DOI: 10.4324/9781003324157-16 12 Animal Families in the Biblical Tradition Beth A. Berkowitz Encountering Animal Families All afternoon, young Jonah had seemed alone. But Jonah had been tracking her mother, Sopho- cles, from the surface, and reuniting with her for part of every hour. And so here’s the thing: in the ocean vastness, maintaining family cohesion requires constant efort. It is intentional. For being a sperm whale there’s no instruction manual, no rule book. There are only demands and generalities, rhythms and patterns. Mostly there is this: the wide, deep ocean and family bonds. (Safna 2020, 64–65) That is ecologist Carl Safna’s description of the sperm whales he got to know while aboard a ship of the coast of Dominica. For sperm whales, Safna reports, “family is everything” (Safna 2020, 15). Safna’s account forms part of a longstanding tradition of curiosity about the intimate lives of animals. In the early Christian writing Physiologus, elephant parents are a model of sexual propriety from whom humans have much to learn (Curley 2009, 30). In a version of the Qur’an’s story of Thamud, a tribe is destroyed for assaulting a mother camel and her little calf, who climbs a hill and plaintively asks, “God, where is my mother?” (Tlili 2012, 153). Studies of animals and religion tend to look at kinship between humans and animals more than kinship among animals, how- ever. Both types are important, but this contribution is about religion’s abiding concern for the families that animals themselves make, with a focus on the Hebrew Bible, and how that concern might speak to us today. First, what exactly is an animal family? What is a family? The defnition depends on dominant social norms. Anthropologist George Murdock understood the central ele- ments of the family to be common residence, economic cooperation, and reproduction (Murdock 1965), but this defnition excludes many families as we know them, such as families whose children have left home, parents who maintain independent fnances, and non-reproductive families. The problem of defnition is compounded for animal families, among whom the variety of confgurations is even greater. A fuid defnition is required, one that considers family less as a static entity or state of being than a process, with rela- tionships thickening and thinning over time (Bamford 2019, 15, 19). A working defni- tion might include any set of intimate relationships with signifcant material and afective dimensions that forms the framework for activities necessary for survival that give life