Skunks Are Not in the Bible — but Smell Is, and Strangely

Biblical Dream InterpretationSee all 70 articles in this series

Skunks are not in the Bible. They are North American, and no biblical writer ever met one.

Smell, though, runs right through Scripture, and it is used for something no one expects.

The sacrificial instructions repeat a phrase dozens of times: the offering is an aroma pleasing to the Lord (Leviticus 1:9).

It is a startlingly physical way to describe worship, and the writers knew it. The prophets attack the idea directly when the offerings are made by people behaving badly — I cannot bear your worthless assemblies (Isaiah 1:13) — so the phrase is never about the smoke itself.

What it captures is something arriving. A smell crosses a distance without being carried, and reaches the person before the thing does.

Paul takes the image and does something with it that most readers pass over.

But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. (2 Corinthians 2:14-16)

The same smell. Not two smells — one, received in opposite ways.

The picture behind it is a Roman triumph, where incense was burned along the route. For the victors it meant celebration. For the prisoners walking in the same procession, the same incense meant the end.

Paul then asks the obvious question and leaves it hanging: And who is equal to such a task?

There is one more, and it is domestic.

Mary pours perfume on Jesus’s feet, and John adds a detail nobody needed: And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. (John 12:3)

The objection is raised immediately — it could have been sold. The answer given is that it will not always be possible to do this.

A year’s wages, gone in a moment, and what the text records is that everyone in the building could smell it.

The honest caveat first. Scripture contains no dream dictionary and never implies one exists. Joseph and Daniel both say interpretation belongs to God rather than to their skill (Genesis 40:8; Daniel 2:27-28). Nobody can say what a particular dream meant.

The associations a skunk carries — a warning, a defence, something that clings, an unwelcome arrival — are ours, from living in a place skunks live. Scripture supplies none of them.

What it does supply about smell is narrow and worth having:

It travels. Something reaches people before we do, and we do not control how it is received.

It is received two ways at once. 2 Corinthians 2:16 is the only passage in the New Testament where the same thing is life to one person and death to another, with no fault in the thing itself.

It lingers. John 12:3 notes the house, not the feet.

And if the dream was simply unpleasant, that is what dreams often are. It does not need a reading.

Lord, something of us reaches people before we arrive.

Make it bearable, and where we cannot, make it honest.

Where we have been received badly for no fault, keep us from bitterness.

And let the house smell of something poured out rather than something spilled.

Are skunks in the Bible?

No. Skunks are North American and no biblical writer encountered one.

What does smell symbolise in Scripture?

Something arriving across a distance. Offerings are “an aroma pleasing to the Lord” (Leviticus 1:9), and Paul calls believers the aroma of Christ (2 Corinthians 2:15).

What does 2 Corinthians 2:16 mean?

One smell received two ways — life to some, death to others — with the image drawn from a Roman triumph, where the same incense meant celebration to the victors and the end to the prisoners.

Does the Bible interpret dreams about animals?

No. It records dreams God interpreted through prophets and says plainly that interpretation belongs to God (Genesis 40:8).

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