I never understood that Bible passage that talks about the Son of Man separating the sheep from the goats (Mt. 25:31-33). I wasn’t raised on a farm and whenever I was with farm animals, it was always cows and horses. In America, sheep are do distinct from goats, that it just didn’t make sense that they would need to be separated – they already are separated!
Then I went to Kenya as a missionary and lived for years with the rural Maasai people who have herds, including sheep and goats. While the Maasai have individual words for sheep (inkerra) and goats (inkineji), the most commonly used word is intare, which refers to “a herd of combined sheep and goats.” Some wag even came up with an English translation for the word intare—“shoats”, though it never really caught on.
Maasai sheep and the goats are intermixed, and to the untrained eye (like mine), it is almost impossible to tell the difference between the two, especially when the animals are not fully grown. Since the animals habitually graze together, they seem as one, the same. Hence, the background to separating the sheep from the goats.
