Jeremiah 7:20 - Exposition

Upon man, and upon beast. That all creation shares in the curse of man is repeatedly affirmed in the Old Testament as well as the New. Inferentially, this doctrine appears from the narrative of the Fall, and still more clearly from Isaiah's description of Paradise regained ( Isaiah 11:1-16 ). Hosea speaks of sufferings of the animals arising out of the guilt of Israel ( Hosea 4:3 ), and a consciousness of the "solidarity" of all living creatures is ascribed to a Ninevite king in the Book of Jonah ( Jonah 3:7 , Jonah 3:8 ). In general, the origin of this community of suffering is left mysterious, but in Genesis 6:12 it is expressly stated as the cause of the Deluge, that "all flesh [ i . e . both man and beast.] had corrupted its way upon the earth;" i . e . apparently, that contact with man had led to a corruption of the original innocence of the lower animals. It is a common experience that intercourse between Christianized (not to say civilized) man and the domestic animals produces a sometimes pathetic change in the psychic phenomena of the latter. Is the reverse process utterly inconceivable?