Two rather easy to miss texts in our Old Testament, when understood in context, indicate divine care for the animals under our care. (Which does not include the squirrels who do not comprehend they are not to climb onto bird feeders or the rabbits who think our vegetable garden is fair “game,” but I wander from our point.) We are looking at Sandra Richter’s Stewards of Eden, and this book keeps getting better.

Two texts:

Deut. 5:14 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. 15 Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.

Deut. 25:4 You shall not muzzle an ox while it is treading out the grain.

In the first the great gift of God to Israel was the Sabbath, and is celebrated as such by observant Jews to this day, and that gift included giving one’s livestock (Black Sinai goats and Awassi sheep, along with bovine who mostly did the heavy work) a Sabbath as well. The second text permits the beast to eat while it works, and a beast eats plenty especially because it is working. Which means the farmer permits the beast to eat what the family will not.

Contextually, and she has a wonderful footnote explaining it all, Richter contends the average farming family (not along the coast or on the sea of Galilee) went foodless for an equivalent sixty days a year.

Image: Cover Photo

What about factory farming of animals? She knows her stuff here. 74.6 million pigs in the USA are in nothing less than total confinement and under total control and… and… and. Poultry, too: some for eggs, some for meat. 9.28 billion of the latter, 489 million of the former. Laying hens have 67 square inches of living space. A piece of paper. Genetically altered, too. A bird that lays in its own feces most of its life is what we eat.

We have an economy that has lost humane treatment of animals designed for food.

The whole business of slaughtering… yuck.

Good news: people know this and fight. Bad news: corporations win.

Consumerism.

Follow Sandy Richter on FB and you can read her hilarious stories about her chickens. In Santa Barbara CA, to boot.