Birds of a Feather

Animal Criticism, Domestication, and The Use of Bird Imagery and Metaphor in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes

Abstract

Wisdom literature is replete with the use of animals for a variety of rhetorical ends, often explained as a function of the universality of such literature in its analysis of nature and the world. In this article, I examine the role and function of bird imagery in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. I do so with the goal of demonstrating the underlying rhetorical ends to which fowl can be put to service, “thinking with” birds in a Straussian sense. Yet the ability to “think with” fauna like birds from a literary perspective is possible because of processes of domestication. I conclude with preliminary thoughts on how recent research on domestication and animal criticism can elucidate the malleability of bird imagery from a rhetorical perspective. In this sense, the incorporation of birds into wisdom imagery is not simply a reflection on the world as is, but rather on a particular type of domesticated (and, by implication, non-domesticated) world, a world that humans have cultivated to be or that exists as yet untamed.