ANIMALS AND THE FOURTH COMMANDMENT

Remember the Sabbath day, and keep it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work.  But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work -- you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.  For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the Sabbath day and consecrated it.

                                                                    ~ Exodus 20: 8-11

            The Fourth Commandment is one of several places in Scripture where we are expressly told that we have obligations to animals – in particular the animals who work for us and who become our food – yet few people are aware that the Sabbath command has anything to do with animals.  This is particularly significant, for this commandment is a pivotal point of the Ten Commandments, bridging the distance between the first three, which are directed to loving God, and the last 6, which are directed to loving neighbor.  It brings us back to the creation story and the place of humankind in it; it encompasses worship, law, trust in God, justice, compassion, mercy, and life lived in the image of God.  The presence of animals here signifies their importance in all of these themes.  In this season of Lent, it seems appropriate to consider how we keep –or fall short of – this commandment. 

Tissot, Moses and the Ten Commandments

         
   Unlike many of the Commandments, this one begins not with a prohibition, but with a call to affirmative action - a call to “remember,” and to set apart (keep holy) one day a week for rest.[1]  Also unlike many of the Commandments, which are addressed to a householding male, this one expressly includes children (male and female), slaves (male and female), outsiders, and animals.  Everyone is called to rest and remember, not just those with power, not just Israelites, and not just humans.  These two elements suggest both that keeping Sabbath is a call to reflection, not a burden or restraint, and that keeping Sabbath is central not just to a life of faith, but to life itself.  As Walter Brueggemann explains, “The implicit act of equalization in sabbath witnesses to the intention of the creator that creation should be a community of well-being, in which all creatures stand together, equally and in shared rest.”[2] Underscoring the fundamental need for Sabbath for all of creation, the Fourth Commandment is grounded in God’s very act of creation: “For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the Sabbath day and consecrated it.”[3]        

This same verse underscores the practice of sabbath as part and parcel of living life reflective of God.[4]  We are to rest because God rested.  Moreover, as we rest in God, we come to know and trust God all the more, allowing us to conform our life more closely to His will. We are also to “remember.”  We are to remember in particular that we “were slaves in Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”[5]  Thus, this commandment is deeply connected to a call to justice, compassion, and mercy that includes children, slaves, and the animals - all the powerless over whom we have dominion.  Terrence Fretheim argues that the tie to creation and the call to justice are one and the same because “the exodus liberation is aimed at the full restoration of peaceable creation.”[6] 

            Pointing to God’s rest on the seventh day, Fretheim calls Sabbath observation “a religious act with cosmic implications.”[7]  It is God’s resting, he explains, that “builds into the very created order of things a working/resting rhythm.  Only when that rhythm is honored by all is the creation what God intended it to be.”[8]  So significant is this, in fact, that “[n]ot keeping Sabbath is a violation of the created order; it returns one aspect of that order to chaos.”[9] 

            In today’s world, this can seem a little dire.  Generally, we “honor” the Sabbath most often in the breach. In our always busy lives, the idea of stopping for a full day when the kids have soccer practice, the shopping needs to be done, the house needs cleaning, dinner needs to be made (or brought home), work e-mails need attention, and deadlines are fast approaching, seems both impossible and unwelcome.  We read Fretheim’s warning that “the order of creation is at stake” with a modern eye, always alert to hyperbole.  Where is there time to “remember” the Sabbath in a world with so much to do? 

Hans Baldung Grien, The Fourth Commandment

            And yet it is this very drive forward that, if we will but stop long enough to notice, tells us that Fretheim might just be right.  When we believe that we cannot stop doing, achieving, and accumulating, we are seeking to take control of our lives away from God.  And, if we do not stop our busy-ness long enough to rest in God, we will never know how to trust Him or to recognize the gifts He has already given us.  And that, surely, is an intrusion of chaos into our lives, supplanting the created order of God. 

            But what about those who cannot stop for a Sabbath?  Here is where the heart of this commandment lies.  Miller points out that the reason those without power - children, slaves, aliens in the land - are specifically included in the Commandment is because they cannot take rest unless those with power allow them to do so.[10]  This Commandment requires those with power to remember those without - for the sake of justice, compassion, and mercy - and to order their own lives such that those who serve may also rest in God.[11]  The call for the Jews to remember that they, too, were once powerless, is a call not only to worship the power of God, but to emulate Him in compassion.  Here, the Sabbath command points forward to all the scriptural teachings on the right use of power and resources.

            Nowhere is this more true than in our relations with animals.  Animals are utterly in our power - under our dominion - and when we exercise that dominion without regard for our common creaturely-ness and without regard for their place in God’s ordering of creation, they are helpless to stop us.  They depend on our mercy and on our ability to hear the word of God, just as the Israelites depended on God’s mercy and His ability to hear the cries of the slaves.  But we have stopped our ears.

            When dairy cows are bred as often as possible, when their babies are taken away from them almost immediately (over their clear protest), when they are milked literally to the point of physical collapse and then shoved to their slaughter with construction equipment because they cannot walk, there is no Sabbath for the animals.[12]  When sows are moved from gestation crates so small they cannot turn around to breeding crates that are barely larger and then back to gestation crates as soon as possible, becoming so frustrated at their inability to move they break their own legs (which go untreated) in an effort to turn around, when they scream in terror at the sight of humans, there is no Sabbath for the animals.  When female dogs are bred every cycle and their feet never touch solid ground and their fur never knows a kind touch, and when, after they are spent, they are taken out back and shot, there is no Sabbath for the animals.  When sharks are hunted for fins at a rate of roughly 70 million every year, and when they are caught, have their fins cut off, and are tossed back into the ocean to bleed to death or drown, there is no Sabbath for the animals.  When baby seals are bashed over the head and skinned - sometimes while still alive - while their mothers watch helplessly, there is no Sabbath for the animals. 

            Undoubtedly, this is cruelty, but is it really Sabbath-breaking?  Is it the in-breaking of chaos?  It is clearly Sabbath-breaking, since the command requires us to allow animals to rest.  Moreover, when we consider the cost of our abuse of animals, the connection to chaos is clear.  The extinction of species due to our relentless drive to hunt and expand our own habitat without regard to other creatures, the water pollution that results from vast waste lagoons associated with factory farms, the massive quantities of greenhouse gases that result from animal agriculture, the clear cutting of rain forests to make room for cattle to graze, and the diversion of water and land resources to grow grain for animals raised for food instead of grain for humans in need, all point to a dire threat to the created order.   

            Miller points out that the Sabbath command is among the most difficult to keep because it “is constantly undercut by the power of economic and personal desire.”[13] Again, in no arena is this more true than in our treatment of animals.  Animals in many settings are profit centers  - and treated as nothing more.  Animals raised for food please our palates. Animals raised for fur, and purebred dogs in the most fashionable breeds, feed our vanity.  Animals hand raised then put in pens for “canned hunts” with a guaranteed kill, gratify our lust for power.  When we, as Christians, economically support these systems by, for example, purchasing factory farmed food or getting the family pet from the internet or a pet store (which almost certainly means it came from a puppy mill), or failing to speak out for (at least) minimal ethical standards for hunting and trapping, we are breaking the Fourth Commandment.

            Addressing the particular unending cruelty of factory farms and other methods of mass food production, Norman Wirzba argues that if we would but pay attention, “we would quickly discover that our food industry bears all the marks of an anti-Sabbath mentality:  sacrilege and ingratitude, obsessive control and profiteering, insensitivity and destruction.”[14]

            The Fourth Commandment directs us to look to both God and our neighbor, intertwining our relationships with God and others, expressly including animals.  It calls us to remember God’s work of creation, in which the whole created order lived in harmony, and His work of justice and liberation in bringing the powerless out of Egypt.  That memory is to serve as the basis for compassionate and merciful treatment of the whole of creation.  Charles Patterson, in his book Eternal Treblinka, examines the connections between animal cruelty and the Holocaust.  In it, he gives numerous examples of Holocaust survivors who became energetic advocates for animal welfare after the war.  They did so because they “remembered” what it was to be powerless; what it was, if you will, to be “treated like an animal.”[15]  It might be said that they remembered that they were slaves in Egypt.  This is the kind of remembering we are called to by the Fourth Commandment, it is a remembering that requires us to strive to live into the image of God and to work for the restoration of God’s creation and for the peaceable kingdom.    

Mike Garratt, Sleepy Heads, Morning Sun

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[1] The prohibiting element of the commandment - “you shall not do any work” - comes as an explanation for how to remember and keep holy the day. 

[2] Brueggemann, Walter. "The Book of Exodus" in New Interpreter's Bible. Nashville: Abbingdon Press, 1994, p. 845 (emphasis added). 

[3] Ex. 20:11.

[4] Neusner, Jacob; Chilton, Bruce D.; and Levine, Baruch A. Torah Revealed, Torah Fulfilled: Scritpural Laws in Formative Judaism and Earliest Christianity. New York: T&T Clark, 2008, p. 83.

[5] Deut. 5:15. The same idea is expressed in the introductory verses of the Ten Commandments are reported in Exodus: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the house of Egypt.” Exodus 20:1-2.

[6] Brueggemann, p. 845, referencing Freitheim, Exodus, and Freitheim, “The plagues as Ecological Signs of Historical Disaster,” JBL, 110 (1991) 385-96. 

[7] Fretheim, Terence E. Exodus Interpretation Series. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1991, p. 229.

[8] Fretheim, p. 230.

[9] Fretheim, p. 230.

[10] Miller, Patrick D. The Ten Commandments Interpretation Series. Louisville: John Knox Press, 2009, p. 130.

[11] Miller, p. 134.

[12] http://www.humanesociety.org/video/ , Beef Recall video (accessed January 6, 2011).  Other videos addressing similar topics are available at this same site. See generally, www.humanesociety.org and www.farmsanctuary.org for information on the various issues raised in this paragraph.

[13] Miller, p. 154

[14] Wirzba, Norman. Living the Sabbath: Discovering the Rhytms of Rest and Delight. The Christian Practice of Everyday Life Series. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006, pp. 24-26.

[15] Patterson, Charles. Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust. New York: Lantern Books, 2002, pp. 139-229.