The Dietary Laws of the Torah

Both Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 dictate a variety of dietary laws for the Israelites. (There is considerable overlap in those two chapters as much of Deuteronomy repeats the Law for those Israelites about to enter Canaan.)

In the dietary laws (kashrut) some animals are declared clean while other animals are declared unclean. In Judaism, foods that satisfy the kashrut laws are called kosher. Closely related to the clean-unclean categories in Judaism are the halal-haram categories in Islam. Of particular importance in both religions is that pork is forbidden and an animal must be drained of its blood during slaughter.

Why, in the Torah, does YHWH call some animals clean and others unclean?  There are a number of suggested answers to this question and most commentators agree that the answer is not clear and no single answer is agreed upon by Biblical scholars.  Indeed, it is not even clear the identity of some of the animals described in Leviticus 11 or Deuteronomy 14.  Here are some of the suggested explanations:

1. The distinctions are irrelevant and known only to YHWH.
2. The dietary distinction are for hygienic reasons; unclean animals will make the people sick or carry diseases.
3. The unclean animals are related, in some way, to other issues of cleanliness in the Torah, such as anything dealing with death or reproduction.
4. The unclean animals were part of various cultic practices in Canaan and around the region.
5. The divisions are symbolic: clean animals represented completion and unclean animals were incomplete in some way.

I find the first answer unacceptable -- although the various other laws may, at times, seem strange to us, they are usually motivated by the need for justice in that culture.  Furthermore, the Israelites were to meditate on the Law, seeking to understand and practice it.  It is hard to meditate on irrelevant distinctions.

All the rest of the reasons seem to have some truth to them but do not provide a full explanation. Pork meat can carry roundworm parasites and thus communicate trichinosis. Predatory birds are often carrion eaters and so presumably can bring infection from the carrion they eat.  One might note that in general, Israelites were prohibited from eating any carcass found in the desert.  But hygiene does not explain all the distinctions; apparently some unclean animals were safer to eat than some clean animals!

Certainly the Torah describes some activities themselves as unclean.  As the Bible Project points out, activities dealing with death were often viewed as unclean.  Touching a dead body made one unclean. Related to death were activities related to bodily fluids and reproduction, such as blood from a woman's period. This might explain the rejection of carrion eaters.

The fourth explanation is a partial explanation for the distinction between clean and unclean foods.  Several times in the Law, a jarring sentence appears, stating that a lamb is not to be cooked in its mother's milk.  This was apparently a common Canaanite practice.  Some tribes in the ancient Near East may have sacrificed pigs or other animals and then (of course) eaten the sacrificed meat.  In the Law's stress on complete separation from these pagan practices, it is possible the Israelites were forbidden to even think about eating those foods.  We see this in the New Testament conflict (I Corinthians 8) over eating food sacrificed to idols. If one ate food that had been sacrificed to idols, was one endorsing the idol worship?  It is possible that this question is in the background of the dietary laws.

Others have argued that an emphasis on completion (as in the Sabbath practices) drives some of these laws.  Some of the animals might have been viewed as incomplete. Animals that swam in water should have scales and fins; those that did not have scales and fins were "incomplete" water dwellers and thus unclean.

For the ancient Israelites, the main emphasis of these laws was to separate them from the culture around them. As a "treasured possession" of YHWH, they were to be noticeably different.  This difference was to be detectable even in their national diet.

For the modern Christian, who does not live in the ancient Near East culture of three thousand years ago, the dietary laws are not, by themselves, in effect. (See Mark 7:19 and Acts 10.) The conflicts that arose in the early church involved the mixing of Jewish and Gentile cultures, so that, in the church council in Acts 15, Gentile Christians were given some simplistic dietary restrictions intended to accommodate their Jewish brothers and sisters.  The dietary restrictions at that time included not eating food offered to idols or meat prepared in ways that were nauseating to the Jew. (See Acts 15: 29.)

The early history of the Jews was to create a unique godly nation, distinct from the rest of the Near East. The early history of the followers of Messiah Yeshua (Jesus) emphasized a life-style distinct from the world around them. The mark of a Christian was how they worshiped YHWH and how they treated others.