Animals and the Land

Proverbs 12:10 sets two people side by side. 'A righteous man regards the life of his animal, but the tender mercies of the wicked are only cruelty.' The verb translated regards is yada, to know, and the word for life is nephesh, the same word used for the living creatures in Genesis 1:24 and for the man as a living being in Genesis 2:7. The righteous man knows his animal's life: whether it is hungry, tired, sick or overloaded. The wicked man's kindness, by contrast, is itself cruel. The proverb treats how a man handles his ox or donkey as a test of his character, not a separate matter of farm management.

Israel's law gives that proverb flesh. The ox and the donkey rest on the Sabbath alongside the household (Exodus 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:14). An Israelite must return his enemy's stray ox and help his enemy's donkey that has fallen under its load (Exodus 23:4-5), which shows that care for the animal is owed even when the owner is hated. An ox treading out grain may not be muzzled (Deuteronomy 25:4), so that it can eat as it works. A man who finds a bird's nest may take the young but must let the mother go (Deuteronomy 22:6-7). An animal may not be slaughtered on the same day as its young (Leviticus 22:28). Even the ban on yoking an ox with a donkey (Deuteronomy 22:10) is read by many interpreters as sparing the weaker animal.

Paul quotes the ox law in 1 Corinthians 9:9 and asks, 'Is it about oxen that God is concerned?' He applies it to paying those who preach, and adds, 'Indeed, this was written for us' (9:10). Some readers take his question to mean that God does not care about oxen and that the law was always really about people. Many interpreters read it otherwise: Paul is arguing from the lesser to the greater, as Jesus does when he says God feeds the birds and asks, 'Are you not much more valuable than they?' (Matthew 6:26). The argument only works if God does care for the birds and the oxen. The greater does not cancel the lesser; it builds on it.

The wider scripture agrees. 'The LORD is good to all; His compassion rests on all He has made' (Psalm 145:9). Psalm 104 is a long hymn to God as the one who feeds lions, birds, goats and sea creatures, and it says 'the earth is full of Your creatures' (104:24). God tells Job about mountain goats giving birth and wild donkeys roaming free, creatures no human uses (Job 38-39). Jesus says not one sparrow 'is forgotten by God' (Luke 12:6). The book of Jonah ends with God's question about Nineveh, which includes 'many cattle as well' (Jonah 4:11). Whatever else Christians disagree about, the claim that animals are things God does not care about has no support in the Bible.

Christians agree that cruelty to animals is wrong, and the great majority hold that humans may use animals for work and food. They disagree about why cruelty is wrong, about how far use may go, and about whether some uses common today are compatible with Proverbs 12:10. Three positions are worth knowing at their strongest.

The first is the classical position of Thomas Aquinas and much of the Catholic and Protestant tradition after him. Animals do not have rational souls and are not persons; they are given to humans for their use, as Genesis 1:28 and 9:3 say. Aquinas argued in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, question 102) that the Old Testament laws against cruelty to animals were given partly so that people would not become cruel to one another: a man who learns pity for beasts will be more ready to pity his neighbour. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992) builds on this tradition. It teaches that animals are God's creatures, that they may be used for food, clothing and work, and that medical experiments on them are acceptable within reasonable limits if they help save human lives. It also says, 'It is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly' (paragraph 2418), and it warns against spending on animals money that should first relieve human misery. The strength of this view is its clarity about the difference between persons and beasts, a difference the Bible itself draws when only the human is made in God's image.

The second position holds that animals matter in their own right, not only because of what cruelty does to us. John Wesley preached a sermon on Romans 8:19-22, The General Deliverance (1781), arguing that animals share in the groaning of creation and will share in its release. C. S. Lewis wrote a chapter on animal pain in The Problem of Pain (1940) and an essay against cruel experiments on animals. The Anglican priest and theologian Andrew Linzey, in Christianity and the Rights of Animals (1987) and Animal Theology (1994), argued that because God created animals and cares for them, they have what he called theos-rights, claims on us that come from God's own regard for them. Christians in this line were behind the founding of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in London in 1824, among them the clergyman Arthur Broome and William Wilberforce. The strength of this view is that it takes Psalm 104, Jonah 4:11 and the Sabbath laws at their word: God's care for animals is direct.

The third position concerns diet. A minority of Christians have chosen not to eat meat, or have abstained from some meat. The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, told monks to abstain from the meat of four-footed animals except when sick. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has long encouraged a vegetarian diet, mainly for reasons of health. Linzey and others argue that the plant diet of Genesis 1:29-30 and the vision of Isaiah 11:6-9, where the wolf lives with the lamb, show God's first and last intention, and that the permission of Genesis 9:3 was a concession to a fallen world. The great majority of Christians, in every tradition, have answered that the permission of Genesis 9:3 is a real gift; that Jesus ate fish and the Passover lamb; that Mark 7:19 declares all foods clean; that Peter was told to 'kill and eat' (Acts 10:13); and that 1 Timothy 4:3-4 calls the forbidding of foods a false teaching, because 'every creation of God is good.' Paul's word in Romans 14:3 governs both: 'The one who eats everything must not belittle the one who does not.'

The live argument today is less about whether to eat meat than about how animals are raised. In much of the world, poultry, pigs and cattle are now kept in large indoor units where thousands of animals are confined in small spaces so that meat and eggs can be produced cheaply. The American writer Matthew Scully, a former presidential speechwriter writing from a Christian standpoint, in Dominion (2002) argued that much industrial farming is a form of cruelty Christians should oppose on the grounds of Proverbs 12:10, whatever their view of meat. Defenders reply that cheap protein has greatly reduced hunger and child malnutrition, that good modern farms can and often do meet strict welfare standards, and that the poor would pay most if food prices rose. Both sides are making moral arguments. The question a Christian must ask of any practice, small or large, is whether the people who keep the animals know the life of their animal, in the proverb's sense.

In many students' settings the question looks different again. Cattle may be a family's wealth, its savings, its bride price and its status. A donkey may be the family's only transport, and often the most overworked member of the household. Wild animals are hunted for meat and sometimes poached for ivory or horn by criminal networks. In recent years donkeys in several African countries were slaughtered in large numbers for their skins, which are exported to make a traditional medicine, and in 2024 the African Union agreed a moratorium on the trade. Proverbs 12:10 speaks to all of these. A righteous herder does not overload, starve or beat his animal, and a righteous church does not look away when its own members profit from cruelty.

When Israel entered Canaan the land was divided by tribe and clan and family, and each family's portion was its inheritance, meant to stay with it. The law said, 'The land must not be sold permanently, because it is Mine, and you are but foreigners and residents with Me' (Leviticus 25:23). A family that fell into debt could sell the use of its land for a time, but it had a right to redeem it, and in the year of Jubilee it returned (25:24-28). The aim was that no family would be permanently landless and no family would accumulate everyone else's fields. The Debt, Interest and Economic Life and Justice for the Poor lessons in this track treated the Jubilee and land rights as questions of economics and justice; here the point is theological. The land belongs to God, and human holding of it is a trust.

That is why the prophets treated land-grabbing as a grave sin. When King Ahab wanted Naboth's vineyard, Naboth refused: 'The LORD forbid that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers' (1 Kings 21:3). Jezebel had him falsely accused and killed, and Elijah pronounced judgment on the royal house. Isaiah cried, 'Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field until no place is left and you live alone in the land' (Isaiah 5:8). Micah condemned those who 'covet fields and seize them' (Micah 2:2). The law cursed anyone who moved a neighbour's boundary stone (Deuteronomy 27:17), and Proverbs warned against encroaching 'on the fields of the fatherless' (23:10). And Proverbs 13:23 notes how poverty often works: 'Abundant food is in the fallow ground of the poor, but without justice it is swept away.' The land could feed the poor; injustice takes it from them.

These texts are not distant for many students. Across much of Africa and Asia, widows are driven off their husband's land by his relatives after his death, often with the claim that a woman cannot inherit. Families lose ancestral land to powerful neighbours, officials or companies, sometimes by forged papers and sometimes by force. Governments sell or lease large areas of farmland to investors, and those who have farmed it for generations under customary rules find they have no written title. Christians should be clear that taking a widow's land is a sin the Bible names directly: God 'executes justice for the fatherless and widow' (Deuteronomy 10:18), and Isaiah says 'plead the case of the widow' (Isaiah 1:17). The daughters of Zelophehad, who asked Moses for their father's inheritance, were told by God, 'The daughters of Zelophehad speak correctly' (Numbers 27:7).

Christians disagree about the larger questions of land policy: whether land should be held mainly by individuals with secure private title, by communities under customary law, or by the state, and how past injustices of colonial seizure should be put right. Those who favour secure private title argue that it protects the poor from arbitrary seizure and lets them borrow and invest; those who favour customary or communal holding argue that it keeps land within families and communities and protects against a market in which the rich buy out the poor, which is closer to the logic of the Jubilee. Both appeal to Leviticus 25. Faithful Christians in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Brazil and elsewhere have argued for and against particular land reform programmes. The local church's first duty does not wait for that debate to be settled: to stand with the widow, the orphan and the family being cheated, to help them document what is theirs, and to refuse to let its own members profit from land taken unjustly.

Leviticus 25 commands that in the seventh year 'there shall be a Sabbath of complete rest for the land' (25:4). The farmer is not to sow or prune, nor harvest in the usual way, and what grows of itself is food for the household, the servants, the foreigner, 'and for your livestock and the wild animals in your land' (25:7). Exodus 23:11 gives the reason in another form: 'so that the poor among your people may eat from the field and the wild animals may consume what they leave.' The law knows the fear this will cause, and puts it into words: 'What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not sow or gather our produce?' (Leviticus 25:20). God's answer is a promise of a harvest in the sixth year sufficient for three years (25:21). The Sabbath year was a test of trust as well as a rule about soil.

Did Israel keep it? The evidence is mixed. Leviticus 26:34-35 warns that if Israel does not keep the land's Sabbaths, the land will have them while Israel is in exile, and 2 Chronicles 36:21 says that is what happened. After the exile, the Sabbath year was kept at least at times: 1 Maccabees 6:49 and 6:53, in a book that Catholic and Orthodox Christians count as scripture and Protestants read as history, record a shortage of food during a siege because it was a seventh year. The Jewish historian Josephus also mentions it. The rabbis later developed rules for the year, and the famous teacher Hillel introduced a legal device called the prosbul so that loans would not be cancelled in the seventh year, because people had stopped lending as the year approached. In the modern state of Israel the year, called shmita, is still observed in various ways by observant Jewish farmers.

Is the Sabbath year binding on Christians? The lesson The Law and the Love Command in this track set out how Christians relate to the Old Testament law, and the answers divide in the usual way. Most Christian traditions hold that the Sabbath year belonged to Israel's civil and ceremonial law for its life in the land, and does not bind Christian farmers as a rule. Some add that its deepest meaning is fulfilled in Christ, who brings the rest that remains 'for the people of God' (Hebrews 4:9), and who announced his ministry with words from Isaiah about the year of the Lord's favour (Luke 4:18-19). Others, such as Christopher Wright in Old Testament Ethics for the People of God (2004), read Israel's laws as a paradigm: not rules to copy, but a pattern that shows what God values and that should shape Christian practice in new forms. On that reading the Sabbath year still teaches that land needs rest, that the poor and the animals have a claim on the harvest, and that the farmer must trust God rather than squeeze every last thing from the soil.

Christian farmers in Africa have drawn on that pattern in practice. Foundations for Farming, which grew out of the work of the Zimbabwean farmer Brian Oldreive from the 1980s, teaches conservation farming: no burning of crop remains, little ploughing, a covering of mulch on the soil, careful timing and planting, and the conviction that good farming is an act of faithfulness to God. Similar teaching has spread through churches in many countries. Its supporters report better yields and healthier soil on small farms; agricultural researchers have found the results of conservation farming vary with soil, rainfall and labour, and that it works better in some places than others. A student does not have to settle those questions to see the principle at work. Leviticus 19:9-10 told farmers to leave the edges of their fields and the gleanings for the poor and the foreigner, as Ruth gleaned in Boaz's field. The Sabbath year and the gleaning laws together say that a farm is not only a business. It is a trust from God, held for the farmer's family, the poor, the animals and the generations to come.

Add a new page to your casebook. Choose one question about animals or land from your own setting. It might be the treatment of working donkeys or cattle in your area, a practice of keeping or killing animals that troubles you, poaching or bushmeat hunting, a widow or family who has lost land, a boundary dispute in your church, the sale of community land to an investor, or the way land is farmed so hard that the soil is failing. If you prefer, return to the creation case you opened in the previous lesson and add this lesson's questions to it.

Write four short paragraphs, as before. First, the facts: what is happening and what you do not yet know. Second, the people and the creatures: who gains, who loses, and what the animals or the land itself suffer. Describe people by their role, not their name. Third, scripture: which of this lesson's texts speak to the case, and whether they speak as rules, principles or patterns. Fourth, the positions: what Christians who disagree about this case would each say, at their strongest.

Then ask the question Proverbs 12:10 puts to every case: what would it mean here for a righteous person to know the life of the creature or the land in his care? Write one practical step that you, or your church, could take this month. If the case involves a widow or family being driven off their land, the step might be helping them gather documents or finding a lawyer or a legal aid service. If it involves animals, it might be teaching on Proverbs 12:10 or talking with those who work with animals. Keep the page; you will use it in the final lesson.