Stanford University Press

How many goats, how many ibexes, how many sheep, cattle, and other animals whose skins were used for parchment provided the material conditions for the survival of Judaism and Christianity as text-based religious traditions? There is, of course, no way to answer that question. The question itself, however, points toward a need to take more seriously the relationships between biblical literature and animals. For it underscores the possibility that neither the books of the Hebrew Bible, nor Judaism and Christianity as religions based in part on interpretations of the Bible, would have taken the forms they did without the presence of animals, interacting with humans in specific times and places.