Massive fires have swept through Australia, devastating ecosystems and taking the lives of countless animals and other nonhuman species. News reports state that no animal has not been impacted by the catastrophic events, and more than one billion animals are believed dead. Elsewhere on the planet, extinction looms large for more than one million animal and plant species because of the climate crisis. Many animal species have already gone extinct. Into this globally devastating reality comes Ken Stone's groundbreaking work, Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies. This work invites readers to enter into the animal world to discover the contributions that animals have made not only to life in ancient Israel but also to the understanding of the Bible's poems and stories. More importantly, Stone shows his readers how to read the Hebrew Bible in an age of extinction.

Stone draws upon his hermeneutical expertise and approaches the Hebrew Bible through critical theory; he brings selected texts into dialogue with “animal studies,” a term he uses to refer to many diverse styles of reading and analyzing, thus avoiding the use of just one methodological approach. Hence, he uses many methods or, in his words, a “scavenger methodology” (14) to gather and produce information on subjects who have not yet been featured in traditional studies of biblical literature.

Stone's goals are: to show how this dialogue between the Hebrew Bible and animal studies could lead to a better understanding of the Hebrew Bible; to explore how the writers of biblical literature used animals as a rich set of symbols to present themselves, their neighbors, their religion, and the God or gods whom they worshipped; to advocate for ethical treatment of animals and their continued presence and survival on the planet; and to challenge readers to engage the Hebrew Bible with the context of present-day animal extinction foremost in their minds.

In six short chapters, he covers much terrain, beginning with an exploration into the relationship between biblical literature and animals. He emphasizes the role that animal bodies play “in both the material history and the literary content of the Hebrew Bible” (14). In subsequent chapters, he gives consideration to domestic and wild animals in both well-known and overlooked texts. Through this lens of animal studies, he is able to destabilize the human-animal binary to argue that the boundary between humans and animals provides a rationale for humans to exploit other creatures. Throughout his book he engages the thought of such scholars as Jane Goodall, Donna Haraway, and Matthew Calarco, among others. The thinking of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas provides the foundation for Stone to insist that animals cannot be excluded from ethics and that the best way to honor animals today is to assure their continued presence and survival on our shared planet.

Chapter 7, “Reading the Hebrew Bible in an Age of Extinction,” is not only the best but also the one that I find to be prophetic. In this chapter Stone calls all readers to engage the Hebrew Bible from the context of our globalized world whose animals, and all life species for that matter, are suffering untold devastation and extinction, the likes of which humans have never seen before. By drawing on the thought of Thom van Dooren, Stone challenges people everywhere to realize that the animals have their own stories to tell, and those stories must be told in new and different ways, right along with the biblical animal stories that also need to be retold in new ways. Stone calls people to creative action: “to tell stories that take into account the suffering and loss that extinctions entail,” “to tell stories that put aside human exceptionalism and refuse to grant too much significance to such distinctions as those between human and animal” (171). To Stone's challenge I would add: the animals’ stories must also be written down. Their lives, their plight must be remembered and preserved, for they too have helped to form significant relational experiences within the web of life.

In sum, this wonderfully crafted, insightful, and accessible book is a “must read” for all humans on Planet Earth.