Important Note:
Opinions are fun. My friends tell me I am someone with lots of opinions and that's fine since I don't get mad at others when they disagree with me. In this same spirit I am interested in hearing yours views as long as you are able to share your views without boiling over. I look forward to hearing from you. I tend to write in the form of short essays most of the time, but contributions do not need to be in this same format or size. Some of the content here will date itself pretty quickly, other content may be virtually timeless, this is for the reader to judge.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1
PETA and the Bible
Posted at: Apr/23/2011 : Posted by: mel
Related Category: Perspectives,
As we approach another Easter holiday, the Bible is again in the news. Interpreting the Bible in special and unique ways is a long standing tradition of western culture and institutions. I suppose this is a result of our widely publicized Judaea/Christian belief that the “Bible contains all the answers.” The latest organization to go down this path is the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), have you heard of them? The obvious question is: What does PETA have to do with the Bible? PETA is an animal rights organization whose agenda is to campaign for an end to the use of animal fur, the eating of meat, dairy products, fishing, hunting, trapping, factory farming, circuses and other similar actions. So what is the connection to the Bible? According to PETA’s vice president, Bruce Friedrich; “the public recognizes that animals are feeling, intelligent individuals, capable of joy and suffering.” Referring to the pronoun "it", Mr. Friedrich went on to state that these animals should not be “de-animalized by means of a pronoun that is also used for sticks and stones.” As a justification for this argument he points to the fact that the oldest translations of the Bible refer to animals as “he” or “she” rather than “it.” Putting aside the Bible for a moment, the notion that all English speakers call all animals “he” or “she” strikes me as more than a little absurd. After all, don’t we generally call an animal “it” because we don’t know if it’s a she or a he? It is often impossible to tell the sex of a cat or dog lying at your feet without turning it over and spreading its legs, let alone that bird in the sky, rabbit in a field or a fish in water. If I visit my brother and one of his cats hops in my lap, the last thing I want to do is flip it over and spread its legs before saying anything about it. Honestly, with cats I don’t think even then I could properly tell if it is a “he” or “she.” Beyond animal’s we often use the words “baby” or “child” to refer to the youngest versions of our own species when we don’t know their gender. With adults, we virtually never refer to them with a neutered pronoun. Most of the time it is pretty easy for us to tell a man from a woman and then speak to them or about them with the right gender reference. Having a gender neutral option is one of the nice characteristics of the English language that we often take for granted. “He” or “she” is part of how we talk about people. Just as important, "it" is a reasonable way to talk about animals. To get back to the Bible however; what gives PETA’s call to biblical translations an appearance of reasonableness is that in Hebrew (the language in which the Bible was written) there is no neuter word for “it.” I am not by any means a Hebrew scholar, but I have studied the language for a couple of years and continue to read about it. Unlike English, Hebrew is a highly gendered language in which not only all pronouns, but also all nouns and most verbs, are either masculine or feminine. As my Hebrew teacher taught me years ago, If you wish to say: “Look at that bird; it’s so pretty,” you have to say in Hebrew, “Look at that bird, she is so pretty.” Another example might be translating “look at that horse, its coat is very shiny”. This would translate in Hebrew to “Look at that horse, he has a shiny coat.” I am not anywhere near knowledgeable enough to know all the gender distinctions for when to use “he” or “she.” I do remember learning that most birds are feminine, while most dogs, horses and fish are masculine. This means that PETA’s argument to associate more human and personal association terms with animals is breaking down. According to the Hebrew, all horses are masculine, wait…according to my knowledge of horses that is not true because we have mares. Is there an Immaculate Conception version for horses where they propagate without females? In Hebrew, the correlation between a noun and its referred to gender seems more accidental than anything else. Things of beauty or personal affection seem to end out feminine more often than not and the rest are masculine. This kind of sounds like how men refer to their ships and cars. The word Torah in Hebrew is feminine and is referred to in a sentence as “she,” English which is a much more versatile language would refer to the Torah as “it” and this is not considered disrespectful by Rabbi’s and other Judaic scholars. Bible translations have varied a great deal over the years. Many people spend their lives studying the text, its history, and its myriad of translations. Most people agree that when the Holy Scriptures or Old Testament was first transposed from oral history and lesson to written text, this first written text was in Hebrew. One of the most noted translations from Hebrew over the years has been the King James Version (KJV) of 1611. While most Bible scholars will tell you that the KJV was not an especially good translation, timing is everything. The King James Version was the first to be mass produced and distributed with the aid of a brand new invention called the printing press which helped to make it the Standard English Bible for centuries. The scholars of the day who translated the Hebrew for the KJV stated that their goal was to translate God’s word as literally as possible. In truth, I am not qualified to judge the work of the KJV translation, but many stories have inconsistencies in the gender of animals including the list of clean and unclean animals in the Book of Leviticus and the references to the donkey in the story of Balaam’s donkey in the Book of Numbers. Actually, these inconsistencies are more a function of the hurdles associated with translating from one language to another. Every language has its characteristics and its limitations. Hebrew is an ancient language as languages go. Assuming that you can translate directly from Hebrew to a meaning that is viable, modern and relevant in current society is naïve at best. I am reminded of how in our modern society the same set of statistics can be interpreted by different groups to imply entirely different meanings. If modern content can so easily be used to mean different things, I question the likeliness that we should be literally translating and interpreting anything from the Bible. Modern Bible translations have substituted “its kind” for “his kind” and “her kind.” I wonder if PETA is going to object to this now that they are using the Bible as a touchstone for their agenda. If we are to follow Mr. Friedrich’s approach, then I supposed he would prefer that we all spoke and wrote contemporary English in the manner of the King James Version. I am not ready to return to a seventeenth century English, I struggle enough with the 21st century version of English. I would be hard pressed to believe that Hebrew speakers are more likely than their English brothers to credit animals with intelligence, joy and suffering. Calling a fish “he” or a bird “she” because the grammar of a specific language demands as much, even if this may not be the animal’s actual gender does not work for me. I know and I believe that there are many lessons we can learn from reading and studying the Bible, but selectively deciding to assign gender based human like emotion to animals is just not on my list. More significantly, the Bible is filled with stores of slaughtering the lamb or other animal and roasting it for a celebratory meal. You can’t pick and choose; if you are going to use the Bible to talk about animals…you need to include all the biblical stories that include animals. Ugh! What should you do? Eating or not eating meat is your personal choice, but deciding that selectively using the Bible in its oldest translation as a justification to humanize animals’ borders on silly to me. Regardless of everything else, I will have to admit that this is one of the most creative things I have ever heard of from the folks at PETA. I wonder if my medium steak is a “he” or a “she”. As a thing of beauty, I think I will call her Venus.
Comments (0) [Add Comment]
