The Bible and the Domestication of the World

Abstract

Abstract Written in an agricultural context oriented around life and work with domesticated animals, the Bible’s texts, from Genesis 1 onward, endorse a picture of human destiny to farm the land and dominate other living beings. In doing so, the Bible contrasts with the cosmologies of low-domesticating indigenous cultures in privileging domesticating and domestication-like modes of relationship between sentient beings. This is not limited to the Bible’s picture of inter-species human relationships. Rather the paradigm of human domination of other beings is analogous to domestication-like relationships between genders, ethnicities and others that are naturalized in subsequent Biblical and post-Biblical texts. We even see a reflection of domesticating assumptions in the picture, across both Testaments of the Christian Bible, of God as a domesticator-like figure and God’s people as a flock that God protects and requires obedience and sacrifice from.