Dreaming About Killing Cats: Cats Barely Appear in the Bible

Scripture records no dream of killing a cat, and gives no meaning to one. Cats barely appear in the Bible. The one clear mention is a single verse in Baruch, a book that Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include and the 66-book Protestant Bible does not.

That near-silence is itself worth a few minutes, and so is the distress a dream like this leaves behind.

Are cats mentioned in the Bible?

Once clearly, in the Bibles of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. The King James Version, from Genesis to Revelation, never mentions a cat — not in the law, not in the histories, not in the poetry, not in the Gospels. A few modern translations put “wildcats” among the desert animals of Isaiah 34:14, where the King James Version has “wild beasts of the desert”.

The clear mention belongs to the Letter of Jeremiah, which Catholic Bibles print as the sixth chapter of Baruch and Orthodox Bibles keep as a book of its own beside Jeremiah and Baruch. It mocks idols that cannot keep animals off their own heads. The Douay-Rheims translation reads: “Owls, and swallows, and other birds fly upon their bodies, and upon their heads, and cats in like manner” (Baruch 6:21). The next verse draws the lesson: “Whereby you may know that they are no gods.”

The cat’s near-absence is genuinely odd, because Egypt is all over the Bible and Egypt was full of cats. They were kept, loved, and buried with honours; the goddess Bastet was depicted as one.

That may be precisely the point. Israel’s Scriptures are conspicuously uninterested in the animals its neighbours worshipped, and when they mention them at all it is to say they are only animals. A creature at the centre of Egyptian religion barely makes the page, and its one clear appearance is perched on an idol.

Lions are there in abundance. Leopards, bears, jackals, wild donkeys. The household cat, once at most.

So what can the dream mean?

Nothing that Scripture will tell us, and we should resist the pages that claim otherwise. There is no biblical symbol here to decode: the one clear mention of cats in any Bible puts them on idols, in a passage that has nothing to do with dreams.

What is worth attending to is the feeling. Dreams in which we do something violent are among the most distressing there are, and people wake from them ashamed — as though the dream were a confession.

It is not. We are not morally responsible for what our sleeping mind assembles out of the day’s fragments. Scripture judges the heart and the deed; it nowhere holds anyone accountable for a dream.

What Scripture does say about cruelty to animals

Since the dream involved harm to a creature, the Bible’s actual position is worth knowing, and it is kinder than most people expect.

The righteous care for the needs of their animals, but the kindest acts of the wicked are cruel. That is Proverbs, and it makes care for animals a mark of righteousness rather than a sentimentality.

The law required an ox to be allowed to eat while it worked, a bird’s mother to be let go, and animals to rest on the Sabbath alongside their owners. A donkey collapsed under a load was to be helped up, even if it belonged to someone who hated you.

God’s care runs further than ours. He feeds the ravens. He notices the sparrow.

If the guilt lingers

Let us take that seriously rather than dismissing it.

Sometimes a violent dream sits on top of a real anger we have not admitted — at a person, a situation, ourselves. The dream is not the sin, but the anger may be worth bringing into the light before it finds a waking shape.

And sometimes it is simply the brain doing its untidy overnight filing, and means nothing at all.

Either way, the remedy is the same and it is very old: say it to God plainly, and if it will not lift, say it to a person.

A blessing for the morning

May we not be condemned by our own sleep.

May the anger we are carrying find words before it finds a target.

And may we be counted among the righteous who care for the needs of their animals — a small mercy, and Scripture thinks it tells you a great deal about a person.

Related reading

• Dreaming About Dead Animals: The Bible Gives It No Meaning
• Dreaming About Wolves: The Bible Gives It No Meaning — but It Warns About Wolves
• 12 Prayers For Repentance: Simple & Powerful