I get why people would be indifferent to shepherds but why would they revile them?
The hero in Predator is called Alan “Dutch” Schaefer. “Schaefer” meaning “shepherd”.
There is no such thing as unwelcome Predator trivia.
Shepherding may have worked well symbolically because shepherds are somewhat outside society, they “err in the wilderness” a lot. It also isn’t difficult to see the analogy between the shepherd leading and protecting his flock and the deity/prophet/priest leading and protecting his flock.
Shepherding can also be extremely nice in terms of food: You have animals go over lands with low quality food like grass and they transform it into high-quality food like meat or even better, liquid meat in the form of milk. You can consume that liquid meat everyday without killing the goose.
It’s likely that humans transitioned from hunting & gathering to farming by way of shepherding. Getting sedentary farming started poses the problem that early farmers had little knowledge of farming and would have had to wait months before the harvest. How do you survive in the meantime? Shepherding gives access to food in short order, it allows you to accumulate lots of energy reserves while staying mobile and it resembles hunting in that you move to an area, deplete it then move on to the next area except that the animals are much easier to get than with hunting, especially after having bred for docility. Thinking about it, shepherding must have been the earliest time that a human could become prosperous and feel that their future was (kinda) secure.
If you look at the year animals were domesticated, you find dogs first (presumably for hunting at first), then the goat, pig, sheep, cattle and zebu*. With the exception of the pig, those are shepherding species (can you shepherd pigs?). Later came cats and chickens which would only be useful for farming.
Most of the game in Israel would have been, surely? Why else specifically list as clean gazelles and other antelope, deer and wild sheep (or whatever zemer is), if Jews weren’t going to be eating them. Of course, you’d have to trap the animals and then cleanly slaughter them, but that still counts as hunting.
One theory is that they thought they were unclean - Egyptians were kind of OTT about hygiene, and wore linen, not wool. The Asiatics and Hebrews and Assyrians, the sheepherders they were in contact with, wore mostly wool, and leather. Wool can be a bit smelly.
Asiatics are also depicted as full-bearded and with longer hair than the Egyptians (who often went as far as removing all body hair anyway). So to the Egyptians, they may have appeared as mobile louse factories…
One thing I think people are missing out on, that I briefly touched on - the primary reason to keep sheep was probably not mutton, it was wool. Wool was one of their main textiles. So arguments around the eating of sheep miss the main point of sheepherding.
You know, you’re right - gazelles, deer and ibexes, are of which wee common here, are kosher (wild boards and hyraxes, obviously, are not). Still, the ancient Israelites had a low opinion of hunters*, and the only hunters mentioned in the Bible, Esau and Nimrod, are not particularly positive figures. Judaism also forbids hunting for sport, which is considered animal cruelty.
- As do modern Israelis. It’s harder to get a hunting license in Israel than it is to get a pilot’s license.
Way removed from the ancient Near East; but I’ve read that in England, anyway up into the early twentieth century: often on mixed farms which included the keeping of some sheep, the (head) shepherd was reckoned a uniquely respect-worthy figure among the farm’s employees; even a farmer who was on the whole a tyrant to his workers, would use considerable tact and circumspection in dealing with “Shepherd”. (ISTR a tenuous theory from this source, about this respectful attitude coming from vague Scripture-related notions.)
That’s probably more like not pissing off the shop steward.
Could well be – with a nebulous semi-religious justification to make it seem higher and more noble…
Dogs were way way way earlier (like tens of thousands of years) than the others. Their first use was not hunting, but garbage disposal (symbiosis).
Male people seem to put a lot of emphasis on hunting and its successor, shepherding, in their historical food analyses, but over all, seeds, grains, roots, and fruits, which were ‘managed’ for thousands of years before they were more literally farmed, were far more important in the diet.
In all cultures, whatever men do is seen as important and noble and what women do is lesser. So maybe it is about women being the farmers and farming being seen as effeminate when taken up by men.
ps: you can herd pigs. Hence the word swineherd.
What about animal sacrifices and so on? I know they’re a biggie in the Old Testament (much more value than the flour) and God loves him the scent of burning animals. I do not know the practice of the other religions - did they have the same set up, with high value on tasty animals (after all, most weren’t entirely burnt in OT, but eaten by priests). It’s sort of chicken and egg on that leading to high value (in story terms, if not reality) on herders over farmers.
They seemed to have a higher opinion of fisherman. There are lots of references to fishing in the Bible. But I have to ask again, what circumstances exactly led to the idea that it was OK to fish, and eat the fish without any Kosher method of slaughter, but not land-going animals? Has this even been debated by Rabbis? Were they just like, “fuck the fish, they’re not really animals the way cows are animals, so it doesn’t matter” or was there any debate over how to deal with the fish once it is removed from the water? Is there some kind of blessing or any other religious ritual performed with the fish, or do they just not care?
My impression, as a gentile, is that Rabbis have debated everything.
Talmudic Judaism is not the same as Pre-rabbinical Judaism. In Pre-rabbinical Judaism, it seems that hunting was permissable. Levitical law even allows it specifically (Lev. 17:13) Talmudic Judaism reinterpreted this somewhere in the late Middle Ages. Why is a good question. It’s framed as an animal rights issue in the Yoreh Deah, but there’s probably more going on there if you’ll let me conjecture.
Since the Yoreh Deah is really where the anti-hunting stance comes from, I think we need to look at what was happening when it was written. It was written in Toledo, Spain ca. 1300. This is a time of upheaval for Spanish Jewry. In 1212, the Almohads were essentially evicted from much of Spain and Jews were brought under the realm of Christendom. Some Muslim caliphates were very tolerant of Jews, but unfortunately, the Almohads were not one of them. There was fairly intense persecution of Jews throughout Spain under Almohad rule. The Christian rulers on the other hand weren’t quite as bad (yet) Religious sentiment had turned against Jews by 1200 or so, but in 1212 when Crusaders began looting and murdering Jews in Toledo, Alfonso VIII sent in troops to protect them (Alfonso VIII might have also had an affair with a Jewish woman, though this might have been a later addition to his story to explain why he gave Jews prominence in his kingdom and as a way to reconcile the persecutions of the 14th century with earlier tolerance.) By 1250, Jews had become indispensable to the nobility and royals of Spain. A famous episode called the Disputation of Barcelona in the 1260s saw a Jewish rabbi completely dismantle Christian arguments on the divinity of Christ and the King (James I, maybe?) rewarded the rabbi with a great deal of gold for his clever debate.
At the same time, Jewish wealth is growing out of step with their Christian neighbors and the church is beginning to take notice. In 1250, the Pope issues a bull forbidding Jews from building synagogues or associating with Christians. So we see that by 1300, Jews are in a tight spot. The nobility generally likes them if for no other reason than they are the bankrollers, while the clergy and the common people increasingly do not (loans of 25% interest tend to do that to you-the nobility doesn’t care about the interest as much since they just jack taxes on the Jewish lenders to recoup the exorbitant rates. Common people needing loans are stuck with the outrageous terms. So it goes.) The Yoreh Deah is conceived in this tension filled world.
We know that hunting within medieval Spain is seen as the purview of the very rich or the very poor. Subsistence rural people hunt for food and the nobility and other wealthy people hunt for sport. My conjecture is that sport hunting was forbidden to Jews to maintain their uneasy balance point. The poor would have resented Jewish hunting because it impacted the game that they used for food. The nobility might have resented it because it both killed their game and it elevated Jews to their social status. Neither would have served Jewish purposes of keeping the nobility on their side while at the same time not antagonizing the common people. Of course, this is just my conjecture and might be completely wrong and maybe Toledo Jews were just animal rights nuts, who knows? I do think it’s a reasonable guess though.
Senoy, thank you for your comments - you really seem to know what you’re talking about, and any sources you have on ancient Near East culture would be very appreciated.
To everyone else: thank you! You’ve all helped me think about this in ways that may not have occurred.
Arkon: I actually own Isaac Asimov’s critique! I just haven’t made my way all the way through it yet…and am not entirely convinced it’s without motive. I have heard the hunter-gatherer = easy, good, and farmer = hard work, bad, before though. And the idea that alcohol was our reason for settling down to farm, rather than hunt-gather! I simply don’t feel in a position to judge these properly.
Try looking up Marc Van De Mieroop. He’s a professor at Columbia who specializes in the Ancient Near East. He has a couple of survey books that are decent overviews.
If you have JSTOR, the Journal of Near Eastern Studies is top notch.
Cite, on the first use of dogs?
It is hypothesized but obviously not proven, that wolves first came into non-hostile contact with humans via seeking out human trash for food. However, that constitutes no use (as you hint at), especially by the mobile hunter-gatherers who did the domestication. Dogs did prove immensely useful as hunting companions, and also, even before much advantageous genetic change, effective alarm systems, which would have been very useful to said hunter-gatherers.