Green Theology: The Messianic Peace with Wild Animals

Mark’s account of the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness following his baptism (Mark 1:13) falls into a different category from most of the material in the Gospels which we have studied so far, and for this reason has been left till last. In the first place, whereas we have so far been concerned for the most part with gospel traditions which we can be fairly sure preserve accurately the teaching of Jesus, it is much more difficult to assess the historical character of Mark 1:13. Even if Jesus did spend a period alone in the wilderness before the commencement of his public ministry, which is likely enough, many scholars would regard the details of Mark’s account of this as not so much a historical report, but more in the nature of an early Christian attempt to express the theological significance of Jesus and his messianic mission. So we shall here be content to understand the significance Mark and his readers would have seen in the statement that Jesus ‘was with the wild animals’, without attempting to decide the historical question. But secondly, Mark 1:13 differs from the other gospel material we have studied in that, whereas other references to animals are incidental, in the sense that they take for granted a well-established Jewish attitude to animals in order to make a point which is not primarily about animals, in Mark 1:13 the evangelist, as we shall see, understands Jesus’ mission as designed to make a difference to the human relationship with wild animals.

Mark 1:13 reads: Jesus ‘was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him’. The statement that Jesus was with the wild animals is a mere four words of the Greek text, but we should not be misled by its brevity into thinking it insignificant or merely incidental. In Mark’s concise account of Jesus in the wilderness no words are wasted. Each of the three clauses has its own significance.

Mark’s prologue (1:1–5), in which this verse occurs, presents Jesus as the messianic Son of God embarking on his mission to inaugurate the kingdom of God. Following his anointing with the Spirit at the baptism, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness (v. 12) for a task that evidently must be fulfilled before he can embark on his preaching of the kingdom (v. 14). The wilderness had gathered rich symbolic associations in Jewish tradition, but we should not be distracted by the symbolism it carries in the fuller Matthean and Lukan accounts of the temptation (Matt. 4:1–11; Luke 4:1–13). Nor should we describe Mark 1:13 as Mark’s temptation narrative: the testing by Satan is for Mark only the first of three encounters, all important. In Mark 1:13 the wilderness carries its most fundamental biblical and natural significance: it is the non-human sphere. In contrast to the cultivated land, where humans live with their domesticated animals, the wilderness was the world outside human control, uninhabitable by humans, feared as it threatened to encroach on the precarious fertility of the cultivated land and as the haunt of beings hostile to humans.[1] It was the natural home not only of the wild animals but also of the demonic.

Hence Jesus goes into the wilderness precisely to encounter the beings of the non-human world: he must establish his messianic relationship

to these before he can preach and practise the kingdom of God in the human world. Significantly, none of the three non-human beings he encounters in the wilderness – Satan, the wild animals, the angels – subsequently appear in Mark’s narrative of Jesus’ activity in the human world.

The order of the non-human beings in Mark 1:13 – Satan, the wild animals, the angels – is not accidental. Satan is the natural enemy of the righteous person and can only be resisted: Jesus in the wilderness wins the fundamental victory over satanic temptation which he can then carry through against the activity of Satan’s minions in the human world later in the Gospel (see especially Mark 3:27). The angels, on the other hand, are the natural friends of the righteous person: they minister to Jesus as they did to Elijah in the wilderness (1 Kgs. 19:5–8) and to Adam and Eve in paradise (b. Sanh. 59b). Between Satan and the angels the wild animals are more ambiguous: they are enemies of whom Jesus makes friends. This is the point that we shall shortly establish.

We must first ask: which animals are designated by the word theμria (‘wild animals’) in Mark 1:13? The word usually refers to wild animals

in distinction from animals owned by humans, and usually to fourfooted animals in distinction from birds, reptiles and fish, though snakes can be called theμria (e.g. Acts 28:4–5). However, the word can

also have the more limited sense of beasts of prey or animals dangerous

to humans. Though sometimes given by the context or an adjective, this sense of dangerous beast of prey seems quite often required by the word theμrion without further indication of it. This linguistic phenomenon corresponds to an ancient tendency, at least in the Jewish tradition, to consider wild animals primarily as threats to humanity, either directly threats to human life (e.g. Gen. 37:20,33; Lev. 26:6,22; 2 Kgs. 2:24; 17:25–6; Prov. 28:15; Jer. 5:6; Lam. 3:10–11; Ezek. 5:17; 14:15; 34:25,28; Hos. 13:7–8; Amos 5:19; Rev. 6:8) or, by attacks on flocks and herds, threats to human livelihood (Lev. 26:22; 1 Sam. 17:34–7; Hos. 2:12; Amos 3:12; John 10:12). The sense of wild animals as threatening belongs to the prevalent conceptualization of the world as conflict between the human world (human beings, their animals and their cultivated land) and wild nature. Not many wild animals (as distinct from birds and fish) were hunted for food in Jewish Palestine, and so interest in wild animals tended to be limited to those which were threats to humanity. Seeing these animals purely from the perspective of sporadic human contact with them can produce a distorted and exaggerated view of their enmity to humans, as can be seen in a remarkable passage of Philo of Alexandria (Praem. 85–90), who portrays wild animals, meaning the dangerous beasts of prey, as engaged in a continuous war against humans, constantly waiting the opportunity to attack their human victims. Alien and excluded from the human world, wild animals had human fears projected onto them. Of course, ancient peoples who perceived wild animals primarily as a threat did not notice that they themselves were also a threat to wild animals by steadily reducing their habitats as they extended the area of cultivated or deforested land.

The Jewish tradition, in the context of which Mark 1:13 should be read, saw the enmity of the wild animals as a distortion of the created relationship between humans and animals and the result of human sin.

In creation God established human dominion over the animals (Gen. 1:26,28; Ps. 8:6–8; Sir. 17:2–4; Wis. 9:2–3), which should have been peaceful and harmonious, but was subsequently disrupted by violence. The Noahic covenant (Gen. 9:1–7) takes account of the violence. But that humans should live in fear of animals should not be the case even by the terms of the Noahic covenant, which promises that animals shall go in fear of humans (Gen. 9:2). In fact, wild animals were perceived as menacing. Jewish literature therefore envisaged two ways in which the true relationship of humans and wild animals might be restored: one

individual, one eschatological. In the first place, it could be thought that

the truly righteous person should enjoy divine protection from wild animals as from other threats to human life: as Eliphaz told Job: ‘At destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the wild animals of the earth . . . [They] shall be at peace with you’ (Job 5:22–3). In later Jewish literature the idea is that the truly righteous person exercises the human dominion over the animals as it was first intended, as it was given at creation (b. Sanh. 38b; b. Shabb. 151b; Gen. Rab. 8:12).[2]

Secondly, Jewish eschatological expectation included the hope that the righting of all wrongs in the messianic age would bring peace between wild animals and humans. The classic scriptural expression of this hope is Isaiah 11:6–9:

The wolf shall live with the lamb,

the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

and a little child shall lead them.

The cow and the bear shall graze,

their young shall lie down together;

and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.

They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain;

for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD,

as the waters cover the sea.

This has often been misunderstood by modern readers as a picture simply of peace between animals. In fact, it depicts peace between the

human world, with its domesticated animals (lamb, kid, calf, bullock,

cow), and the wild animals (wolf, leopard, lion, bear, poisonous snakes) that were normally perceived as threats both to human livelihood (dependent on domestic animals) and to human life. Peace between all animals is certainly implied, both in the fact that the bear and the lion become vegetarian (11:7) and the snakes harmless (11:8), and also in the cessation of all harm and destruction (11:9), which must mean also that humans are to be vegetarian. The picture is of a restoration of paradise (‘my holy mountain’ is Eden, as in Ezek. 28:13–14) and the original vegetarianism of all living creatures (Gen. 1:29–30), but it is presented from the perspective of ancient people’s sense of threat from dangerous wild animals. That threat is to be removed, the enmity between humans and wild animals healed. Later Jewish literature, down to the New Testament period, continued the same expectation, primarily inspired by Isaiah 11:6–9 (see Isa. 65:25; Sib. Or. 3:788–95; Philo. Praem. 87–90; 2 Bar. 73:6). In such passages, the dominant notion is that the original, paradisal situation, in which humans and wild animals lived in peace and harmony, will be restored in the messianic age.

We need not limit the wild animals (theμria) of Mark 1:13 to the somewhat dangerous animals that might be encountered in the wilderness of Judea: bears, leopards, wolves, poisonous snakes (cobras, desert vipers and others), scorpions. The word does not prohibit well-informed readers from thinking also of other animals: hyenas, jackals, caracals (the desert lynx), desert foxes, Fennec foxes, wild boars, wild asses (the onager and the Syrian wild ass), antelopes (the desert oryx and the addax), gazelles, wild goats (the Nubian ibex), porcupines, hares, Syrian hyraxes, and so on.[3] But both the word usage and the habits of thought that went with it would be likely to bring especially the dangerous animals to mind.

Mark’s simple but effective phrase indicates Jesus’ peaceable presence

with them. The expression ‘to be with someone’ (Greek einai meta tinos) frequently has the strongly positive sense of close association or friendship or agreement or assistance (e.g. Matt. 12:30; 26:69,71; 28:20; Luke 22:59; John 3:2; 8:29; 15:27; 16:32; 17:24; Acts 7:9; 10:38; 18:10; Rom. 15:33), and in Mark’s own usage elsewhere in his

Gospel, the idea of close, friendly association predominates (3:14; 5:18; 14:67; cf. 4:36). Mark 1:13 depicts Jesus enjoying the peaceable harmony with wild animals which had been God’s original intention for humanity but which is usually disrupted by the threat of violence.

Apart from the context, we might class Jesus, in terms of the Jewish

traditions we have outlined, simply as the individual righteous person

who is at peace with the wild animals. But Jesus in Mark’s prologue is no mere individual. Just as he resists Satan, not as merely an individual righteous person, but as the messianic Son of God on behalf of and for the sake of others, so he establishes, representatively, the messianic peace with wild animals. He does so only representatively, in his own person, and so the objection that a restoration of paradise should not be located in the wilderness is beside the point.

More to the point is that all the wild animals of Isaiah 11 would be most easily encountered in the wilderness. Jesus does not restore the paradisal state as such, but he sets the messianic precedent for it. If Mark’s phrase (‘with the wild animals’), indicating a friendly companionship with the animals, would certainly evoke, for his original readers, the Jewish expectation of the age of messianic salvation, it also contrasts with some aspects of the way the restoration of the proper human relationship to wild animals was sometimes portrayed in the Jewish literature. There the animals are portrayed as fearing humans (a reversal of the present situation of human fear of the animals  and no doubt thought to be the proper attitude of respect for their human rulers: T. Naph. 8:4; T. Benj. 5:2; Philo, Praem. 89; cf. Sir.

17:4; Ap. Mos. 10:3; Gen. Rab. 34:12) and the expectation is that they

will serve humans (2 Bar. 73:6). In other words, they too will become domestic animals. The human dominion over them is conceived as domination for human benefit. Such ideas of the ideal human relationship to the wild animals as one of lordship over subjects or domestic servants did continue in Christianity, but they are very notably absent from Mark 1:13. Mark says nothing of that sort at all. Jesus does not terrorize or dominate the wild animals, he does not domesticate or even make pets of them. He is simply ‘with them’.

The context to which Mark 1:13 originally spoke was one in which wild animals threatened humanity and their wilderness threatened to encroach on the human world. The messianic peace with wild animals promised, by healing the alienation and enmity between humans and animals, to liberate humans from that threat. Christians who read Mark 1:13 today do so in a very different context, one in which it is now clearly we who threaten the survival of wild animals, encroach on their habitat, threaten to turn their wilderness into a wasteland they cannot inhabit. To make the point one need only notice how many of the animals Jesus could have encountered in the Judean wilderness have become extinct in Palestine during the past century:

the bear, the onager, the desert oryx, the addax, the ostrich and no doubt others. Others, such as the leopard and the gazelle, would not have survived without modern conservation measures. But Mark’s image of Jesus’ peaceable companionship with the animals in the wilderness can survive this reversal of situation. Its pregnant simplicity gains a new power for modern Christians in a world of ecological destruction. For us Jesus’ companionable presence with the wild animals affirms their independent value for themselves and for God. He does not adopt them into the human world, but lets them be themselves in peace, leaving them their wilderness, affirming them as creatures who share the world with us in the community of God’s creation. Mark’s image of Jesus with the animals provides a christological warrant for and a biblical symbol of the human possibility of living fraternally with other living creatures, a possibility given by God in creation and given back in messianic redemption. Like all aspects of Jesus’ inauguration of the kingdom of God, its fullness will be realized only in the eschatological future, but it can be significantly anticipated in the present.

 

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[1] Johannes Pedersen, Israel: Its Life and Culture (trans. A. Moller; London: OUP/Copenhagen: Pio/Povl Branner, 1926), pp. 454–60; Williams, Wilderness, pp. 12–13.

[2] Cf. Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’, pp. 87, 100–1, 103, where additional references are given. See also T. Naph. 8:4, 6; T. Iss. 7:7; T. Benj. 3:4–5; 5:2.

[3] For this (not exhaustive) list of animals to be found in such areas of Palestine, I am indebted to Henry Baker Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible (London: SPCK, 1911); Friedrich Simon Bodenheimer, Animal Life in Palestine (Jerusalem: L. Mayer, 1935); George Cansdale, Animals of Bible Lands (Exeter: Paternoster, 1970). Some Old Testament passages are informative as to the animals generally associated with the desert: Deut. 8:15; Job 24:5; 39:6–8; Isa. 13:21–2; 32:14; 34:11–15; Jer. 2:24; 5:6; 10:22; Zeph. 2:14–15; Mal. 1:8.