Is the Wild Ox Willing to Serve You?

Is the Wild Ox Willing to Serve You? Commentary by Hilary Davies Cite Share Show Bible Passage The Great Black Bull, or aurochs, in the Axial Gallery in Lascaux is rightly one of the most famous images associated with Paleolithic parietal, or cave, art. Archaeologists place this artistic complex in the Magdalenian period, making it c.17,000 years old, a late stage when compared to Chauvet cave in the Ardèche, which has an estimated age of 30,000 years. Humankind has been awestruck by the otherness of the natural world for a very, very long time. At over 4 metres long and 2 metres high, the aurochs of Lascaux is one of the largest animal depictions in the gallery. It is meant to overwhelm by its power, which the painters knew intimately from close observation of the aurochs’s behaviour in its natural environment. Attempts to back-breed this ancient ox, extinct as recently as the seventeenth century in Poland, have produced a modern approximation that is still majestic in its massive bulk and beauty, even if it is not quite the real thing. The bull is seen galloping, his forelegs outstretched, his nostrils wide, his eyes alert, his elegant, but deadly, horns pricked forward, almost like ears sounding the world around him. Smaller bovines tuck under his very belly, as if riding alongside under his protection. This is a herd in motion: you can hear the thunder of hooves, hear their bellow, smell their musky scent. This is not an animal who, in Job’s words, ‘will spend the night at your crib’ (39:9), nor one to be bound with ropes or pull a plough. This wild ox is ferocious, untamed and untameable. He defends his territory and his family from other males and from predators who are themselves formidable: contemporary re-wilded back breeds of the aurochs in Eastern Europe have recently been seen forming a defensive circle round their young, those pricked-forward horns lowered against a frustrated pack of wolves. This bull is completely other, there to be wondered at and worshipped, an object of spiritual awe and dread that is very far from his domesticated descendants who meekly ‘bring grain to your threshing floor’ (v.12).