What do you mean there are no cats in the Bible?

Visiting with our cat Dudley over breakfast, I began to wonder what the Bible had to say about cats. There were certainly cats in the Middle East in those days—the Egyptians mummified and deified them—but when I took my Cruden’s Complete Concordance off the shelf I found that it listed not a single passage about cats.

Dogs, yes. For instance, the dogs that ate Jezebel, leaving nothing but the palms of her hands.

Sheep and goats, of course, and the swine that ran down a steep place and were drowned. The whale that swallowed Jonah. Serpents, check. Eagles, check. Wolves and owls, check. Plagues of frogs and locusts. Shellfish and other treyf. Camels that have difficulty passing through the eye of a needle. Dragons, though the Revised Standard Version retranslates them disappointingly as hyenas. Even unicorns. But no cats.

Some of the big cats do appear: the lions in the den with Daniel, the leopard that can’t change its spots. But our friend Felis domesticus is nowhere to be seen.

It doesn’t seem right.