these involve discourse which is not directly audible to the listener/reader. The discourse is imbedded, a report of animal vocalization by a third person ("But Samuel said, 'What is this bleating of the sheep in my ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear? [Samuel 15:14]). Two more are explicit references to the fact that an animal is not vocalizing or is not on the scene and is thus not able to produce audible vocalization ("...as a sheep before her shearers is dumb" [Isaiah 53:7] and "...neither can men hear the voice of the cattle... they are gone" [Jeremiah 9:10]) which, due to the procedure employed, were caught in the filter.

Two, including the example of the non-vocalizing sheep in the above, are similes in which the 'speaking' (or 'non-speaking') entity is not really an 'animal' but a human being ("...because ye are grown fat as the heifer at grass, and bellow as bulls" [Jeremiah 50:11]). One is a metaphor or emblematic symbol for Christ ("...they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb..." [Revelation 15;3]). Two more belong to the category of the non-vocalizers in the sense that they involve questions about animal vocalization the answer to which is 'No' ("Doth the wild ass bray when he hath grass? Or loweth the ox over his fodder?" [Job 6:5]).

The ninth 'exception', which we shall discover is likewise no real exception, is a curiously lyrical verse in which two ordinary milk cows (not called 'cows' in the Authorized Version) are summoned to the awesome task of pulling a cart containing the 'ark of the LORD'. Without hesitation and without apparent need of human direction and prodding

...the kine took the straight way to the way of Bethhemesh, and went along the highway, lowing as they went, and turned not aside to the right hand or to the left..." (1 Samuel 6:12; emphasis added).

Here the spirit of the LORD is obviously the enabling factor, the guiding presence which allowed the animals to find both their way (and their voice). The verse above is tied, mytho-conceptually, to the tenth example (and only post-lapsarian exception in the Pentateuch): Balaam's ass. Without getting into the detail of the episode, let me say that here the surrounding events were likewise extraordinary. The animal perceived what Balaam did not--an Angel of the LORD blocking the road--and openly disobeyed her master's command to move ahead. Perturbed by this incomprehensible display of resistance, an angry Balaam struck the frustrated animal three times with his staff:

...[but] the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times? (Numbers 22:28.)

The scene is poignant. No wonder it left a deep imprint in the Biblical imagination. A disciple of Jesus, many centuries later (if we accept the dates traditionally assigned to the composition of the respective texts), still vividly recalled the "...dumb ass speaking with man's voice" (2 Peter 2:16). The latter is another of the few 'exceptional' passages captured by our procedure. It is evident that the expression of feeling by a non-human was an extraordinary event, to be tolerated only if explicitly sanctioned by Divine agency. If 'nature' was to express itself, the LORD had first to open its mouth, unlock its larynx.

Later writers would extravagantly affirm what Numbers made explicit. Although the passages quoted below are clearly excessive by the sober standard of the 'Priestly Code', they demonstrate the same principle which is revealed in the story of 'Balaam's ass': i.e., nature may recover its power to vocalize through direct intervention by the Lord or (possibly) through petition by the Lord's agents:

Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof: let the fields rejoice, and all that is therein. Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the LORD... (1 Chronicles 16:32-33); or

Sing, O ye heavens; for the LORD hath done it: shout, ye lower parts of the earth: break forth into singing, ye mountains, O forest, and every tree therein: for the LORD hath redeemed Jacob, and glorified himself in Israel (Isaiah 44:23).

It is gratifying to see nature potentially so at one with human purpose! Despite their surface exuberance, however, passages such as the above fall short of a traditional animist celebration of life. The emotional outpouring occurs, to the extent that it occurs at all (always a question in declamatory uses of the imperative or what could be called the 'imperial future'⁽¹⁷⁾), as a fully orchestrated response, directed from outside. The heteronomous nature of the performance tends to wipe out any value the structure has as an indicator of genuine discourse.

Unprocessed nature...

What structures of the imagination lay beneath this stupendous silence of nature? The prophets seem to have been obsessed with the idea that discourse uncontrolled was discourse out of control. Running through the Bible, the Old Testament in particular, is the fear of a self-regulated universe, which I interpret (quasi-historically) as the fear of return, return to a condition which existed before the LORD's 'stabilizing' intervention. Concealed beneath the face of the "deep" is the state of the world prior to Creation (Genesis 1:2), a state which, in the perception of the patriarchs, lacked division and order.

(More than a few psychologists have seen the contents of the 'deep' as a representation of the suppressed unconscious. The metaphor is not bad and can be pursued here parenthetically. In such an interpretation, the Works of Creation might mark the emergence of the conscious mind. An identification with historical process suddenly presents itself. A possible scenario unfolds which seems reasonable. Patriarchy adopts 'consciousness' as its own and henceforth derogates the 'unconscious'--the prior state of the collective being. In Indoeuropean culture the unconscious is treacherous, like the human female. 'Dreams' are 'lies' as comparative linguistic reconstructions teach us⁽¹⁸⁾.)

Other than the brief initial reference to the "face of the deep," the potentially dangerous (and seemingly chaotic) world of unprocessed nature is only to be inferred. The Priestly Code (or P), which higher criticism assumes is a principal source of the books Genesis through Samuel, is believed to have suppressed accounts of God's original struggle with (and eventual triumph over) the forces of... you name it. The phenomenon could be called Original Nature, the nature which seethed beneath the surface of Divine Creation (but which burst, almost immediately, into the open with the startling appearance, so soon after the supposed 'completion' of this stupendous task, of the Evil Serpent).

I believe the complex structure, which underlies this suppressed cluster of images, can be identified with a reasonable degree of certainty. It is nothing less than an advanced state of social integration: undivided nature, the bane of the prophets and the bane of Western civilization ever since. In the Mosaic account the nature which this cluster of images represented had no voice at all (following the 'lapse') and was to be heard only sporadically in subsequent portions of Scripture. It appears, on those rare occasions when it does manage to surface and to disrupt the calm of the Biblical universe, as a hideous transmogrification of natural reality, a burst of hallucinatory images among which are the worst of the monsters which stalk the mind. Sometimes it presents itself in the churning of the sea where it assumes the form of a dragon or the intimidating figure of the Leviathan, that Biblical resurgence of pre-artifactual nature. We shall attend to a few of these anomalous passages in a moment.

The epitome of Evil, 'original nature' was condemned to silence and obscurity by the structures which sought to replace it in the collective imagination. Attentive readers of the Bible will find these two concepts regularly conjoined. In Silence and Darkness we uncover the mythic instruments by which Evil was punished:

...and the wicked shall be silent in darkness (1 Samuel 2:9);

...let the wicked... be silent in the grave (Psalms 31:17);

...sit thou silent... and get thee into darkness (Isaiah 47:5).

The fact that the person addressed in the latter instance is a woman is not exactly without metaphoric significance. As punishment for her association with 'nature' portions of the New Testament would impose a categorical silence on the human female. I suppose silence could be considered the latter-day version of Old Testament purification!

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence (Timothy 2:11-12).

As one can imagine, passages of this kind have served various social and political purposes in the past two thousand years. From the beginning, they were used to keep women out of the teaching professions and out of the ranks of the clergy. The Works of Creation had given rise to a 'new nature', one which was pacified and domesticated or was at least amenable to pacification and domestication and the successful extension of 'man's dominion'. The livestock, listed previously in Table I , comprised a docile and more tractable version of the living reality which lies in adjacency to human discourse. 'Farm animals' were safe, subdued, silent, definitely under control.

The wild and untamed...

I had a suspicion when I began this statistical task. The other animals of the Bible, those not directly related to the production of commodities in the community of the Chosen, might offer clues as to the character and whereabouts, in the Biblical imagination, of this suppressed discursive reality, this despised manifestation of nature. In this respect the findings (see Table II below) were not disappointing:

Again, the words designating these creatures agre rank-ordered according to frequency of occurrence in the text as a whole. Standing out, as showing no evidence of vocalization (or the capacity to vocalize), is a somewhat motley grouping: camels, locusts, swine, pigeons, and grasshoppers. However, of these categories swine and camels, though unclean and thus banned in any case from the daily routine of the prophets, were nonetheless the domesticated animals of others. They behave statistically as if they were the livestock of the Chosen.

It is also likely that pigeon(s) are misplaced in the tabular display. Pigeons enter the Biblical picture exclusively as items intended for sacrifice; so it is probably safe to assume that they existed (primarily) in a the domesticated state. It is likely that the wild pigeon of the 16^th century English imagination was not (lexically speaking) a pigeon but a dove, a creature somewhat lighter in body weight and perhaps less desirable as an item for human consumption. In the KJV the dove, as a form of the species existing in the wild, does manage to vocalize as occasion permits (see Table II), whereas the domesticated pigeon is consistently reduced to silence. Meanwhile, pigeons are sacrificed while their wild counterpart is not. This appears to reflect the observance of a rule which states that the feral animal, clean or unclean, is not an appropriate item for ritual sacrifice.

In the KJV all twelve references to pigeons involve their use in sacrifice. With regard to doves no references at all pertain to ritual functions. Similarly birds, a category which appears to have been made up of wild creatures alone, appear never to have been offered in sacrifice; but fowls on the other hand, a generic category which appears to have included both wild and domesticated animals, are referred to at least once in such a context:

And if the burnt sacrifice for his offering to the LORD be of fowls, then he shall bring his offering of turtledoves, or of young pigeons [Leviticus 1:14].

Note, however, that the word fowl is used here only to introduce the idea that birds brought in sacrifice must be pigeons or turtledoves, another word for domesticated pigeon, shortened often in 16^th century English to turtle. (The famous 'voice of the turtle' was, of course, the subdued voice of a dove.) The word fowl is functionally analogous to beast which, in the KJV, also includes both wild and domesticated animals.

However, even if we include the silent creatures listed above, the group as a whole appears relatively noisy in comparison with the animals listed in Table I. Clear indications of vocalization, or at least the potential for vocalization, occur in nearly six percent (6%) of the references in Table II. This may be compared with a frequency of less than one percent (1%) among the animals previously listed. Although the Lord's original bequest/command to humankind was nothing less than that it "...subdue [the entire earth]" and have "dominion over..." every living thing that moves on the earth (Genesis 1:28) effective control appears to have declined with increased distance from the practical concerns of Biblical community. The Lord's rule of silence is much less apt to be waived with livestock than with creatures of the wild.

Aside from the two verses in which the Serpent speaks to First Woman, Table II lists only one reference, in the roughly two-hundred-and-thirty-four (234) pages of text contained in my edition of the Pentateuch, to vocalization by a non-human:

But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast: that ye may know how that the LORD doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel (Exodus 11:7).

This 'exceptional' passage, already cited in the notes, is worthy of special attention because it dramatizes for us, once again, the direct dependence of the 'voice of nature' upon Divine will (or whim). Before the Fall, nature possessed the capacity to engage humans, and presumably itself as well, in extensive discursive interaction. After the 'lapse', as punishment for its participation in an illicit discourse involving humans, nature entered a period of compulsory silence which endured through the Five Books of Moses and was interrupted only by the episode discussed earlier in which a domesticated ass, through special intervention from above (Numbers 22:28), was able to recover nature's lost capacity for vocalization. It was not long-lasting, to be sure, but long enough for the creature to utter a few poignant words of complaint to her abusive master.

The homely trio...

The verse quoted above, in which a dog (in response to Divine will) loses the capacity to 'move its tongue' against the Chosen, is the negative complement of the previous moral instruction. The heteronomous character of Biblical discourse, which should by now be so familiar to readers as to require no further comment, is exhibited here as it was previously. But this time the larynx of nature was not activated but put out of commission. As indicated in the quoted verse, the animal to whom the task fell of demonstrating this impairment of function was canis familiaris, next to the domestic swine and the snake the most despised animal of the ancient Near East.

As the reader may have already surmised, this grouping of superficially disparate creatures -- the pig, and snake, the dog (all silent in the structure of post-lapsarian community) -- was neither arbitrary in its mythic dimension nor historically fortuitous. So despised does the swine appear to be, in the unforgiving value system of the Old Testament, that this common domestic animal of the European neolithic nearly escapes mention. (See Table II.) The word has two paltry references in the Pentateuch, each of which pertains to dietary law and can be therefore considered obligatory references. The word swine vanishes for the remainder of the Old Testament and reappears with an absolute frequency of fourteen (14) in the New Testament. All these later references are highly pejorative which accords with modern English usage and feeling.

There appears to be shared ground wherever we look. Each of the above-mentioned animals, like the human being itself, was a creature of the forest, displaced from its habitat of choice by a complex array of circumstances. Evidence is scanty to be sure. But the three appear to have come together at a remote moment in prehistory, not exactly independently of human cultural evolution (I would suggest), for each appears to play a significant role in the earliest agricultural households and was thus conceptually rooted in domesticity. The dog was probably the oldest member of the homely triad, a remnant of a decidedly pre-neolithic period in human social organization.

The dog's original as well as its later function was largely discursive. The animal provided valued companionship, as it does still today, and learned to announce the possible presence of hostile intruders. Yet, after all this presumably valued service, the words used to designate this animal bristle with negative content (cur, mongrel, mutt). The dog has earned our contempt as it has endured our exploitation. Even the mouse, who has been active in the destruction of farmers' grain stores for ten thousand years (and seems to have provided no product or service in compensation), has fared much better than the dog. In the Old Testament system of values, the 'thief' is more respected than the 'slave'.

In the early neolithic household all the above-mentioned victims of present abuse by humans performed practical functions (in exchange for measly sustenance). The swine for example. Immediately at home in human company, the pig⁽³⁰⁾ fulfilled the dietary need of farmers for the high-quality protein, which was required to broaden the population base of agriculture (which invented hard work after all). But it performed a secondary task for which it was excellently suited: namely, the disposal of waste, a function it shared with 'man's best friend'. (This function may have been a factor in the cultural degradation of both animals through the years. Waste disposal is a seemingly thankless task in a wasteful society.)

The pig is surely one of the most resourceful of creatures. It is omnivorous and less discriminating in its tastes than the dog. It devours household waste with gusto and enthusiasm. It plunges into the waste water of kitchen clean-up and seems to relish the soapy dregs of our past culinary pleasures. The pig sees rich opportunity in butchering residue which the fastidious among us are inclined to shrink from. Slopping and slurping, amidst vocally versatile expressions of appreciation and delight, it sucks into its own stomach the viscera (and their contents) of other animals. Eminently practical, the pig appears indifferent to the question of where these body parts originated, normally a factor of some importance to humans (as to other animals).

But, at the same time, the pig is polite and well-mannered. Gratefully acknowledging the skimpiest of fare, it turns simply elsewhere when household garbage is meager. In striking contrast to the preferences of the prophets, the pig shows no loathing of the earth. It sticks its snout into the moist loam of the rain forest, which is its natural home, and roots around in the rich mycorrhizal community of the soil to find succulent tubors and other treasures (e.g. the truffles of human culinary delight) which only it, among higher vertebrates, seems able to detect with certainty.

It is likely that the third member of this despised trinity, the snake, had also an important function in early neolithic community. Direct evidence is not available, but the ubiquitous appearance of this creature in world lore and its inevitably positive association with the human female indicates an early domestic role of some importance to human community. Although the snake was almost certainly a domestic fixture on the human scene, it was probably not domesticated. In the early period the snake was probably not bred and confined but lived, most likely, in a state of symbiosis with human community. Representations of snakes are abundant in the material residue of neolithic villages. The animal was widely associated with good health in humans, to mention one of its most frequently noted positive attributes, and the argument has been persuasively advanced that the snake played a necessary role in the control of rodent populations, the ever-present danger to grain stores (and human health).

The caduceus, the wing-topped staff of Hermes (which is encircled by two snakes), points to allegedly symbolic properties of healing in addition to wisdom and fertility. The caduceus has been the insignia of the medical branch of the U.S. Army since 1902. The snake has had strong traditional association with fertility (and, through reduction, the human female) and long carried the meanings of accommodation, conciliation, and truce. As a symbol of medicine the cadeceus has largely replaced the sign of Asclepius, a symbol involving a single snake.

In the pre-history of Eurasia, all three of these animals had a strong positive association with the female of our species. This fact should yield a valuable clue as to their meaning in the paranoid fantasies of the would-be patriarch, the one who carry the banner of male virtue into the historical period. In the picture I conjure of the early Eurasian neolithic, the female (with her varied metaphoric associations and attributes) was the settled and socially dominant entity in human community, its stable core and mythic center. If Marija Gimbutas was even approximately correct in her grasp of the social implications of the archaeology of Eurasia (for the millennia concurrent with the closing Pleistocene), then the emergence of the myth of male supremacy, and the social and cultural institutions it appears to have spawned (and depended upon), must be read primarily as a reaction to that earlier, still somewhat hypothetical, cultural state.⁽³¹⁾

A pre-patriarchal Eurasia...

In another chapter I shall attempt a more detailed sketch of this early period as I envision it. My claim will not be extraordinary in its general contour. It follows the thinking of many others who have maintained that a good share of the 'bogeymen', and blantantly negative mental constructs, of Western patriarchy are cultural perversions of traditional myth. It is well known, for example, that the medieval concept of the devil (as an evil supernatural entity who, in its appearance, was part man, part beast) owed its wide-spread effectiveness among heathens to the fact that it successfully exploited (and perverted) the image of Pan, the popular horned god of the pagans. After all, if the Christianization of the continent was to proceed, the spiritual competition, and its store of images, had to be weakened or (preferably) extirpated, if their modification and incorporation into Christian teaching was not theologically practical or appropriate.

In a similar and complementary vein, hades (the relatively benign dwelling place of the pagan dead) was refurbished in the service of the Christian-Muslim notion of eternal damnation: the idea that humans must suffer 'punishment' beyond the grave for their alleged 'sins', a proposition which would have been too much for the accommodating disposition of the 'matristic' sensibility, hence the massive resistance to Christianity in the first Millennium of the Present Era and throughout the Middle Ages, culminating in the burning of women, a punishment for heresy which was explicitly mandated in the legal provisions of the Pentateuch.

(I use Gimbutas' descriptive label matristic as a designation for female-centered community, the mode of social organization which, she claimed, preceded patriarchy in Europe and the Near East. Gimbutas gave this vanished culture the name Old Europe. And her vision has acquired a material reality with the uncovering of archaeological evidence. Old Europe has gradually emerged to scientific and popular perception as a concept to be taken seriously, if not exactly to be accepted in its entirety. The Lithuanian-American scholar based many of her conclusions on archaeological excavations of the past fifty years or so in which she herself participated.⁽³²⁾)

For those who may hold to the belief that the Spanish Inquisition, and its moral and legal ethos, was an aberration in the spiritual experience of Christians and Jews, a sampling from the Law of Moses may be instructive:

Thou shall not suffer a witch to live (Exodus 22:18);

He that sacrificeth unto any god, save unto the LORD only, he shall be utterly destroyed (Exodus 22:20);

And if a man take a wife and her mother [a common practice, it seems, in many pre-modern societies] it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire... (Leviticus 20:14);

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death... (Leviticus 20:27);

And the daughter of any priest, if she profane herself by playing the whore, she profaneth her father: she shall be burnt with fire (Leviticus 21:9).

Subsequent passages are less frequent, and less coldly legalistic in their formulation. Nonetheless, the spirit of Exodus through Numbers remains alive in late portions of Holy Scripture:

And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire (Revelation 17:16).

Further, it is not surprising to find sorcery, and the worship of nature, coupled with images of the whore and the dog. These figures and images were condemned as a group:

For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie (Revelation 22:15).

One is intrigued by the further association of these despised elements of the self-righteous imagination with the telling of lies. As I have suggested elsewhere: in the peculiar logic of patriarchy, natural discourse and functions of the unconscious, in particular, are associated with the (seemingly) all-too human propensity to prevaricate.

I have little to adduce, in the way of new theory or new historiography, other than to suggest that ideologically motivated distortions of current myth have been essential to the colonizing strategy (as this has been manifest in Western political and cultural aggrandizement), and so should be intensively examined with generalizations of the above sort in mind. As the written record, for the most part, of patriarchal institutions and their mixed bag of successes and failures, early recorded history affords a special and, at times, singular glimpse into the world which existed prior to itself. For in the cabinet of horrors, which patriarchy invariably labored to install, we discern an outline of the largely forgotten communal state which the doctrine of male supremacy was at pains to replace (albeit with varying degrees of success).

So what to do with Genesis, a Bronze Age text which is overwhelmingly negative in its position with regard to natural discourse and explicitly biased against the human female in ways too numerous to count? How to interpret its obsessional and hateful attitude toward Pagan social structures?

It is not possible, in my opinion, to place the origins of this material outside the context of a major political transition, an event which may indeed have shaken humanity as a whole, depending on how we gauge the depth of its onset and early effects. Other than through appeal to an over-arching historical postulate, such as this, I see no plausible way in which the Five Books of Moses--the Hebrew Torah-- with their unique constellation of divisive images, can be adjudged to make sense.

It takes one to know one...

There is something else worth mentioning though it is not directly related to the topic at hand. Table II reflects the reverence of the Biblical folk for the lion and their apparent identification with this predatory but highly social animal. This beast is also an outstanding exception to the prevailing pattern exhibited in the data. The injunction against vocalization by animals is clearly waived in the case of this revered animal, called 'great' in the Pentateuch (Numbers 23:24 and 24:9) and 'strong', 'valient', 'fierce', 'stout', and 'bold' elsewhere in Holy Scripture. The lion 'roars' in sixteen instances and 'cries out' in two.

To be sure, some of these examples are similes where the actual referent is a courageous or heroic human male. Nevertheless, in its choice of an animal to serve as emblem for the collective (read male) identity, Biblical society shares with other neolithic and Bronze Age cultures a selective bias which is initially astonishing, although the penchant tends to lose its mystery upon reflection. Incredibly, societies which practice animal husbandry normally seek inspiration for the display of their communal strengths and virtues not in the living creatures under their direct 'stewardship', as one might reasonably anticipate, but in the actions of animals which prey on their domesticated stock. Thus the high status of the lion in the Biblical imagination (and the veneration of the wolf and/or eagle among other folk who farm). One predator recognizes itself in another.

A missed opportunity...

In view of the strong association of Christ with Judea, and given the militancy of early Christians, it is most curious that the principal textual apparatus of the new religion failed to adopt the lion as a symbol for Jesus:

For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda, of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning priesthood (Hebrews 7:14).

Perhaps it would have strained the credibility of the metaphor to develop the images of the lion and the lamb side-by-side, as attributes co-existing somehow in a single heroic personage, in the manner perhaps of the wolf and the lamb in that never-never-location of Biblical peace and harmony. (The gnostics, interestingly, in their charming propensity to turn Good and Evil upside-down, saw Christ as the Serpent. But then the Serpent did not prey on Biblical livestock and was perhaps more deserving of the honor.)

The wolf, the lamb, the lion and the bullock...

The world, which comes into view in the writings of the prophets, was a universe of striking conflict and division. The picture we form of the cultural scene, as played out by a community in apparent seige, amounts to something more than a simple coming to terms with the problems of an arduous existence. What unfolds is not just a practical approach to life, developed by an inundated and suffering people whose options were restricted by the harsh reality of physical circumstances. Much of the strife and contention, which find expression in the pages of this document, must be seen as the natural consequence of their world-view. We confront here a way of imagining the world in which many of the most ordinary qualities of animal character -- accommodation, assimilation, integraation, etc. -- had become somehow alien to human experience; or were shoved into an impossible future condition, a set of social circumstances which was somehow discontinuous with the 'present' and the 'past': an imaginary space and time when

...the wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock... (Isaiah 65:25),

to cite one of several similar passages which are to be read, it seems to me, as rationalizations for the strife-ridden status quo.

It is noteworthy, however, that even here, in this most unattainable of social states, the world is far from integrated. The verse begun above continues "...and dust shall be the serpent's meat." We are jolted into the realization that even here, in this mythical place and moment of social harmony and bliss, little actual progress has been achieved in the healing of the divisions of nature. Though fierce lions and wolves may have joined the ranks of the domesticated and docile, 'original nature' remains as divided as it was before. In the Biblical imagination, unprocessed nature -- the eternal representation of Evil -- can never be accommodated. The despised Serpent can never outlive the wrath of a vengeful people.

The fear of return...

Let me summarize our findings thus far. In the quasi-historical perspective, which we have adopted, the social condition which preceded the emergence of patriarchy was the dreaded state of social integration. It was 'original nature', the dark and complex state of a discourse not yet 'ordered' by male invention, insight, virtue, purity, division, etc. The composers of Genesis took upon themselves the task of suppressing all vital signs of this prior social state. This was to be accomplished through a re-interpretation of the myth of 'creation' which was now visualized against the background of an additional metaphor: as the mythic precursor to the patriarchal family with its diverse package of divisive elements. Natural process was replaced by artifact, a transmogrified social construct which was vertically organized and exclusive, a structure founded, moreover, on a perverted concept of 'blood relationship'. Here we see the father, i.e. the lonely creator, standing at the pinnacle. All this in striking contrast to what one must assume was the lateral disposition of the prior social state.

In the meantime, the concept of 'nature' continued to perform a socially valuable service and was not thus simply to be done away with, expunged from human awareness. Indeed, the participation of nature was a requirement in the framing of the new values. Original nature now functioned as the negative pole in the articulation of male virtue. The degradation of this 'un-managed nature' provided the necessary opposing element in the dynamic by which patriarchal structures reproduced themselves and maintained their strength and purpose. Only by means of strict opposition to natural discourse, and to the integrity of natural community, could male virtue be effectively articulated and the domain of the patriarch be properly delineated and secured.

Crime and punishment...

The first human couple's 'lapse' prefigured a continuous struggle, at the level of practical existence, between 'original nature' and the artifactual reality of the patriarchal family. Condemned was First Woman, strongly allied with nature in her procreative capacity and thus prone to backslide, an aggravating and persistent consequence of her deplorable natural condition, the gravest of threats to the exercise of patriarchal power. Thus the pre-lapsarian female, on the occasions (few or many) when she dared to raise her head, found herself castigated as 'whore', as 'harlot', sometimes as 'Jezebel' (the inspired if intensely hated wife of King Ahab) who sought to put nature back into religion and back into the structure of the Near Eastern imagination.

Recall that an explicit provision of the LORD's original sentence (stated indirectly, to be sure, in the oblique manner typical of Biblical injunctions) was that First Woman must abandon her promiscuous ways, that from thenceforth

...thy desire shall be for thy husband [alone] (Genesis 3:16).

The LORD's prediction would be vacuous in an historical context in which female monogamy was an unmarked value. His words are next-to meaningless if we do not see this an indictment of the human female prior to the Fall.

By the way, the better and much less misleading designation for the status of the female in patriarchal community would be monandry. Monogamy, which suggests a restriction evenly applied, is not exactly the word to describe the social arrangement in question in which only Eve's actions are constrained. No similar injunction applies to Adam. No corresponding restriction is placed upon the social-sexual freedom of the human male, not certainly at this early stage in the disclosure of the patriarchal agenda.

The 'crime' for which Adam was actually punished was real enough in the post-lapsarian frame of values, though the style of the delivery permits (typically) the nature of the transgression to be recognized only through inference. First Man's 'crime', in brief, was that he was passive. His real offense was the archetypal offense of the pre-lapsarian male (or would-be patriarch in any age or cultural context), i.e. the failure to 'take charge', the failure "...to rule over [First Woman]" (as Genesis 3:16 would make clear). If First Woman's crime was to fall victim to her evil instincts -- that is, to allow herself to be seduced by nature -- Adam's (just as certainly) was to stand by while these events played themselves out. His was the crime of acquiescence. Adam's transgression -- expressed in the language of advanced patriarchy -- was that he acted like a 'wimp' instead of the 'man' which the responsibilities of patriarchal authority required him to be. If this episode is not an account of social roles in significant transition, I do not know how it is to be viewed.

Meanwhile, nature in general was punished, reduced to silence except for (1) the Divinely orchestrated vocalizations discussed above, or (2) those instances in which the vocalizing animal has a strong emblematic function of reference (to human males in the typical pattern), or finally (3) the occasional voices from the 'waters of the deep' where that old enemy of male awareness hung out: the serpent, or 'original nature' which, despite the best efforts of the writer-prophets, would not be defeated.

Out-of-control...

Disrupting the surface calm of patriarchal consciousness, 'original nature' assumed (in the archetypal representation) the form of the ancient Leviathan or Biblical Dragon (if not the form of our old friend the Serpent). Or it inhabited the body of a Beast of hideous aspect and bearing. The hallucinatory images of Isaiah, Daniel and Joel are in this surreal vein. Here the 'suppressed reality' of natural discourse asserts itself in the manner typical of the genre--amidst signs of social disorder and an awful sense of physical displacement. These images foreshadow the violence and dislocation of Revelation. The reader is invited to study the footnotes to Table II for the literary effect of these expressions of nature out-of-control. The surface of the 'sea', considered often to represent the barrier between conscious and unconscious mental process, is broken sometimes by the appearance of terrible beasts, normally thought to be land-based creatures of the imagination:

Daniel spake and said, I saw in my vision by night, and, behold, the four winds of the heaven strove upon the great sea. And four great beasts came up from the sea, diverse from another (Daniel 7:2-3).

For the voices of nature, which appear to become audible in the agitated verses which follow this passage, see the footnotes to Table II.

The perfect artifact...

It happens, however, that the LORD offers despised nature the opportunity to salvage something from its errant history and identity. By yielding to the will of the patriarch, as creator, nature can move beyond its lowly beginnings and achieve deliverance of sorts. Salvation lies, when all is said

and done, in the concept of nature modified, nature as male artifact -- nature transformed and made pure, as in alchemical process and ancient metallurgy.

The regenerative power of 'original nature', and its presumed expression in the 'reproductive' capacity of the human female, is hereby superseded. In the hands of Man the Creator the material world achieves a level of 'purity' and 'perfection' which is rarely (if ever) to be seen in natural process itself! This idea, with us today in countless cultural and commercial manifestations, is one of the weirder propositions to emerge from the mytho-conceptual cauldron of the Ancient Near East. Yet it holds the key to some of the most puzzling features of these odd strands of meaning in our collective experience. The abiding distrust of natural discourse is a striking case in point. But it appears to be only one aspect of a pervasive fear of integration.

In first place, the nature which Biblical tradition regards as 'imperfect' is the nature which did not entirely suit the simpler requirements of human needs (and came thus to be despised for its complexity). It is perhaps understandable that tenders of sheep would place relatively greater value on animals whose wool was of uniform color, to take the most obvious example. It is perhaps even understandable that white would have been the color of preference. Through the years, commercial interest likely exploited the dominant characteristics of the animal. And white, for all I know about sheep (which is not very much), may have been the prevailing color in natural populations of these creatures. In any case, white (or yellow) wool -- whether achieved through 'natural selection' or intensive breeding practices -- was a valuable base resource which lent itself conveniently to additional processing of specific kinds. It was more suitable as a base material for dyeing, for example, and for the manufacture of brightly colored woven textiles.

Inspired no doubt by their experience with the breeding of animals, and their desire for uniform grades of animal products, pastoral patriarchs came to value nature principally as artifact, raising uniformity (and, by extension, purity) to the level of a virtue in the process. Division and the separated part were embraced as crucial elements in this 'new' world-view. For in nature, the whole is rarely if ever simple while the part, if not uniform, as naturally constituted, can at least be made so, which is the breeder's ultimate objective. Thus a division of the world took precedence over the complexities of an integrated reality.

Ignoring the Bible...

As I have argued, there is a serious contradiction in this perception of the world. Singularity remains a concept distinctly alien to living nature where, as Sir Stafford Beer has cogently argued, correspondence is the key to meaning:

We are the inheritors of categorized knowledge; therefore we inherit also a world view that consists of parts strung together, rather than of wholes regarded through different sets of filters. Historically, synthesis seems to have been too much for the human mind--where practical affairs were concerned. The descent of the synthetic method from Plato through Augustine took men's perception into literature, art and mysticism. The modern world of science and technology is bred from Aristotle and Aquinas by analysis. The categorization that took hold of medieval scholasticism has really lasted it out. We may see with hindsight that the historic revolts against the scholastics did not shake free from the shackles of their reductionism.

The revolt of the rationalists--Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz--began from a principle of 'methodical doubt'. But they became lost in mechanism, dualism, more and more categorization; and they ended in denying relation altogether. But relation is the stuff of system. Relation is the essence of synthesis. The revolt of the empiricists--Lock, Berkeley, Hume--began from the nature of understanding about the environment. But analysis was still the method, and categorization still the practical tool of advance. In the bizarre outcome, whereby it was the empiricists who denied the very existence of the empirical world, relation survived-- but only through the concept of mental association between mental events. The system 'out there', which we call nature, had been annihilated in the process.⁽³³⁾

I have quoted Sir Stafford Beer at length to raise an important (if secondary) aspect of the issue. Note that this distinguished scholar assembles his argument about Western culture (which the reader will surely agree has significant points of congruence with the viewpoint developed in these pages) within an historical framework which ignores the Biblical prophets (and writers) whose thinking on these same matters could not possibly have been less ambiguous or less influential in the emergence of our culture.

Nor can one argue that the invidious content of the Pentateuch was simply not familiar to the church-going masses in Britain and elsewhere and could have had thus only a modest effect. Since the publication of the Authorized Version of the Bible in 1600, the hateful and divisive images of the Old Testament -- its unrelieved hostility toward women and nature, the punishments it prescribes for discursive infractions of untold kinds, the stoning and burning alive of accused transgressors, not to mention the 'fire and brimstone' which rains down from 'Heaven' on entire human populations -- have fulfilled a crucial need in the harangues of religious demagogues (of which Britain has produced more than its share).

Yet despite an uninterrupted and broadly based exposure to the social vitriol of Holy Scripture, the basic tenets of Western belief systems are rarely considered to reflect these values; although, to 'explain cause', we think nothing at all of invoking the mythology of classical antiquity, as though that influence were somehow more direct. Even as we enter the new millennium in what, many believe, is a healthy state of spirited inquiry and high cultural advancement our understanding continues to be frustrated by the perception that what has happened, in the broadest cultural sense, reflects the currents and counter-currents (good and bad) of a secular frame of mind, the product of our particular intellectual history and our scientific approach. Despite the precision and cogency of his presentation of the symptoms, Beer observes convention in that he limits his discussion of 'cause' to the efforts of individual philosophers, as though the well-springs of our culture were the inkwells of academia. When all the time -- at the level of vulgar perceptions, at least, which is where myth really resides in its instantly effective forms -- our culture has been religious in its character and fundamental orientation. Seemingly 'secular' elements of ideology -- whether popular or academic in their specific manifestation -- are to be recognized, typically, as transformations of religious belief (which is, itself, the reflection of biologically rooted myth).

Thus Beer notes constancies in the pronouncements (and surface sparring) of philosophers through the ages. In my opinion, there is a remarkable sameness to these upsurges of intellectual consensus and dispute. In its mythic construction, much of the fuss turns out to be familiar. Our fanatical devotion to the myth of the 'part', our tendency to 'categorize' and symbolically 'isolate' (through words and names and visual icons), our inevitable loss of the sense of 'relation', followed by the 'annihilation' of nature itself as a closing catastrophe. These events all reflect the operation of a much more broadly integrated set of principles than academics alone, with their lofty pronouncements (and occasional differences of opinion), could conceivably have produced.

For these reasons, like Faust in the opening scenes of Goethe's verse epic, we have scanned the pages of the Bible to see what clues this document, unquestionably a foundational structure in the popular culture of the West, might reveal. In Faust's case the search was futile. The 'natural connections' he sought there⁽³⁴⁾ had been already thoroughly severed, which happens to explain also why we, with our contrasting set of questions and objectives, have found the document useful.

It is not exactly an irrelevancy that the peculiar and restricted form of public discourse, which the Biblical fathers were at pains to delineate and foster, somehow anticipates most of the preferences of the modern Culture of the West: the notion of isolation at the expense of structural relation, the part at the expense of the whole, the simple at the expense of the complex; the mytho-conceptual precept of separation with the subsequent loss of a sense of the integrated structure, analysis in place of synthesis, division and uniformity as opposed to natural diversity, and so on and so on. The list of instances seems inexhaustible in which the language of the Bible comes down on the wrong side -- what we may refer to, in evolutionary terms, as the maladaptive side -- of some of the most important philosophical and social aspects of human experience.

Nor are the oppositions I list here tentative generalizations, abstracted and somehow condensed from a confusing vapor of religious metaphor. The practical social objective of the Bible (the Pentateuch in particular), which was to assemble and to enforce a code of legal and moral conduct for the individual and the community in which he/she lived, has resulted, it turns out, in a level of expository clarity and specificity which is extraordinary by any measure or standard. The Christian Bible provides thus a tool like none other for understanding the mytho-conceptual content of the culture in which half the population of the worl