Moses helps them and is taken in by the family-marrying one of the daughters and becoming the very thing the Egyptians who raised him despised: a shepherd. Settling in the land of Midian, he sees another injustice: the daughters of the local priest struggling to water their flocks because of pushy shepherds.
After the story of the exodus begins, Moses goes on the run because he killed an Egyptian in anger. Sheep continue their prominence when the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt, many generations after Joseph’s time. Abraham memorializes the place as “The Lord Will Provide.” The ram becomes a substitute offering, a symbolic foretelling of the Messiah who is to come. Moments later, Abraham discovers a ram trapped in a nearby thicket. Abraham is clearly distraught by the request, and, as he begins to obey, is relieved when an angel commands him to stop. So the request from God was shocking to Abraham, but not nearly as flabbergasting as it would be to us today. Remember that heart-stopping moment when God asks Abraham to raise his knife on his own son, Isaac, as a sacrifice? In Canaanite culture, the fertility god of the day could demand a portion of the bounty of the land in sacrifice-including animals, grain, and even human life. Sheep were not only used to reconcile human relationships, but also our relationship with God. When Pharaoh wants to win favor with Abram, he gives him sheep, among other gifts. The split between Lot and Abram is also sheep-related, as the duo discovers the land can’t sustain both of their flocks.
The original bloody conflict between brothers Cain and Abel is over an offering Abel’s acceptable gift from the flock versus Cain’s rejected gift from the field. Because of their worth, contention soon came. Though sheep are not specifically mentioned in the account of creation, God made these animals a valuable source of food and clothing. Sheep graze throughout the pages of the Bible, beginning in Genesis. The early church even embraced the shepherd as one of its primary images. But as I dug deeper, I began to realize that sheep are integral to the stories of God.
Like the animal figurines in my family’s Christmas crèche, they could be pushed to the back to make room for more central characters. Before my in-depth study, shepherds and sheep were merely token characters in a handful of biblical stories-part of the landscape, the lifestyle.
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