Caleb the Dog

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It’s hard to imagine any parents calling their child Dog. But that’s just what the Bible tells us Jephunneh and his wife did: They named their son Caleb—from klb, the Hebrew root for “dog.” Is it just an unfortunate appellation? Or did the biblical authors have a reason to identify this great leader, who helped scout out the Holy Land for Moses (Numbers 13:2, 6), with a canine?

Throughout the Bible, names carry symbolic meaning. The first mother bears the name Eve, meaning “life”; Adam means “man.” Ishmael is called “God hears” because God hears his mother, Hagar, cry out in the wilderness (Genesis 16:11).

Many biblical bad guys are given bad names. The name of David’s antagonist Nabal means “boor” or “fool.” Saul’s fourth son, another of David’s enemies, is referred to as Ish-bosheth, “man of shame.”¹

Caleb is clearly a good guy. Of the twelve spies Moses sends into Canaan to see whether the land is “good or bad,” and “whether the people who live in it are strong or weak” (Numbers 13:18–19), only two—Caleb and Joshua—return confident that they will be able to enter the land with God’s help. While the ten other spies grumble and frighten the Israelites with tales of the monstrous people they encountered, Caleb and Joshua report: “The land that we went through as spies is exceedingly good land. If the Lord is pleased with us, he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land that flows with milk and honey. Only, do not rebel against the Lord; and do not fear the people of the land, … the Lord is with us” (Numbers 14:7–9). Caleb is rewarded for his faith. Although the Lord condemns Moses and all the Israelites to die before entering the Holy Land, he makes an exception of Caleb: “But my servant Caleb, because he has a different spirit and has followed me wholeheartedly, I will bring into 022the land into which he went, and his descendants shall possess it” (Numbers 14:24). This promise is fulfilled (at least temporarily, as we shall see) in the Book of Joshua, when Joshua gives Hebron to Caleb as an inheritance, because “he [Caleb] wholeheartedly followed the Lord, the God of Israel” (Joshua 14:14).

But this particular good guy has what appears to be a bad name, for throughout the Bible, dogs generally get a bad rap.

Isaiah characterizes dogs as greedy (“they never have enough,” Isaiah 56:11) and slothful (“loving to slumber,” Isaiah 56:10). In the Book of Psalms, dogs represent the unstable and the chaotic. They literally “hound” the needy and desperate. The distressed individual who cries out, “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” in Psalm 22 complains that “dogs are all around me; a company of evildoers encircles me” (Psalm 22:17 [English 22:16]). Similarly, Psalm 59 contains the following prayer for deliverance: “Deliver me from my enemies, O my God; protect me from those who rise up against me. Deliver me from those who work evil; from the bloodthirsty save me … Each evening they come back, howling like dogs and prowling about the city. There they are, bellowing with their mouths, with sharp words on their lips” (Psalm 59:2–3, 7–8 [English 59:1–2, 6–7]). These prowling dogs may be the pariah and mongrel dogs known from literature to have lived on the outskirts of ancient Near Eastern cities, where they apparently survived on the refuse thrown outside the city walls.

The Book of Ecclesiastes describes the lion as the zenith of the animal kingdom and the dog as the nadir. Nevertheless, the preacher tells us, it is “better [to be] a living dog than a dead lion” (Ecclesiastes 9:4).

Biblical dogs are especially noted for their indiscriminate feeding tendencies. In Exodus 22:30 (English 22:31), dogs are fed torn flesh that is no longer fit for human consumption. Proverbs 26:11 describes dogs eating their own vomit (“Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who reverts to his folly” [Proverbs 26:11]). Dogs even eat the flesh of human beings: In the Book of Kings, dogs carefully pick the corpse of Queen Jezebel clean, leaving only “the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands” (2 Kings 9:35; see also 1 Kings 21:19, 23, 22:38).

Dogs were considered so vicious, they were apparently employed in warfare. In Psalms, they taste the blood of enemies (Psalm 68:24 [English 68:23]); in 1 Kings 14:11 and Jeremiah 15:3, they eat the remains of the conquered dead.

It’s no surprise, then, that when people are referred to as “dogs” in the Bible, it is invariably an insult. The Philistine giant Goliath, feeling that David has shown him disrespect, asks the youth, “Am I a dog, that you 024come to me with sticks?” (1 Samuel 17:43; see also 2 Samuel 3:8). When Shimei, a member of Saul’s household, insults King David, David’s nephew Abishai calls him a “dead dog” (2 Samuel 16:9).²

When used of oneself, the term “dog” is self-deprecating. The Syrian commander Hazael (later to become king) calls himself a “mere dog” when he meets the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 8:13); when David becomes king, he promises kindness to Jonathan’s son (and Saul’s grandson) Mephi-bosheth, who immediately falls on the ground and does obeisance before David, asking, “What is your servant, that you should look upon a dead dog such as I?” (2 Samuel 9:8).

Similarly, in the extrabiblical evidence from ancient Israel, the epithet “dog” is used either to identify oneself as a subordinate or to deride others. In 1935, excavators at Lachish (just 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem) discovered a hoard of letters written to the commanding officer of Lachish in the early sixth century B.C.E., on the eve of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar’s invasion of Jerusalem. The collection of 22 letters not only provides a vivid description of Israelite military maneuvers in the face of attack, they also shed light on the use of language in this period, including the use of the term “dog.” The letter writer self-deprecatingly tells his superior, the commander of Lachish, “Who is your servant but a dog.”³ In the much earlier El-Amarna tablets—a hoard of correspondence between the 14th-century Egyptian pharaohs Amenhotep and his son Akhenaten and other Near Eastern rulers—the governor of Jerusalem, one Abdi-Ashirta, calls himself a kalbu, the Aramaic equivalent of klb (dog), when addressing the pharaoh.⁴

To find more positive connotations for the term “dog,” we must look not only outside the Bible, but outside ancient Israel.

In Egypt, dogs appear to have been highly valued for the very qualities modern dog lovers appreciate: their bravery and their loyalty. Dogs often appear with their owners in hunting and domestic scenes depicted on the walls of Egyptian tombs. From ancient inscribed dog collars and from reliefs and paintings, we know that Egyptian dogs bore names like “Brave One” and “Reliable.” (A modern equivalent would be Fido, from the Latin for “fidelity,” a name made popular in the United States by Abraham Lincoln’s mutt.) Egyptian dogs were also closely associated with Anubis, the jackal-headed god of the underworld. Hundreds of thousands of dog mummies have been found buried at cult centers dedicated to Anubis.⁵

In the Hittite civilization (centered in Anatolia in the mid-second millennium B.C.E.), puppy sacrifice was part of religious practice. According to Hittite ritual texts, puppies were frequently slaughtered during military rites, perhaps because they were used in battle. 026Puppy sacrifices were believed to have protective and purifying effects.⁶

Excavators at the fifth-century B.C.E. Phoenician city of Ashkelon, on the Mediterranean coast, unearthed a mass burial of dogs, which has been interpreted as a cemetery of dogs associated with a god or a local temple (see box). The dogs appear to have died naturally. Historian Baruch Halpern has suggested that the practice may have been related to worship of a Mesopotamian goddess such as Gula, the goddess of healing.⁷ Numerous votive plaques and figurines depicting dogs were found in the temple of Gula at Isin, in Mesopotamia, and the ramp leading up to her temple contained the remains of 33 dogs.

Further, we have several references to Mesopotamian individuals whose personal names contain the root kalbu (dog). These include Kalbi-Sin, meaning “Dog of Sin (the moon-god)”; Kalbi-Marduk, “Dog of Marduk (the supreme god)”; Kalbi-Bau, “Dog of Bau (a goddess associated with Gula)”; Kalbi-Šamaš, “Dog of Shamash (the sun-god)”;⁸ and Kalba, meaning simply “Dog.”⁹ Similarly, Phoenician and Punic inscriptions include the names klb’ (Dog) and klb-’lm (Dog of the Gods).¹⁰ Generally, these names seem to mean something like “Loyal Servant of Sin (or Marduk or Bau, etc.).” The shorter form Kalbi simply refers to a “Loyal Servant.”

These common Near Eastern names may be the key to understanding the biblical name Caleb. Caleb could well be a shortened form of a similar Hebrew theophoric name (a personal name that incorporates the name of a god). Such shortened theophorics are common in the Bible, where we find Jacob, which may be short for Jacob-El, “God will protect,” a name known from extrabiblical sources, and Micah, which could be short for Michael, meaning “Who is like El?”¹¹ Caleb might be a shortened form of klb-el, meaning “Dog of God.”

The biblical Caleb is, of course, famed for his loyalty to his master, YHWH. Indeed, every biblical narrative that mentions Caleb describes him as malle acharey yhwh or some variation thereof (Numbers 14:24, 32:12; Deuteronomy 1:36; Joshua 14:8–9, 14; see also 1 Kings 11:6). The phrase (used only of Caleb except in one instance) literally means “he fills after YHWH”; the New Revised Standard Version renders the passage “he wholeheartedly follows YHWH.” Most scholars have taken this to mean that Caleb loyally kept all the commandments of YHWH.¹² Perhaps the biblical authors hoped to call attention to this by calling him Caleb, Dog of God. The name conveys fealty, just as the epithet “dog” conveyed subordination and loyalty in the Amarna tablets, the Lachish letters and certain biblical passages.

There is, perhaps, another quality of dogs—in both extrabiblical and biblical sources—that might have equally influenced the biblical authors’ choice of the name Caleb. Both Caleb and canines were considered outsiders.

Dogs, as the biblical passages quoted above suggest, lived on the outskirts of ancient Israelite society. Meir Malul, an expert in biblical and Mesopotamian law, has recently suggested that for this reason, dogs may have come to symbolize the ultimate outsiders or others.¹³ Malul notes that on a Neo-Babylonian legal tablet, a woman who is giving up her son for adoption is said to cast her son “to the dog’s mouth” (Akkadian, ana pi kalbi); the man who adopts the child picks him up “from the dog’s mouth” (ištu pi kalbi).¹⁴ Clearly, the mother did not put her baby in a dog’s mouth; rather, this is a legal metaphor for part of the process in which a woman divests herself of ownership of a child and a new parent then takes that child from the ownerless realm.

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Malul compares this with Exodus 22:30 (English 22:31) and Deuteronomy 14:21, in which God tells the Israelites to give unconsecrated and contaminated meat to dogs (Exodus) or foreigners (Deuteronomy). In this way, the Israelites effectively remove a contaminating substance from their own domain and place it in the ownerless area outside Israel. Dogs and foreigners are the representatives of this other, ownerless sphere.

Caleb, too, is an outsider. Unlike Moses’ eleven other spies, Caleb is not an Israelite. Rather, he belongs to the Kenizzite tribe, centered in the Negev (Numbers 32:12 and Joshua 14:6, 14). Caleb’s “otherness” is affirmed the first time God refers to him, in Numbers 14:24. God states that Caleb has “a different spirit with him” (haytah ruach acheret imo)—an evocative phrase used only this once in the Hebrew Bible. Nonetheless, Joshua gives Caleb and his descendants control over Hebron (Joshua 15:13–19). Thus a foreign body is in control of an area central to early Israel’s self identity. But it doesn’t last long. Joshua 21:11–12 reassigns Hebron to the Levites instead; Caleb is given control only over the fields and villages bordering the city. Like a dog, he is not allowed in the city itself.

Ever loyal to his master, yet always an outsider. This is what Caleb, Dog of God, shares with other dogs.

It’s hard to imagine any parents calling their child Dog. But that’s just what the Bible tells us Jephunneh and his wife did: They named their son Caleb—from klb, the Hebrew root for “dog.” Is it just an unfortunate appellation? Or did the biblical authors have a reason to identify this great leader, who helped scout out the Holy Land for Moses (Numbers 13:2, 6), with a canine? Throughout the Bible, names carry symbolic meaning. The first mother bears the name Eve, meaning “life”; Adam means “man.” Ishmael is called “God hears” because God hears his mother, Hagar, cry […]