Palaces of Ivory or Teeth (Ps 45.9): Carol Adams’s Absent Referent and Ecological Translation of the Psalms

Abstract

In The Sexual Politics of Meat, Carol Adams develops a feminist-vegetarian theory of the absent referent. She argues that cultural imagery and semantics function to make moral consideration of the animal absent from the act of eating meat. For instance, the use of the word “meat” for nonhuman animals and “flesh” for humans helps humans deny that meat is the flesh of another sentient being that can suffer like humans and wants to live. When translators of the Hebrew Bible use “ivory” for Hebrew shen in Ps 45.8(9) rather than “teeth,” this makes the elephants who provided their tusks the absent referent and makes human identification with the suffering of those elephants less likely. This paper argues that translators need to understand absent referents in English in order to translate the book of Psalms adequately and ecologically.