i.

MANY PEOPLE DIE in the book of Genesis, and we are, for the most part, told where the bodies are buried. We know what happens to the corpses of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Joseph. We sometimes get details about the procurement of a burial plot or the reconciliation of estranged brothers who come together to lay a father to rest. In the case of the first human death, however, we learn less: We know nothing about what happens to Abel’s body. From early on, commentators noted this absence and wondered how it was that human beings first came to care for and inter the bodies of the dead.

Early Jewish commentary on Abel’s death at the hands of his brother imagines Abel’s parents stumbling upon the lifeless body of their son. In this narrative, Adam and Eve are distraught and confused, having no prior understanding of the end of life other than some mysterious warnings they once heard in Eden. They sit by the body of their child and weep, helpless and overcome, until they see a nearby raven scratching at the earth, making an indentation in which to bury his deceased companion. They know how to feel sorrow, but the raven helps them understand what to do next.

A passage in the Quran tells a similar story, but in this case, the raven’s lesson is directed at the son who murders his brother. When Habil’s sacrifice is accepted and Qabil’s rejected, Qabil is overcome with envy and slays Habil. Allah sends a raven, who models for Qabil a way to honor the body of his dead brother and hide his shame. “Woe is me,” he says, “was I not even able to be as this raven?” Qabil is filled with regret, seeing in the raven a kind of care that exceeded his own.

In Genesis’s version of the story, God is the one who confronts the murderer, asking, “What have you done?” God outlines a series of consequences, telling Cain that the ground will no longer yield a harvest for him, that he will be instead “a restless wanderer on the earth.” Cain never admits wrongdoing, responding only by objecting to the weight of his punishment. God places a mark on Cain as a sign for others, so that no one will kill him in his wanderings. In the Quran, Allah sends a sign directed to Qabil himself—mercy in the form of a raven, scratching at the earth, offering an occasion for recognition and repentance.

According to some commentaries, the raven doesn’t come for years. Qabil is shocked when Habil’s body stills, unaware that his blows could bleed away a life. He takes his brother’s body onto his back, wandering alone and away from his parents, braced by burdens he imagines he can hide. In these versions of the story, the raven’s delayed lesson takes on new meanings. Qabil can now cease his wandering; he can at last put down his load.

ii.

Ravens might seem unlikely teachers. Prized for their intelligence and beauty, they are just as often reviled for their apparent cruelty and longstanding association with death. In a commentary on Genesis, Philo of Alexandria calls the raven “a symbol of evil” that “brings night and darkness upon the soul.” Scottish poet and hymn-writer James Montgomery puts it more succinctly in a five-line ode to the bird: “death is in thy croak.”

Ravens are predatory scavengers. They eat almost anything, but a good portion of their diet is provided by dead bodies. When the Great Fire of London spread through the city in the summer of 1666, destroying more than thirteen thousand homes, residents returned to find ravens and crows scavenging among the burnt corpses. Haunted by the image of these birds eating human flesh, citizens petitioned the king to eliminate them from the city, leading to a widespread extermination campaign.

The raven’s reputation as a desecrator and plunderer of the dead and its classification as an unclean bird played a significant role in the interpretation of biblical passages that referenced ravens. Two hundred years after the fire, famed Baptist preacher Charles H. Spurgeon offered the following interpretation of Jesus’s call in Luke’s Gospel to “consider the ravens” in a sermon preached at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London: “You, in some senses, are much better than a raven. The raven is but a poor unclean bird, whose instant death would make no sort of grievous gap in creation.” Spurgeon went on, “If thousands of ravens had their necks wrung tomorrow, I do not think that there would be any vehement grief and sorrow in the universe about them. There would simply be a number of poor dead birds, and that would be all.”

iii.

A recent report from the United Nations estimates that the spread of the mutating virus H5N1—commonly known as bird flu—has led to the deaths of some 300 million birds over the last four years. One hundred and sixty-six million wild and domestic birds have either sickened and died or been culled in the United States alone since the virus was first identified at a poultry farm in Indiana in 2022.

The prior year, ornithologists in India noted that crows, who had accounted for 70 percent of H5N1 bird deaths, were emerging as a significant casualty of the virus. While some scientists pointed to the crow’s diet, and specifically their feeding upon the bodies of other dead animals, as the cause of their susceptibility to the virus, others argued that it was probably the crow funerals that were making the birds sick.

Over the last decade, scientists at the University of Washington have documented the way that wild American crows (as well as other corvids, including common ravens and California scrub jays) gather around dead conspecifics, recruiting other birds to the site of a fallen bird, making lots of noise, and sometimes touching the deceased. These gatherings, which can draw hundreds of birds to the site of a single dead corvid, have come to be known as crow funerals.

Ravens and crows both form lifelong pair bonds, mating with the same bird for up to twenty years. When one dies, scientists have observed the survivor standing over the body, staring in silence. Ornithologist John Marzluff interprets this behavior as something more than just survival instinct. “They seem to be mourning a loss.”

iv.

I find stories about the role that ravens might have played in teaching human beings how to ritualize grief remarkably moving, but I can’t help but think of what these traditions leave out.

While ravens behave in ways that could be interpreted as rituals of mourning, they are not known to bury their dead, and they respond quite differently to the death of other species. It seems just as likely that Adam, Eve, and Cain would have found ravens trying to scavenge at the site of Abel’s body, or that the wandering Qabil would have been mobbed by ravens eager for him to drop the body of his brother so they might begin eating him. There still would have been a lesson about death in these stories, but that lesson would have been less about honoring the dead or letting go and more about letting the dead sustain the living.

We all eat the dead in different forms. Dead things decay, returning the bits of matter of which they were made back to the earth and becoming new kinds of matter that sustain living beings; there is no way to avoid living by way of the dead. Reflecting on the inevitability of death alongside images of planting, harvesting, and feasting, the writer of Ecclesiastes seems to struggle with the recognition that none of this matter is created nor destroyed. To the world that God created, “nothing can be added…nor anything taken from it.” When we die, our bodies become part of that planting, part of a future harvest. Human beings generally prefer not to think about these realities, seeing in them in a form of cruelty or despair. “Who can bring them to see what is after them?” the writer asks.

Ravens play a visible role in this process of bringing the once-living back to the dust from which they came. They teach things we might try to forget.

v.

In the fourth chapter of the Rule of Saint Benedict, nestled among a long list of “instruments of good works,” the text admonishes its audience to “maintain the prospect of death before your eyes daily.” These words seem like a paraphrase of wisdom from Ecclesiastes or a fragment from a sermon on Ash Wednesday, but in the context of Saint Benedict’s life, they also seem like practical wisdom from a man who survived many attempts by jealous colleagues to poison him.

During one such attempt, the tainted bread was intercepted by a raven who had long been Benedict’s companion. The bird warned Benedict about the bread, hopping around as ravens often do when they are anxious about the safety of a food source. Benedict directed the raven to take the poison far away. “Take up that loaf and leave it in some such place where no man may find it.”

The story provides a glimpse into the grief of an Abel who survives. Benedict was spared by the raven from Abel’s fate, but he must live now with the burdens of what he cannot unlearn. He does not gratify anger; he does not seek revenge. With the help of the raven, he lets go of the poisoned loaf. He does not let it consume him.

vi.

Five years before he preached about ravens, Charles Spurgeon preached at the Surrey Gardens Music Hall on a Sunday evening to a crowd of twelve thousand people, with reports of ten thousand more gathering in the street outside. At some point in the service, shouts of “Fire!” rang out from the crowd, and a stampede of thousands rushed to the doors, killing seven people—including a pregnant woman and someone who was suffocated under the body of her own sister, crying for help in the crush of the crowd. A close friend of Spurgeon’s said, “I cannot but think, from what I saw, that his comparatively early death might be in some measure due to the furnace of mental suffering he endured on and after that fearful night.” For years, Spurgeon would burst into tears at an instant for reasons the young preacher could not explain.

vii.

Before Genesis begins to narrate the burial of the dead, more lifeless bodies appear. In Genesis 6–9, we read about a flood that wipes out all animal life, save for the family God has spared aboard a ship together with pairs of every kind of animal, set apart to repopulate the world. At the end of the story, a man named Noah sends out a raven to see whether the waters have receded.

Interpreters of the Noah story have long struggled to understand why this raven never returns to the ark. To fill in the narrative gap, many readers have relied upon their understanding of the raven as a carrion bird as well as its reputation for cruelty. The raven was distracted, they reason, “held captive by gluttony,” seeing the casualties of the flood—those excluded from the ark—as a source of food. Jemima Blackburn, a Scottish painter who became one of the most popular illustrators of the Victorian period, depicted Noah’s raven eagerly descending upon the engorged body of a drowned horse, preparing to begin its feast.

But among the bodies emerging from the deep, there must have also been thousands upon thousands of ravens. The raven may well have been feeding as the waters receded, but the bird might also have been a restless wanderer—moving to and fro over the surface of the receding water and landing beside lifeless conspecifics, counting, bird by bird, each and every loss.

When Noah leaves the ark, God will provide a covenant that enshrines the value of every life and at the same time permits the consumption of flesh. God will now “require a reckoning” for both human and nonhuman animals, and at the same time, “every moving thing that lives shall be food.” Those who looked out from the boat, scanning the waters and waiting for the shore to emerge, might have learned the lessons of this covenant by other means.

 

 

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Ashleigh Elser is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and the history of biblical interpretation who teaches at Saint Louis University. She is currently working on a book about ravens in biblical literature.