The Gospel of Matthew describes Jesus separating sheep from goats on the day of judgement, sheep to his right hand and goats to the left. Why is this? What is the sin of the goat that means the whole species must be condemned to eternal fire? In the parable, it is because those identified as goats failed to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned. But those are people. Why, in Matthew’s metaphor, are they goats?
On the Warka Vase, a line of naked men bring sheep and goats to Inanna. The vase was thought lost when it was stolen from the National Museum of Iraq in 2003. Made of alabaster and weighing close to 275 kg, it must have been quite a difficult thing to spirit away, and it was in fact broken in the taking. The base of the vase remained stuck to its display stand. But in one of few good-news-stories from the war, it was returned only a few months later by a group of young men in one of those characteristic red Toyota pickup trucks beloved of rural communities from the Middle East to the Deep South. There’s no cuneiform inscription on this vase, so sorry, you’ll have to look it up yourselves (or check the comments for a picture).
Never mind. It surely won’t be hard to find a tablet about sheep and goats. From the earliest protocuneiform onwards, bills of sale for sheep and goats are almost as common as grain. Searching the CDLI database, there are 443 instances of the words “goat” or “goats”, and a massive 1116 “sheep”. But these bills of sale are pretty dull. Today we have a calculation of wages, but the interesting thing for us is the date at the bottom.
The Sumerians were more favourable regarding goats than Jesus. They even entrusted them with choosing of priests. Today’s tablet is dated: “year: ‘The priest of Inanna by the goat was found.’”. The names of year in Neo-Sumerian and Old Babylonian times weren’t given by number, but rather by some momentous event that had occurred. Usually this would be some huge building project, or the conquest of a rival city. Apparently a goat choosing a priest cleared the bar, so either this was pretty dull year, or the goat was kind of a big deal. One question this raises is when they decided on the epithet for the year. At this point in our current year it would seem obvious that we’re in “year: coronavirus locked down the world”, but there are still five months to go and anything could happen.
So what’s so good about sheep? What did the goats do to deserve their punishment? Visit any YouTube comment section and you’ll find the answer. Goats are hard to tell from sheep, so the discerning eye of the shepherd is needed to tell them apart when sending them to market. Sheep are followers. They buy in to what they are told and follow their shepherd unquestioningly. If you’ve ever played Goat Simulator (“the latest in goat simulation technology, bringing next-gen goat simulation to YOU”), you’ll know this doesn’t apply to them. So if your goal is to create a religion of followers, good sheep go to heaven and bad goats go to hell.
