Once upon a time, proving the authority of Old Testament commands, even obscure ones, was really important to me. (Still is, but in a slightly different way). One of my favorite prooftexts was First Timothy 5.17-18:

Let the elders who rule well be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching. For the Scripture says, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain,” and, “The laborer deserves his wages.”

“You see that?” I would ask, with rhetorical flourish. Paul appeals to an “obscure” case law in Deuteronomy (25.4) to prove that pastors should be paid.

But I felt a little bit guilty about it, because I knew there was another NT passage that made the same point with the same law. I avoided it because it raised issues that I found wholly mysterious and weird. Thus, we read in First Corinthians 9:

This is my defense to those who would examine me. Do we not have the right to eat and drink? Do we not have the right to take along a believing wife,as do the other apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas? Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working for a living? Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk?

Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you? If others share this rightful claim on you, do not we even more?

This caused me all sorts of problems. I wanted a simple argument that a law about oxen should mean something for human beings. But Paul’s enthusiastic appeal to Deuteronomy 25.4 said more than that: it said that oxen really weren’t God’s primary concern in the law at all. I assume that the Israelites were, indeed, really and literally not supposed to muzzle an ox while using him to thresh grain, but Paul seems clear to me that more is going on. Perhaps even the treatment of the ox is itself a lesson pointing to ethical obligations we have towards fellow humans.

This bothered me. It complicated my exegetical training and hermeneutical assumptions. I didn’t know what to do with the passage so I avoided it.

Another complication in the passage: How does Paul jump from oxen to a specific kind of human work such as plowmen and threshers. While Paul rhetorically implies God is not really concerned about oxen in the passage, he doesn’t say precisely that God was writing about pastors. Rather, it seems God was writing about farmers, from which Paul extrapolates to pastors and evangelists. (This part doesn’t seem so hard since Jesus preached a great deal using parables in other analogies that moved from agriculture to preaching.)

Much later, thanks to something I heard somewhere by Jim Jordan, I was able to look at Deuteronomy 25.4 in context and notice the connections.

You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain. If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband’s brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband’s brother to her. And the first son whom she bears shall succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel. And if the man does not wish to take his brother’s wife, then his brother’s wife shall go up to the gate to the elders and say, “My husband’s brother refuses to perpetuate his brother’s name in Israel; he will not perform the duty of a husband’s brother to me.” Then the elders of his city shall call him and speak to him, and if he persists, saying, “I do not wish to take her,” then his brother’s wife shall go up to him in the presence of the elders and pull his sandal off his foot and spit in his face. And she shall answer and say, “So shall it be done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.” And the name of his house shall be called in Israel, “The house of him who had his sandal pulled off.”

So why wouldn’t the brother want to do his duty. Perhaps he just despises his sister-in-law, but that seems handled by the condition: “If brothers dwell together.” If there was going to be a problem it should have come out before and agreements made. We have this law mentioned in two places that I know of. The first is in Genesis 38 (the law seems to be reiterated and redefined by Moses in Deuter0nomy, but not created new by him or by God at that point). The second is in Ruth 4. In the first place a brother spills his seed so that the widow remains childless and he will inherit his brother’s property. In the second the man is not a brother who lived with the deceased husband so he is not under the same level of obligation (though in the providence of God the exchange of a shoe is used to make the declaration and the man’s name is totally forgotten in the Biblical record while Boaz’s is remembered).

What is the common issue in all these stories and laws. It seems there is a worry about who gets to profit from the land. If a man only has one son, the son for his dead brother, then the dead brother’s name and inheritance all go to the son named after the brother. Unless there is a second son by that woman or another wife, there will be no inheritance for the surviving brother who is doing his duty for his dead brother’s widow.

But isn’t there another issue that might be a consideration? What about the question of who gets to profit from the dead brother’s land before it passes on to the son and heir of the dead brother?

The ESV puts a subhead separating the law prohibiting the muzzling of the ox in Deuteronomy 25.4 and the law of the brothers and the widow in Deuteronomy 25.5ff. I think Paul is rejecting that subhead. The first principle established is that while the surviving brother is working or renting out the dead brother’s property, and is raising his brother’s son by his brother’s widow, that he has a right to profit from the land. “It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop.”

So the ox stood for the surviving brother laboring ultimately for the inheritance of his dead brother’s heir, but having a right to still enjoy the fruits of his labor.

The question this raises for me is: Are there other places in the Law in which animals are understood to stand for people.