Did Israelites hamstring horses, and if so why? My brother-in-law is a horse farrier, and we were discussing this question recently. Hamstringing refers to the severing of the hamstring tendon. Contrary to what you may have read in some commentaries, hamstringing a horse does NOT render a horse unfit for war but still useful for agriculture. It’s much worse than that, and should actually be considered a tortuous way to kill a horse and render it totally useless while it slowly dies.
So why did God command Joshua to do this? What reason could God have for telling Joshua to torture horses?
Joshua 11.6,9: “But the Lord said to Joshua, ‘Do not be afraid because of them, for tomorrow about this time I will deliver all of them slain before Israel. You shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire.’ […] So Joshua did to them as the Lord had told him: he hamstrung their horses and burned their chariots with fire.” (NKJV)
At first I wondered whether “hamstring” might be a mistranslation of the Hebrew. The same verb in a more basic form means “to pluck, or uproot”. Closely related words in Hebrew mean “barren”. For this reason a few commentators have suggested that perhaps the verb in Joshua should be translated as “castrated”.
The same verb is used only two other times in scripture, describing an event with David:
2 Samuel 8.4: “David took from him one thousand chariots, seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand foot soldiers. Also David hamstrung all the chariot horses, except that he spared enough of them for one hundred chariots.” (NKJV)
1 Chron 18.4: “David took from him one thousand chariots, seven thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand foot soldiers. Also David hamstrung all the chariot horses, except that he spared enough of them for one hundred chariots.” (NKJV)
(Incidentally, the Samuel passage most likely contains a scribal error and is supposed to say seven thousand horsemen, not seven hundred, which would make it consistent with Chronicles. The Septuagint gets it right in this verse.)
As far as I’m aware, no Bible translation has ever rendered the verb as “castrated” in any of these passages, either in ancient or modern times. The Septuagint translates this Hebrew verb as “hamstrung” in Joshua and “disabled/paralyzed” in 2 Samuel and 1 Chronicles. The Vulgate says “hamstrung” (subnervavit). The Ancient Aramaic/Peshitta translates it more dynamically as “destroyed”, and also emphasizes the chariots more than the horses themselves. So if this Hebrew verb does mean “castrate”, then the meaning has apparently alluded all translators forever.
Besides, castration makes little strategic sense in these contexts. Castration does not disable a horse and has only a very negligible effect on a horse’s ability to pull a chariot in battle (again, contrary to what some commentators claim). Therefore if Joshua were castrating the horses after this battle he would merely be stopping the stallions from breeding, nothing more. Such a mild and long term action is not in keeping with the theme of total destruction in the passage. Besides, Joshua left no enemy survivors after this battle, so it’s not as if he’s putting an end to some enemy horse breeding program. With David castration makes even less sense, because he spared 100 horses, and 100 stallions are still capable of an awful lot of breeding (my brother-in-law tells me that 1 stallion can usually service about 200 mares in a season).
In short, castration cannot plausibly be in mind in any of these passages, for both grammatical reasons and contextual reasons. The word really does mean “hamstring”.
Josephus talks about this event with Joshua in his own words, and his vocabulary adds further confirmation:
“…[God] charged them to make their enemies’ horses useless, and to burn their chariots. […] Joshua slew their horses, and burnt their chariots.” (source)
In other words, Josephus equivocates between making the horses “useless” and “slaying” them. Josephus clearly knows that hamstringing is a way of both disabling and killing a horse.
So why did God not only allow this, but command it? I think two possible reasons: (1) hamstringing is probably an easier and more efficient way for a man to kill a horse, especially if the horse happens to be already strapped to a chariot behind it; (2) the hamstring is symbolic of a horse’s strength, and to cut the hamstring’s tendon is both symbolically and literally a way of cutting down such strength. So there’s partly an element of efficiency, and partly an element of poetic justice. It makes sense.
The only strange thing about hamstringing horses, to modern readers like us, is that the horses die torturous deaths. It seems wrong. We are a gentle people who believe in shooting a horse if it breaks a leg, i.e. we take efforts to spare horses suffering. Apparently this was not such a high priority for God and Joshua. Proverbs 12.10 says that a righteous man regards the life of his beast, so why does God desire these horses to die in this way? I see two options:
Option A: God wanted the horses to suffer torturously as a good and appropriate thing in itself. These horses were covenantally part of the Canaanites, therefore perhaps God straightforwardly desired for the Israelites to torture them. This seems implausible though, because nowhere else in scripture is there an example of God commanding Israelites to torture enemies, human or animal. Even if it is appropriate for God Himself to torture the wicked (e.g. in hell), there is no pattern of God commanding men to torture the wicked. The pattern we see in scripture is one of relatively quick punishments.
Option B: God wanted the horses to be killed more efficiently/symbolically, and the increased suffering was merely a tolerable side effect. There is certainly some value to killing horses with a little less human effort, and value in poetic justice. Perhaps that value simply matters more than the suffering of the horses.
It seems Option B is the better choice. Although it is clearly not a beautiful and wonderful thing for a horse to suffer while it slowly dies, apparently the suffering of a horse is not such a big deal in the eyes of the Lord, i.e. not as big a deal as we moderns are tempted to make it. This is consistent with what we see elsewhere in scripture about God’s stance towards animal suffering. God created carnivores like leviathan before Adam sinned (Gen 1:21). Carnivores cause horses to suffer too. But apparently God is okay with that, because God gives the carnivores their meat (Psalm 104:21). There is still something about animal suffering that is not ideal, and most likely it will cease to exist in the New Creation …nevertheless, animal suffering is not inherently wicked. The principle of shooting a horse with a broken leg to spare it suffering is still a good principle, but we should not be tempted to raise that principle too high or absolutize it morally. If we do raise that principle too high, then we are apparently not thinking about horses the way God and Joshua did.
Your PETA followers are not going to like this Brad!
Can we not conclude, on the basis of everything else we know about God’s dealings with his creation, that he does in fact regard animal torture (which is different to animal suffering per se) as a really undesirable thing and that the reason it is commanded in these passages is because there is an even worse thing going on (I.e. the wickedness of the horses’ covenant heads)?
In other words, keep your relativising principle but send it the other way: it’s not that God cares less about animal torture than we though but that he cares more about human wickedness than we thought.
It’s got to be both/and. I take for granted that the Canaanite wickedness is relevant and super important, otherwise there would be no need for any sheep or cattle to be killed for example. Given that’s the case, my only remaining question was why did the horses need to be killed *in this particular way*? And I think the answer is most likely just because that was the easiest way to kill a horse in that historical context. The fact that it also happened to be a more torturous death wasn’t so important.