John Eaton

The Circle of Creation: Animals in the Light of the Bible John Eaton

This book fulfils a lifetime ambition of the author, who is a distinguished Old Testament scholar, to write on a matter near to the hearts of most people. His professional knowledge, a favourite cat and an animal sanctuary have combined to produce this book on animals in the Bible. In the Bible, John Eaton finds, is the ideal of a loving community of all the species as fundamental to God's eternal purpose. There is the understanding of the present world as fallen from God's ideal, but still restrained and guided in respect of animals by sacred laws. And there is the prophetic vision that the original ideal will, by God's action, at last be achieved. In addition, most important of all, is the light shed on the fallen world by the ideal world, the awareness in great moments of worship of the universal circle of praise when all creation unites about the Creator. So here are animals galore, from donkeys and birds, through a whole tapestry of wild life to lambs loving and lambs sacrificed, in an approach which, far from looking sentimentally at the living creatures spoken of in the Bible, has a deep concern for animals, threatened as they are in our own world today.