Cattle were essential in the daily life of ancient Israel. Female cows provided milk, while castrated males (“oxen”) plowed fields and hauled heavy loads. Both types of cattle grazed in fields and pastures (Num 22:4; Isa 30:24), ate food like fodder or silage (Isa 20:24; Job 6:5), and rested in stalls or sheds (Hab 3:17; 2 Chr 32:28). However, cattle were vulnerable to diseases like anthrax and cattle plague, which could devastate herds (Exod 9:3; Jer 21:6; Ezek 14:19). When healthy animals died, they also provided meat, hide, and by-products.
Uncastrated male bulls were even more important than oxen. Unlike oxen, bulls could breed and thus increase livestock numbers. Since they were “intact,” bulls were preferred over oxen for ritual sacrifices (Lev 22:24). Biblical Hebrew reserves the term par for bulls, usually bulls as sacrifices (e.g., Lev 4:3; Isa 1:11). No special term exists for oxen. (English translations do not always maintain the distinction between bulls and oxen.) Bulls were a costly sacrifice in ancient Israel, used to atone for deeply serious transgressions (Lev 4:3), to consecrate priests (Lev 8:14), and at major celebrations and festivals (1 Kgs 1:9). Some traditional interpretations of Lev 22:24b argued that castrated cattle were forbidden in Israel (b. Ḥag. 14b; b. Shab. 110b). But that is unlikely, as gelding cattle to produce oxen was simply too useful for Israelite farmers.
How are bulls used symbolically in the Hebrew Bible?
Bulls symbolized power and fertility because of their strength and vigor. Bulls and God were interconnected, particularly in worship. In the temple, the likeness of twelve bulls supported a huge bronze basin called the Sea (1 Kgs 7:25). Like the rivers of Eden (Gen 2:6, 10–14), these bulls likely symbolized God’s life-giving power flowing to the four corners of the world. In Ps 29, the divine warrior rides a storm cloud like an angry bull, roaring in thunder and inseminating the land with rain. Some biblical traditions imagined the cherubim, which guard God’s throne, as having faces like bulls. In Ezekiel, one face of each four-faced guardian, the “cherub face,” is a bull (Ezek 1:10; 10:14). God’s title “the Mighty One [ʾābîr] of Jacob” may also mean the “Bull [ʾabbı̂r] of Jacob” (Gen 49:24; Ps 132:2, 5; Isa 49:26; 60:16). A slight spelling variation occurring in this phrase suggests that the Masoretic scribes—ancient editors of the Hebrew Bible—worried about presenting God as looking like a bull.
Were some Israelites uncomfortable with using bull symbolism for God?
In 1 Kings, King Jeroboam I of northern Israel erects statues of bulls and sacrifices to them at Dan and Bethel. Some Israelites might have viewed Jeroboam’s bulls as pedestals for the invisible God. Others, however, imagined God in the form of a bull. A near-contemporary seal (Samaria ostracon no. 41) was owned by a man named “Yah[weh] is a bull”! The writers of 1 Kgs 12:25–33 blast the use of bull images in worship. Even earlier, the prophet Hosea condemned bull iconography (Hos 8:5; 13:2). The famous story of the bull worship at Sinai in Exod 32 was likely refashioned soon after Jeroboam I set up bull images. The story in Exodus served as a way to pass polemical judgment on the king. It seems tailored to criticize his actions, mirroring the king’s exact words. Compare Exod 32:4 and 1 Kgs 12:28, where both texts say, “Here are your gods” (plural, suggesting one bull each for Dan and Bethel).
Why did Hosea and other defenders of the Sinai covenant dislike bull symbols in worship?
In the eyes of critics, the bull icons used in the north looked for all the world like forbidden sculpted images, idols (Exod 20:4). Hosea 13:2 complains about “a cast image” and “the work of artisans” (see Deut 9:16 and Ps 106:19 for similar complaints). Hosea insists that the people actually worship the bulls: “Sacrifice to these, they say.” Such bull worship is probably mocked in the Judges’ story of Israel’s bondage to Moab’s king “Young Bull” (Eglon), where Israel must bring him “offerings” (Judg 3:15).
Bulls were associated with storm gods in Ugaritic and Canaanite religion. Bull images have been found at sixteenth-century BCE Ashkelon and fourteenth-century BCE Hazor. These bulls represented Baal or Bull El, not the deity of Hosea and his fellow Levites (see Exod 32:26). An eighth-century stele of Adad, for example, shows the storm god (akin to Baal) standing on a bull. Archaeology of the south city of Ugarit has unearthed a bronze bull figurine probably associated with “Bull El,” the head deity of Ugarit. Such iconography likely influenced the depiction of the divine warrior as a bull in Ps 29 and similar passages, yet there is a difference between critical appropriation of imagery and what Hosea blasted as “adultery.”
Bibliography
- Borowski, Oded. Every Living Thing: Daily Use of Animals in Ancient Israel. AltaMira, 1998.
- Cook, Stephen L. The Social Roots of Biblical Yahwism. SBLStBL 8. Society of Biblical Literature, 2004.
- Lewis, Theodore J. The Origin and Character of God: Ancient Israelite Religion through the Lens of Divinity. Oxford University Press, 2020.
related links
- “Golden Calf” votive figurine, Byblos, Temple of Ba’alat Gubal, Middle Bronze II
- In Egypt, Apis was a bull. With the fifth Exodus plague, on cattle (Exod 9:1–7), God is judging Apis/Serapis, the bull-god, and Hathor, the cow-goddess of Egypt.
- Nicolas Poussin, “The Adoration of the Golden Calf,” 1634
- “Exodus #15, And He Saw the Calf and The Dancing,” by Peter Lipman-Wulf, 1960
- “Adoration of the Golden Calf,” by Andrea Vaccaro, 1645–1655
- “Worship of the Golden Calf,” Frans Francken II, Antwerp, 1581–1642
- Copper bull from the goddess Ninhursag’s temple in Ur, ca. 2500 BCE, metal (copper alloy) sheet hammered over a core of wood and bitumen
