Beschreibung
After more than a century of growth, zooarchaeology has begun to reach its full potential. Recent scholarly interest in zooarchaeological investigations has opened up multiple avenues of research that have led to a reassessment of the role of animals in ancient societies. Even with regard to Israel's history, more recent studies on the human-animal relationship have helped shed light on aspects of past human life, from social structure to economy, diet, ecology, ideology and religion. However, the growing interest in the material evidence unearthed by archaeology has not been matched by an equal interest on the part of biblical scholars in trying to understand, through texts, what the place of animals was in the socio-cultural context of biblical Israel. This paper investigates the social construction of animals that emerges from a critical analysis of the Hebrew Bible. In dialogue with zooarchaeological disciplines and through a hermeneutic perspective oriented to the social role of animals elaborated by human-animal studies, the study confronts the biblical text by investigating how it constructs animals in the different contexts that characterize it. Three central moments of the social construction of animals in the biblical text are considered: creation narratives, legal texts; and the sacrificial institution.
