SHEEP and THE
BIBLE
Anonymous
(Investigator 112, 2007
January)
SHEEP – INTRODUCTION
Sheep are the
most-mentioned animal in the Bible. They were domesticated about 5000
B.C. from wild species that have since died out. The Bible says that
Abel, son of Adam and Eve, was a "breeder of sheep" (Genesis 4:3).
Since the oldest human fossils go back over 40,000 years it's possible
that the date for the domestication of sheep will eventually be
revised.
The 20th-century world had
about 450 breeds of sheep. Bardorff (1950) says: "The sheep likes dry
high-lying areas more than low-lying wet areas. Of middle European
plants it eats 237 types and rejects 141." (pp 319-320)
The sheep in the Bible were
mostly broad-tailed. They were important in the religious sacrifices of
Israel's religion and also supplied wool, skins, mutton, fat and milk.
In this species only the rams have horns but Palestine also had other
sheep varieties where both ewes and rams had horns. Horns were used as
trumpets and as containers for oil and wine. (Joshua 6:4; 1 Samuel
16:1).
In early Old Testament
times white sheep were a minority. Black sheep and spotted sheep
including white spots on black animals were the majority.
VOICE-RECOGNIZING SHEEP –
JESUS CORRECT
Jesus spoke of sheep
recognizing the shepherd's voice and responding to it but not to some
other voice:
…the sheep hear
his voice,
and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has
brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him,
for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will
flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers. (John
10:3-5)
A sectarian publication
reported:
A traveler to
the Holy Land
recently experienced the accuracy of those words. He reports: "We
wanted to film some sheep and tried to make them come near. But they
did not follow us because they did not know our voices. Then a small
shepherd boy came along; hardly had he called them when they followed
along. We recorded the shepherd's voice on a tape recorder and
afterwards played it. To our great surprise, now the sheep followed
even us!" (The Watchtower, July 15, 1975)
James Freeman (1972) writes:
Travelers have
noticed the
wonderful readiness with which the sheep of a large flock will
recognize the shepherd's voice. Though several flocks are mingled they
speedily separate at the command of the shepherd, while the word of a
stranger would have no effect on them. Porter thus describes a scene he
witnessed among the hills of Bashan: "The shepherds led their flocks
forth from the gates of the city. They were in full view, and we
watched them and listened to them with no little interest. Thousands of
sheep and goats were there, grouped in dense, confused masses. The
shepherds stood together until all came out. Then they separated, each
shepherd taking a different path, and uttering as he advanced a shrill,
peculiar call. The sheep heard them. At first the masses swayed and
moved as if shaken by some internal convulsions; then points struck out
in the direction taken by the shepherds; these became longer and longer
until the confused masses were resolved into long, living streams,
flowing after their leaders." – Giant Cities of Bashan, p. 45.
BEFORE OR AFTER?
In England shepherds went
behind their sheep whereas Jesus said, "He goes before them and the
sheep follow him".
However, customs and
procedures varied:
In our country
at this day,
shepherds generally follow their sheep, which go before him. In other
countries, as France, it is otherwise at this day; the shepherds go
before their flocks, and their flocks follow them, upon some sounds
they make. (Poole 1685)
In ancient Palestine both
methods operated. (Psalm 77:20; 80:1; Genesis 33:13)
What about Jesus' words "He
calls his own sheep by name"? This doesn't happen on large sheep
stations but it did when flocks were small. Smith's Bible Dictionary
says:
The following
quotation
from Hartley's Researches in Greece and the Levant, p. 321, is
strikingly illustrative of the allusions in John x.1-16: "Having had my
attention directed last night to the words in John x.3, I asked my man
if it was usual in Greece to give names to the sheep. He informed me it
was, and that the sheep obeyed the shepherd when he called them by
their names.
This morning I had an
opportunity of verifying the truth of this remark. Passing by a flock
of sheep I asked the shepherd the same question which I had put to the
servant, and he gave me the same answer. I then bade him call one of
the sheep. He did so, and it instantly left its pasturage and its
companions and ran up to the hands of the shepherd with signs of
pleasure and with a prompt obedience which I had never before observed
in any other animal. It is also true in this country that ‘a stranger
they will not follow, but will flee from him.'
The shepherd told me that
many of his sheep were still wild, that they had not yet learned their
names, but that by teaching them they would all learn them." (p. 631)
SHEEP LEAP TO DEATH
The Bible describes an
instance, often considered implausible, of a herd of pigs running off a
cliff. (Matthew 8:28-34)
The Sunday Mail
reported a
similar instance but of sheep:
ISTANBUL: A
flock of 1500
sheep have stunned Turkish shepherds by leaping off a 20m cliff,
according to the Aksam newspaper. About 45 sheep died but the
rest survived as the pile built up. The incident is believed to have
happened near the town of Gevas, in eastern Turkey. (July 10, 2005, p.
42)
If on rare occasions sheep
stampede off a cliff perhaps on rare occasions pigs do too!
WOLF AND LAMB
Jesus implied wolves are
dangerous to sheep. (John 10:10-14) Bardorff (1950) bears this out:
Sometimes the
wolf makes
livestock tending truly impossible. In this way an attempt to raise the
so-useful reindeer on the southern hills of Norway or contain them in
herds was thwarted by wolves. In ...1823 the authorities were notified
of
animals fallen prey to wolves: 15182 sheep, 1807 cattle, 1841 horses,
3270 sheep lambs and goats, 4190 pigs, 703 dogs and 1873 geese and
hens. (Bardorff 1950)
The book The Jerusalem
Biblical Zoo (c. 1980) says:
In Israel there
are still
wolves living wild, coming in from the north in winter or roaming the
desert, sometimes alone and sometimes in small packs. Such wild wolves
cannot be kept in cages or live in a zoo at all. (p. 55)
Yet the Bible describes
future peace using the illustration of a wolf dwelling with a lamb:
The wolf shall
dwell with
the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and
the lion together, and a little child shall lead them. (Isaiah 11:6-8;
65:25)
This is literally possible
if the predators are young:
The Jerusalem
Zoo has put
panthers and goats together with wolf-cubs and lambs in an enclosure
among the rocks. While panthers and wolf-cubs are still young, they can
safely be left with goats and lambs. As soon as their instincts come to
the fore, at the age of about eight months, they must be removed to
their own enclosures. (p. 70)
SHEEP & GOAT
BREEDING
MYSTERY
"Then Jacob
took fresh rods
of poplar and almond and plane, and peeled white streaks in them,
exposing the white of the rods. He set the rods which he had
peeled in front of the flocks in the runnels, that is, the watering
troughs, where the flocks came to drink. And since they bred when
they came to drink, the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and
spotted." (Gen. 30:37-39).
Kirk Straughen
(Investigator 63 p. 39) calls this "superstitious nonsense"
because: "the colour of a sheep's fleece is determined by the
genes it inherits from its parents, and no amount of rods, peeled or
otherwise, will effect the outcome."
Jacob had been a shepherd
for 20 years and would have understood flock genetics. Nevertheless
what actually happened is unclear. In Investigator
64 (p. 16) and 66
(p. 34) I gave five possible explanations including "We should not
entirely discount epigenesis – the environment of the parents
influencing
the inheritance of the offspring" and I cited Vines (1998).
Eight years have passed and
epigenetics is now a recognized branch of genetics.
For a century Mendel's laws
of inheritance underlay genetics and taught that the genes or DNA of
parents dictate the characteristics of the offspring. That's still true
but it's no longer the whole truth. Now, geneticists research
"epigenetic effects" which are environmental factors that affect gene
expression.
New Scientist, for
example,
describes how scientists bred brown-tailed mice and spotted tailed mice
and got unexpected results. (May 27, 2006, p. 16) Another breeding
experiment erased the usual effects of the mouse "agouti gene" – which
makes mice "ravenous and yellow and renders them prone to cancer and
diabetes" – by changing the female's diet. (Watters 2006)
Watters writes:
More and more,
researchers
are finding that an extra bit of vitamin, a brief exposure to a toxin,
even an added dose of mothering can tweak the epigenome – and thereby
alter the software of our genes – in ways that affect an individual's
body and brain for life. The even greater surprise
is the recent discovery that epigenetic signals from the environment
can be passed on from one generation to the next, sometimes for several
generations, without changing a single gene sequence. (p. 34)
These discoveries have not
yet been applied to Jacob's sheep and goats, but they do suggest that
more may be said in future.
REFERENCES:
Bardorff, W. 1950 Brehms
Tierleben, Safari-Verlag, Berlin
Freeman, J M 1972 Manners
and Customs of the Bible, Logos, p. 429
Poole, M. 1685/1963 A
Commentary on the Holy Bible, Volume 3, Banner of Truth Trust,
p. 331
Smith, W. 1967 Smith's
Bible Dictionary, Spire edition, pp 631-632
Vines, G Hidden
Inheritance, New Scientist,
28 November, 1998, pp 26-30
Watters, E. DNA Is Not
Destiny, Discover, November
2006, 33-37, 75.
SCIENCE and The BIBLE – Hundreds of Investigations: