livestock: the land animals people keep and live among, and by extension the land animals as a whole
This is the everyday Hebrew word for a land animal, and its home ground is the farmyard rather than the wilderness. Oxen, sheep, goats, donkeys and camels are the creatures it names most often: the working animals a family owns, counts as wealth, rests on the Sabbath, loses in a plague, or carries off from a captured town. The great majority of its roughly 190 appearances carry that domestic sense, which is why "livestock" serves it better than the older English "cattle".
Two contrasts set its edges. Set against the word for a wild creature (חַיָּה), it means the tame animals people keep. Set against people, it widens out to mean animals of any kind, the land creatures listed alongside the birds and the small things that crawl. A few fixed phrases, "the animals of the earth" and "the animals of the field", pull it the other way, toward the predators and scavengers of open country. It differs from the word for a herd as property (מִקְנֶה) in naming the creatures themselves, owned or not.
Its most striking use is the pair "man and beast", a way of saying "every living thing here":
- in the plague stories, where sores and death fall on people and animals alike
- in the judgment oracles, where a ruined land is emptied of people and animals together
- in the promises of restoration, where both are sown again and multiplied
- in Jonah, where the animals of Nineveh fast in sackcloth and God is said to pity them too
The same word also measures the distance between people and animals, and then sometimes closes it. A person who lives without understanding "is like the animals that perish"; the psalmist confesses that he had become a brute beast before God; and Ecclesiastes presses the comparison hardest of all, observing that people and animals draw one breath and come to one end.