| Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 1: The Shared Spirit of Men and Beasts
by Jonathon White
Theopolis
October, 2025
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"Scripture is absolutely dripping with animal metaphors. Animal traits, characteristics, and appearances are attributed to God, Man, Angels, Nations, Armies. Since animals are the lowest creature in the three-tiered hierarchy, they are useful to metaphorically focus on a single aspect of God (bold like a lion) or the effects of an army (stripping the land bare like locusts)...."
"The fact that Man is the image of God can sometimes incentivize an overly sharp ontological distinction between Man and Beast. But both classes of creature live and move and have their being in the Lord in much the same way. What the exact ontological difference between man and animal actually is, is not the purpose of this paper, though I will address it briefly. But first it is necessary to lay out the scriptural case for an equivalence between Animal and Man in the Soul/Spirit department. We will begin with the Hebrew word “ruach.”
I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts. For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity. All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:18–21, ESV) [ruach]
All three highlighted words are Strong’s 7307 ruach, frequently rendered “breath” or “spirit.” Despite the use of the 2nd and 3rd instances of “ruach” above to pose unanswerable questions, Solomon’s first use (translated breath, likely due to the squeamish theological sensibilities of the translators) declares in no uncertain terms, that the “essence” of the spirit in both man and animal is the same. So, now we would need to inquire, where did man and beast receive this spirit? Ruach first appears in Genesis 1:2 as the very “Spirit” of God. In other words, this Ecclesiastes passage seems to indicate that all animate beings “live and move and have their being” in God and are quickened by a donated exhalation of divine breath or spirit...."
"Far from being a counter-example of my thesis, God’s respiration of “nephesh” into Adam actually provides further linguistic equivalency between man and animal:
Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. (Genesis 9:3–6) [nephesh]
There are a number of interesting things going on in this passage. First, if you pay close attention, you’ll notice that a careless reader could come away thinking that the passage sanctions cannibalism. The opening presents to man “every moving thing that lives” as food. Taken literally, this category would include fellow humans...."
"In Genesis’ account of Noah’s flood, God counts the bulk of animals as worthy of destruction along with the bulk of humanity; likewise, He also counts a remnant of animals as worthy of salvation from the waters along with Noah’s family. In this instance, God deals similarly with both kinds of “flesh,” animal and human...."
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Related Material:
Covenant Population and the Animals on YouTube by Tim Martin
Romans 1: Biblical Bestiality on Youtube by Zach Davis
The Jews' Unjust Judgment of Gentiles on YouTube by Zach Davis
Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 2: The Animalistic Dehumanization of Sin
by Jonathon White
Theopolis
October, 2025
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James Jordan speculates that in the primordial garden, the Serpent may have been assigned a catechetical role to the infant couple. In this view that old dragon, the Serpent Satan, was meant to instruct the first couple in proper order and disposition of the garden...
The bestiality of sin is the same perversion that would lead a serpent to think he could rule over God’s divine image on earth. Sin is more than a mere reversion to the animalistic, but it is not less than that. The Bible describes sin itself as a kind of animal, just like Satan who prowls like a lion seeking whom he may devour. As Cain contemplates committing the first murder, God warns him “sin is crouching at the door” and “its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” The word “crouching” (Strong’s 7257 rabats) conjures the image of a four-legged animal, lowering its body to the cursed ground, gathering itself to pounce. Up to this point in Genesis we have only seen one particular animal, the serpent, and when we last saw him, he too was crouched in the cursèd dust. It was prophesied that from that lowly position he would spring and strike at the seed of the woman. And the serpent does not wait long. He pounces upon Cain, Adam and Eve’s firstborn, striking the first blow in a war that has been raging ever since...
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Biblical Bestiary and Covenant Creatures, Part 3: Renion of Man and Beast in Christ
by Jonathon White
Theopolis
October, 2025
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Eve’s belated presentation as the final work of God’s glorious creation does more than just heighten Adam’s anticipation for his wife, it also casts Eve, the Bride, as a kind of eschaton of the first creation. Eve parallels the Bride of Christ to be revealed in Revelation, who descends as the New Jerusalem, uniting the New Heavens and New Earth (Rev. 21:2). Christ, like Adam, requires a Bride drawn from his own side, capable of a one-flesh reunion. That reunion only comes after the whore of Babylon is first past the mind’s eye of the reader, reminding us what an unfit bride looks like, much like Adam was shown the animals before Eve. Ironically, though, Eve’s sin causes her to serve as the first biblical example of spiritual harlotry. Genesis 3 gives no indication of physical congress between Eve and the Serpent, but in the moment she chooses to follow the serpent’s lead instead of her husband’s she becomes the archetype of all of Israel’s future spiritual dalliances. Ezekiel 16 and Jeremiah 2 present dramatizations of the true nature of Israel’s idolatry: bestial adultery....
[See Related Material on Ezekiel 16 by Tim Martin: "Clothed by God: A New Paradigm of Child-Rearing in the Kindom" on Youtube]
By the time of Jeremiah and Eziekiel, adultery was already the established analogue to idolatry, however these passages intensify the metaphor by painting habitual idolatry as the even more heinous sin of fornication with animal lovers. It is in this sense that Leviticus 18:23 can be interpreted more broadly, “You shall not lie with any animal and so make yourself unclean with it, neither shall any woman give herself to an animal to lie with it: it is perversion.” Just as Paul interprets Deuteronomy 25:4’s prohibition from muzzling an ox while it treads out grain to be talking about ministers (1 Tim. 5:18 and 1 Cor. 9:9), so we have cause to see that Leviticus 18:23 is more fully a warning to Israel and the Church to avoid the descent into idolatry, which is spiritual bestiality. Sadly, Israel did not heed this warning. Again and again she turned to her idols and refused to obey the stern but loving warnings stop. Because she would not put away her idols, Yahweh put her away in divorce (Jer. 3:8). The only hope for returning to intimacy with God is through union with Christ in his death and resurrection. And we see the bloody parallelism in the downward and upward slopes of Israel’s story as God’s bride: after being found wallowing in her blood, she was cleaned and wed, and yet it is only through wallowing in (and even consuming!) the blood taken from Christ’s side on Calvary that she might become again a fit Bride for God. Christ had to be slain as the last animal sacrifice to make a way out of the grave and purge her from her flesh-defiling relations with animals. And so Christ was put into a death-sleep like Adam, new life plucked from his side to cleanse, purify, and make human once again his wayward, animalistic bride....
In Genesis, the animals are broken into three primary “domains” (land, air, and sea) and then further broken down into “kinds.” However, as the land animals are the only animals immediately relevant to Adam’s natural domain (land) they are the only group whose “kinds” are fully given: beast of the field, livestock, and creeping things. Notably, when Adam names the animals one of the land “kinds” are not listed as being named by him (creeping things) and one entire domain is excluded (sea creatures). Again, I would say that creeping things and sea creatures were left out because they were less immediately relevant to Adam’s rule. Additionally, we could note that of the three domains (earth, sky, sea/deep) the sea is the one domain which does notpersist in the New Heavens and New Earth (Rev. 21:1)...
Footnote #5:
The context of bestiality is not often associated with Romans 1, but I think that the non-specificity of the female sexual perversions is telling:
“Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature.” (Romans 1:22-27)
The disgusting rise in popularity of “monster romance” novels targeting the younger fans of traditional bodice rippers gives a pretty good proxy for this same phenomenon at the human, personal level (though Babylon and Israel/Church clearly are operating at a corporate level)
Footnote #6:
The extension of man’s domain over the fish of the sea only comes with Christ’s ministry, who teaches his disciples to be fishers of men. The great god of the sea, Leviathan, a type of Satan, is not tamed, but destroyed: “In that day the LORD with his hard and great and strong sword will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan the twisting serpent, and he will slay the dragon that is in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1
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