Goat

A goat is a domesticated herd animal, closely herded with sheep throughout the biblical world, valued for its milk, hair, hide and meat and used more than any other animal for sacrifice. Scripture treats the goat as ordinary furniture of pastoral life: Nabal's estate is measured as three thousand sheep and a thousand goats (1 Samuel 25:2), and the song of Moses lists goats among the richest produce of the land alongside butter, milk, rams of Bashan and the finest wheat (Deuteronomy 32:14). Hebrew uses more than one word for the animal — ez for the goat generally, gedi for a kid, sa'ir for the hairy male goat — a linguistic detail reflected in the careful listing of "seven thousand seven hundred rams and seven thousand seven hundred male goats" brought to Jehoshaphat as tribute (2 Chronicles 17:11).

Economically, the goat belongs to the household: Proverbs 27:27 counts goats' milk as food for the family and for the servant girls, a picture of self-sufficient herding rather than trade. Scripture also distinguishes the domestic herd from wild goats, whose inaccessible crags become a hiding place — Saul seeks David and his men "on the rocks of the wild goats" (1 Samuel 24:2). The dietary code introduced at Leviticus 11:1 places the goat among the clean animals permitted as food, and goats appear in the ordinary mixed flock of a large household's wealth.

Sacrificially, the goat is everywhere. The Passover victim may be taken from the sheep or from the goats, provided it is without defect, a male a year old (Exodus 12:5), and Josiah supplies the people with thirty thousand lambs and young goats for the Passover (2 Chronicles 35:7). Leviticus 22:27 sets a limit on when an offering may be made: a bull, sheep or goat is to remain seven days with its mother, and only from the eighth day is it accepted as an offering made by fire to Yahweh. The goat therefore stands at the meeting point of two scriptural themes — the flock as livelihood and the flock as liturgical offering.

One command draws the most interpretation: "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" (Exodus 23:19). In Jewish tradition this verse underlies the separation of meat and dairy in kosher practice; other readings, ancient and modern, treat it as a polemic against a Canaanite fertility rite or as a check on cruelty toward the animal. Most Christian bodies do not regard it as a binding food law, though they differ over whether it carries an enduring ethical principle. Christian readers have also long read the sacrificial goat typologically, seeing in the spotless Passover victim — which Exodus 12:5 allows to be a goat — a figure of Christ; that reading is a matter of interpretive tradition rather than of what the text of Exodus itself states.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.