Wild Cat

Cats were first domesticated in Egypt or Ethiopia about 1600 or 1700 B.C. and in China about the same time. It seems likely that in Africa the African Wild Cat felis lybica in its search for mice and rats began to inhabit granaries and was finally coaxed into people’s homes by feeding it scraps of meat. These earliest domestic cats were kept not simply as pets but for the control of the rodents. In Egypt the goddess Basht was given the cat as her symbol and she is usually depicted as having a cat’s head. Cats were also mummified and buried with important people. Basht was the divinity believed to inhabit and govern the region east of the Nile which is where the Israelites lived from the time of Joseph to the time of the Exodus. These associations of the cat with Basht probably explain why there is no mention of cats in the protocanonical books of the Bible and the only time cats are mentioned in the deuterocanonical books is in relation to Babylonian temples.