The use of this term in the denunciation against Jehoiakim, more than six centuries B.C., and the previous enumeration of crimes in the 22nd chapter of Jeremiah, would seem sufficiently to account for its origin and use in regard to the disposal of the dead bodies of excommunicated or notorious malefactors, by the earliest Christian writers or judges. The Hebrew name of the ass, says Parkhurst, is "derived from its turbulence when excited by lust or rage;" and the animal was also made the symbol of slothful or inglorious ease, in the case of Issachar, B.C. 1609: Genesis, xlix. 14. It is thus probable some reference to such characteristics of the brute and the criminal, rather than any mere general allusion to throwing the dead bodies of inferior or unclean animals (of which the dog was a more common type) under any rubbish beyond the precincts of the city, may have been intended, by specifying this animal in prescribing an ignominious sepulture.
Lamba.
It can hardly have escaped the notice of your Querist (although the instance is not one adduced by Ducange), that the phrase, "burial of an ass" קְבוּרַת חֲמוֹר for "no burial at all," is as old as the time of the prophet Jeremiah. (Vide chap. xxii. 19.) The custom referred to being of religious origin, might lead us to the sacred books for the origin of the phrase denoting it; and it seems natural for the Christian writers, in any mention of those whose bodies, like that of Jehoiakim, were for their sins deprived of the rites of sepulture, to use the striking phrase already provided for them in Scripture; and as natural for that phrase to continue in use even after the somewhat more civilised custom of "imblocation" had deprived it of its original reference to "the dead body's being cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost." (Jer. xxxvi. 30.)
J. Eastwood.
This phrase is, I think, accounted for by the ass being deprived of interment in consequence of the uses made of its dead carcass. After a description of the adaptation of his bones to instrumental music, Aldrovandus continues as follows:—
"De corio notissimum, post obitum, ne quid asini unquam conquiescat, foraminibus delacerari, indeque factis cribris, assiduæ inservire agitationi; unde dicebat Apuleius: cedentes hinc inde miserum corium, nec cribris jam idoneum relinquunt. Sed et Albertus pollicetur asinorum corium non solum utile esse ad soleas calceorum faciendas, sed etiam quæ ex illa parte fiunt, in qua onera fuerunt, non consumi, etsi ille qui utitur, eis continuo peregrinando in lapidibus portaverit, et tandem ita indurare ut pedes sustinere nequeant."—De Quadruped., p. 351.
T. J.