After learning that some media are practicing “cultural sensitivity” and being delicate about portrayals of animals that certain religious groups found offensive, Mary suggested that today’s metazoan should be a pretty pink pig. A good idea, I thought, but you know me — I can’t just stop there. So I read Leviticus.
Boy, Leviticus doesn’t just despise pigs…it detests just about everything. All these dirty, filthy animals (except the ones their tribe happens to raise for food and milk and fur, of course) that are disgusting and unclean. They are not only unfit to be sacrificed to the Lord, and not to ever, under any circumstances, be eaten, but if you touch them, alive or dead, you are befouled; if they touch any object it is unclean and must be destroyed. This is like the anti-biology chapter of the Bible.
So, for your edification, I’ve put the complete text of Leviticus 11 below the fold, along with a sampling of examples of the animals the Bible frowns upon. You know, it’s not just pigs — the Bible really loathes birds, and all invertebrates except 4 species.
Leviticus 11
1 And the Lord spake unto Moses and to Aaron, saying unto them,
2 Speak unto the children of Israel, saying, These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.
3 Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.
4 Nevertheless these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.
5 And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.
6 And the hare, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.
7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.
8 Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcase shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.
9 These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.
10 And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:
11 They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.
12 Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.
13 And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray,
14 And the vulture, and the kite after his kind;
15 Every raven after his kind;
16 And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind,
17 And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl,
18 And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle,
19 And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.
20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.
21 Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth;
22 Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.
23 But all other flying creeping things, which have four feet, shall be an abomination unto you.
24 And for these ye shall be unclean: whosoever toucheth the carcase of them shall be unclean until the even.
25 And whosoever beareth ought of the carcase of them shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even.
26 The carcases of every beast which divideth the hoof, and is not clovenfooted, nor cheweth the cud, are unclean unto you: every one that toucheth them shall be unclean.
27 And whatsoever goeth upon his paws, among all manner of beasts that go on all four, those are unclean unto you: whoso toucheth their carcase shall be unclean until the even.
28 And he that beareth the carcase of them shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even: they are unclean unto you.
29 These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,
30 And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.
31 These are unclean to you among all that creep: whosoever doth touch them, when they be dead, shall be unclean until the even.
32 And upon whatsoever any of them, when they are dead, doth fall, it shall be unclean; whether it be any vessel of wood, or raiment, or skin, or sack, whatsoever vessel it be, wherein any work is done, it must be put into water, and it shall be unclean until the even; so it shall be cleansed.
33 And every earthen vessel, whereinto any of them falleth, whatsoever is in it shall be unclean; and ye shall break it.
34 Of all meat which may be eaten, that on which such water cometh shall be unclean: and all drink that may be drunk in every such vessel shall be unclean.
35 And every thing whereupon any part of their carcase falleth shall be unclean; whether it be oven, or ranges for pots, they shall be broken down: for they are unclean and shall be unclean unto you.
36 Nevertheless a fountain or pit, wherein there is plenty of water, shall be clean: but that which toucheth their carcase shall be unclean.
37 And if any part of their carcase fall upon any sowing seed which is to be sown, it shall be clean.
38 But if any water be put upon the seed, and any part of their carcase fall thereon, it shall be unclean unto you.
39 And if any beast, of which ye may eat, die; he that toucheth the carcase thereof shall be unclean until the even.
40 And he that eateth of the carcase of it shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even: he also that beareth the carcase of it shall wash his clothes, and be unclean until the even.
41 And every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth shall be an abomination; it shall not be eaten.
42 Whatsoever goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth upon all four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all creeping things that creep upon the earth, them ye shall not eat; for they are an abomination.
43 Ye shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing that creepeth, neither shall ye make yourselves unclean with them, that ye should be defiled thereby.
44 For I am the Lord your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy: neither shall ye defile yourselves with any manner of creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
45 For I am the Lord that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.
46 This is the law of the beasts, and of the fowl, and of every living creature that moveth in the waters, and of every creature that creepeth upon the earth:
47 To make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the beast that may not be eaten.
If this book was written by the divine creator of the universe, the Earth, and all that lives on it, why does he so revile 99% of the species that he made?
20 All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.
Is there a bird species that goes about “upon all four”, or is the word “fowls” being used here to refer to something other than a bird?
I just checked some other translations, and their version of “fowls” here is “winged insects”.
@2: Still not on all “four”. :-)
Jehovah is the original fussy third grader.
Yahweh is quite the micro-manager. He can’t just say:
Cloven hoofs. Cud chewing. Have to have both to be a clean animal. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
He has to walk through every row of the truth table for “and” with examples, and reiteration of the basic rule.
My two favorite comments on that style of writing are in Edith Hamilton’s introduction to The Greek Way where she contrasts the economy of Greek writing with the repetitiveness of the Old Testament, and the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with its detailed instructions on how to count to 3.
doubter @#1 — I assume it has something to do with bats, which are included in the previous verse. Repetition is part of the oral style, and then too, given the hacked nature of these writings interpolations and redundancies shouldn’t be surprising. Also, the verse divisions are a later addition and somewhat random, thus perhaps the break between bats and the more general description of “fowl”…in the sense of anything that flies…that crawl on all fours is a scribal error.
I guess it’s A-OK to go out for the Bucket-O-Cockroaches tonight. As long as they’re the four-legged variety.
Big Boppa: As long as you don’t eat the loose legs in the bottom of the bucket, I think you’re good. Damn fried cockroaches are as bad as sesame-seed bagels for shedding.
Yemenite Jews do eat some varieties of locust. But they are the only group of Jews with a tradition of which locust are kosher.
As for the feathered kind of flying things, some orthodox Jews follow the rule that any bird not explicitly mentioned on the forbidden list is OK, while others limit themselves to those birds for which there was a known tradition of being consumed by Jews. IIRC Szatmari Hasidim avoid turkey for this reason.
This strikes me as a primitive version of a medical text. Don’t eat insects because you will get indigestion, don’t eat pigs because you will get weird parasites, don’t eat or touch things that die on you unexpectedly, wash your clothes and cookware if something goes wrong. A lot of them don’t make sense to us today, maybe some did make sense to some a few milennia ago. Maybe some never made sense and were the “pseudoscience” of the time.
I had heard that locusts were kosher, but I was surprised to see beetles included. Does anyone currently consider any kind of beetle kosher? The only web results I get are about cochineal beetles used as a food dye.
I read a book once (Marvin Harris, The Abominable Pig) that hypothesized that some of the ritual uncleanliness was due to discouraging farming animals that were resource-intensive in the given environments. In particular, it hinged upon the idea that the pig is the one animal prohibited in multiple religions, that said religions tend to be in areas of more marginal ability to farm pig-like animals, and that pigs are competitors with humans for similar food sources, ergo it doesn’t matter how delicious bacon is, stop raising pigs that eat us out of house and home, you idiots.
…but that doesn’t explain any of the others, particularly insects.
@11: According to this, cochineal is not Kosher.
http://www.kosherquest.org/book.php?id=FOOD_ADDITIVES.htm
and authorities are divided on shellac, another food additive from insects.
Both of these are problematic for vegans, too.
I don’t know, apparently you can eat beetles, which are said to constitute about 20 to 30% of all animal species. Although one would think that the creator’s apparent “inordinate fondness for beetles”, as Haldane supposedly called it, would mean it would know on how many legs they crawl…
This isn’t saying “don’t touch camels”, it says “don’t eat camels, and don’t butcher them either”. Which is reminiscent of the common taboo against eating horse: don’t eat the work animals!
I don’t know what they have against rabbits though.
Any divine know-it all creator would mention kangaroos. I mean how could a 6ft tall bouncing marsupial slip your mind and not get a mention?
Soylent green is an abonimation unto Nuggan. I’m kind of surprised Leviticus didn’t explicitly say don’t eat your neighbor, or your enemy, or your enemy’s neighbor, that be bad.
God also made all of them ‘clean’ later on.
Ac:10:12-15:
Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth,
and wild beasts,
and creeping things, and fowls of the air.
And there came a voice to him,
Rise,
Peter;
kill,
and eat.
But Peter said,
Not so,
Lord;
for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
And the voice spake unto him again the second time,
What God hath cleansed,
that call not thou common.
@ #17:
This is a book that says the rabbit/hare chews its cud and that a turtle has a voice. Among other knee-slappers.
Here’s a comparison of just two of the above groupings taken from a variety of translations; note that there’s almost more disagreement/disparity than commonality:
New International Version
the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey,
the gecko, the monitor lizard, the wall lizard, the skink and the chameleon.
New American Standard Bible
and the white owl and the pelican and the carrion vulture,
and the gecko, and the crocodile, and the lizard, and the sand reptile, and the chameleon
The Message
water hen, pelican, Egyptian vulture,
gecko, monitor lizard, wall lizard, skink, chameleon
Amplified
The swan, the pelican, the vulture,
The gecko, the land crocodile, the lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon
New Living Translation
the white owl, the pelican, the carrion vulture,
the gecko, the monitor lizard, the common lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon
King James
And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle,
And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole
English Standard Version
the barn owl, the tawny owl, the carrion vulture,
the gecko, the monitor lizard, the lizard, the sand lizard, and the chameleon
New King James Version
the white owl, the jackdaw, and the carrion vulture
the gecko, the monitor lizard, the sand reptile, the sand lizard, and the chameleon
21st Century King James
and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle
and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole
American Standard Version
and the horned owl, and the pelican, and the vulture
and the gecko, and the land-crocodile, and the lizard, and the sand-lizard, and the chameleon
Young’s Literal Transaltion
and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle
and the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole
Darby
and the swan, and the pelican, and the carrion vulture,
and the groaning lizard, and the great red lizard, and the climbing lizard, and the chomet, and the chameleon
This is a common mistake of the religious; assuming that religious edicts must have some secular purpose. The reason not to eat rabbits is because God said so.
I don’t see a prohibition in there anywhere of LOOKING at any of these animals. Why would you be offended by a picture of a pig?
Don’t these people read their own books?
Ya, I followed this when I was a fundy.
The rabbit digestive tract isn’t very efficient, so it takes one pass bunny berries, chews them up (chewing its cud), and runs through the process again.
I take it you are a KJV fan. Some other versions translate Song of Solomon 2:12 as “turtledove”, not “turtle”.
@edinodum, #10, I always find that argument unconvincing — that the authors were somehow channeling medical or hygiene or health information in these strictures. It’s a common argument used by defenders of the gobbledygook in the OT — that Jehovah was just looking out for us, including all this darned useful information and making it holy so that our ancestors wouldn’t get trichinosis, and isn’t that Marvelous! Not buying it. I mean, reading the text, there’s nothing in there about how these animals or this or that kind of meat Makes You Sick. It’s all about how it’s merely an Abomination to the Lord. And there’s fundamentally no good reason for not eating pig, or rabbit, or whatever, compared to sheep and goats and cows. You can argue about the economics of it, as @carlie, #12 does, referring to Marvin Harris’s book, but I find that pretty unconvincing and ad hoc, too. Lots of cultures made pig husbandry work, economically. Pigs are nifty little omnivores, eat lots of things which are unappealing to people, although admittedly, they will ruin your garden. But then so do the pesky wild rabbits, which you should eat to keep ’em from eating the turnips and their tops. And part of the point of the food economics of pig husbandry is it’s stored protein — you slaughter and eat the pig when it has achieved full growth, more or less, and when the rest of the food is currently unproductive, i.e. in winter, well after the harvest, when you’ve got nothing but your stored, softening root veggies and the grain supplies are dwindling, then you slaughter the pig, and then the household eats well for several weeks. I may be waving my hands here, as are those who offer up these “medical advice” apologia, but:
in the end, the OT is in no way a science text with some secret knowledge manifesting the benevolence of Jehovah or preserving the Wise Ways of the Tribe. The leprosy chapters and that medical advice is really risible.
@21, Reginald: exactly.
Is it good because Jehovah says so, or does Jehovah say so because it is good?
@20 – of course turtles have voices. Haven’t you ever seen the video of a pet turtle moaning as it humps the hell out of a shoe? Here‘s a page with a bunch of tortoise mating calls, in fact.
(Also, I think the original “voice of the turtle” expression was referring to turtledoves.)
And rabbits may not chew their own cud, but they do eat their own shit, and it’s perfectly plausible to think that primitive peoples might have the same word for different forms of re-eating one’s food.
(None of this changes the overall point, of course.)
@Dr. Pablito
Just because it isn’t very good medical or economic advice, doesn’t mean that isn’t the kind of thing that inspired it. You might as well say doctors weren’t trying to give medical help when they did blood letting, because it isn’t good medical advice! So I’m not sure what point you were trying to make, what position you found “unconvincing”.
What’s more convincing (to me at least) is the idea that the prohibitions are meant to enforce cultural separation from the other people living around them. The Old Testament in particular is littered with injunctions against mixing with the neighbors, to the point where there is a specific prohibition against a form of divination that was practiced in the region (eating a kid boiled in its mother’s milk). Jehovah is a jealous god, don’t forget, and doesn’t want his people escaping into other cultures, because religion and culture were inseparable at the time.
wayne at 19 – he didn’t actually make them clean, it was just a metaphor God was using to convince Peter to go proselytize to the dirty Gentiles.
brianpansky #30
Except those doctors explained how and why they are doing it and how it is supposed to help the patient. The Bible doesn’t do that, nor does it tell about how sinners who disobey Yahoweh’s culinary advice suffered for it. It’s quite odd really, for many other sins (mostly false worship, but also adultery and so on) Israelites are punished repeatedly. Even verbal tradition (which is the real basis for the entire Jewish Halakha*) doesn’t mention health as a reason for Kashrut. These laws are supposed to be accepted as is for no other reason than god said so.
Numenaster #31
Exactly!
The ban of bacon in ESL books may sound ridiculous and outrageous, but I don’t think the Swine Society will be particularly incensed. On the other hand, this is something harming real people:
And it’s something that cannot be blamed exclusively on religious groups.
Anyway, I’ve got a personal prohibition against eating cute animals.
And I think all animals are cute in their own special ways.
I mean, who would eat that cute pig? And that smirking camel?
@17 – Indeed.
So I’m not sure. Is it ok for me to eat Kangaroo? What about Marsupials in general? And what about the ‘animals that layeth eggs yet suckle thy young’? Such a noble and complete book should be able to tell me if I can eat an Echidna.
And I just love verse 12. Apparently God couldn’t see all the small wee beasties that float around in water that have no fins nor scales yet we eat them every time we drink a glass of water – apparently to the detriment of our soul.
Its as if God didn’t know much more about the world than the people who carried his book around the desert. Odd that.
sorry to be nit-picking (which I have been accused of previously), but number two, the coney, is not a picture of a rabbit. Unless there is another version/translation somewhere, coney is old english for rabbit (and amusingly enough, supposed to be the origin of the four letter gender insult “c” word from the original latin, “conus”). But I grant the Bible was not written in english so maybe a bad translation.
A few points:
It doesn’t say the almighty reviles these things. It says they make you unclean. That’s a notion we barely have anymore. It’s sort of like mixing bleach and ammonia. For unknown reasons carrying these things into a temple will cause bad things to happen.
The word “abomination” doesn’t mean now what it meant in the 17th century. A better translation is “inappropriate combination.” Has hooves, doesn’t combine it with cud-chewing, etc. There may have been a theory that YHWH created cows and they mated with–something–people? cats? bears?–and that’s where we got pigs. Hence pigs are an inappropriate combination.
The other main theme of these laws is “don’t act like a Babylonian.” These passages were compiled (if not written) during the Babylonian conquest and a lot of the weirder stuff comes down to that.
There’s no convincing health argument here. Pork is the one most people point to, but raw pork wasn’t as risky then as it was in more recent times, when people kept pigs in their backyard and fed them garbage, waste, and dead pig parts. Raw fowl is also risky but plenty of fowl is allowed. And there’s nothing about cooking anything properly, which would solve a lot of the problems anyhow. Overall there doesn’t seem to be a division based on health.
Dr Pablito-
I suspect that these dietary restrictions, however they came about, were more likely compiled by the author than invented by him. Also, they did not necessarily become “holy scripture” as far as I know, until they were compiled into a holy book centuries later.
Keeping a Kosher diet must suck. How do Jews live without centipede and heron brownies? Or double ferret chip cookies?
Beetles? What beetles, or what mistranslation?
Will you?
Horses were apparently routinely sacrificed to the Germanic gods, and the meat eaten. The religious association was apparently strong enough that eating horsemeat came to be seen as dangerously close to apostasy and was therefore avoided.
Oh! Interesting! Reference, please?
It is a bad translation – for a hyrax such as depicted! :-)
No, you’re thinking of cunnus.
…once Christianity was established, obviously.
People did eat beef while having their plows and wagons pulled by oxen.
ekinodum @10:
Assuming you didn’t know about parasites and microorganism spreading disease, but you notice that some people eating certain things tend to get sick, and wished to issue a warning in a theocracy you might end up with a document like this.
carlie @12:
There may be a bit of resource management going on also. Animals competing for food humans might eat is a possibility but also competition for water in a parched land, and fuel to properly cook pork or other infected meat might also be better used in some other way.
I wouldn’t call this pseudoscience as much as, possibly, quasi-science. Given a lack of other alternatives and both tools and background these rules, as deeply flawed as they are, likely served to lower the exposure to disease. So they serve some useful purpose.
On the other hand it has been noted that Jewish laws over food and cleanliness may have served to vilify the Jews. If their neighbors get sick and the Jews don’t it isn’t a huge leap for the paranoid mind to conclude the ones who didn’t get sick are poisoning, or cursing, the rest.
A similar pattern of cultural resistance to disease is seen in the late 1800s when it was well noted that Irish workers got sick but the Chinese workers didn’t. We now attribute the difference to the Chinese cultural practice of getting their water in the form of tea. The heating of water for tea deactivates the pathogens. The Irish, used to drinking freely from open water sources without any treatment tended to fall ill as the water was often polluted with giardia, sewage, or other contaminates.
People observe, form hypotheses, test (gee … the people who didn’t eat the undercooked pork, or shellfish contaminated by sewage, didn’t get sick), and draw conclusions (avoid the pork and shellfish). Given a lack of germ theory and understanding of parasites, and being intellectually blown off course by an assumption that disease is a punishment from on high, they weren’t going to come to scientifically valid conclusions. On the other hand humans are natural scientists and even given a lack of tools and background we try.
David Marjanović
That’s not a hyrax; it’s a Jamaican coney, a rodent related to the capybara. The one the bible was talking about was still a rabbit, though. (On which topic, how the hell could the authors tell the difference between a rabbit and a hare but not between birds and insects? Or even how many damn legs the insects have? Seriously now.)
Numenaster #31:
Yes, but this is not necessarily inconsistent with the taboos originally having a secular purpose, whether medically/scientifically sound or not.
Don’t forget that all those rules where probably already ancient when they finally wound up in the Torah.
Why must we not eat pork?
– Because everyone in the family got sick one time after eating it. There was even a fatality.
– Because my grandparents told my parents who told me and now I am telling you. Pork is bad for you.
– Because it is the way of The Ancestors. They never ate pork, from which we know, there must be something wrong with it.
– Because God said not to do it. Pork is unholy. Besides, it is something we just don’t do.
– Boom, now you have it in writing too. From this moment on it is Official.
What the fuck DO they eat?
#42, David – I thought it was a hyrax too, but how the hell (#45 Dalillama) could the bible know about jamaican coneys, unless they also lived in the mid-east? In any case, they probably taste great in escabeche just the same. As for “cunnus” or “conus” (my latin is poor, my memory is worse), I read many eons ago a theory that taboo slang mostly derived from names for animals, and the more taboo a word (like “c…”), the closer to humans (in terms of domestication) the animal in question. The author used the latin root for rabbit to show how this particular word was a very severe taboo word in many languages. It was an article in the New Scientist, a loooong time ago. But the “cunnus” explanation sounds more logical, pity…
What about UNICORNS??? (mentioned in several places in KJV 1611) YHVH must have REALLY been down on THEM … this from Answers in Genesis childrens’ bible: (sorry, the pic won’t paste)
https://www.facebook.com/AwkwardBible/photos/a.359435304070572.103181.313075568706546/699030176777748/?type=1&theater
I like the theory that pigs are an ecological nuisance in semidesert areas. On a hot summer day, they will look for any available water and wallow in it.
However, some of those customs seem convenient for distinguishing the Israelites from their neighbors. The Israelites had lived in the highlands north and south of Jerusalem, and forbidding shellfish would be a way of avoiding associating with the Philistines, who inhabited the coastal plains. Here is an interesting discussion of the pig question: Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah | Israel Finkelstein – Academia.edu Pig bones became scarce in the highlands around 1000 BCE, suggesting that rejecting of eating pork goes back a long way. However, pig bones were common in the coastal plains. So was rejecting of pork another way for Israelites to distinguish themselves form the Philistines?
@edinodum 10 & Numenaster 31
It is most likely a combination of those two. Where one stops and the other begins isn’t easy to disentangle. Some of the commands, particularly with washing after dealing with dead animals, had definite health benefits. The trichinosis bit with pigs is at best overstated, but it’s understandable how people would think animals that eat filth would in turn be filthy. That list would include, but not be limited to carrion eating birds, pigs, filter feeders, catfish and other detritus eaters, etc. Other rules were probably just about defining cultural boundaries and excluding outsiders. All of them were given the force of God’s law because that more forcefully ensures compliance.
…because if you do, you’ll become the abominable snowman and be forced to live high in the Himalayas, where it’s very cold.
seriously, what differentiates “abominable” and “unclean”?
… on second thought, I don’t really want to know.
Wait, so people used to lick rabbits?
Not a word of this is going to stop me eating bacon butties. If you don’t want me to eat bacon, God, then don’t invent pigs.
Cunnus vs. coney: you’re both right!
http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=coney&allowed_in_frame=0
http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=cunt&allowed_in_frame=0
Basically, “coney” sounds enough like “cunnus”, along with the notion of something soft and warm and furry, for it to work. i do think this note from the first link is hilarious: “‘Rabbit’ arose 14c. to mean the young of the species, but gradually pushed out the older word 19c., after British slang picked up coney as a punning synonym for cunny “c**t” (compare connyfogle “to deceive in order to win a woman’s sexual favors”). The word was in the King James Bible [Prov. xxx:26, etc.], however, so it couldn’t be entirely dropped, and the solution was to change the pronunciation of the original short vowel (rhyming with honey, money) to rhyme with boney.”
The biblical “coney” was more probably the hyrax, the rabbit was originally West European(Spain) in habitat
…and the pea ye shall not allow to toucheth the mashed potatoes.
Y’all are making this too complicated.
Jehovah loves bacon. Don’t eat the bacon, it’s Jehovah’s. You even think about eating the bacon, much less actually get close enough to one of those tempting, walking, hunks of meat to actually touch it, you’ve really pissed Jehovah off.
Because he wants ALL the bacon.
Why was it necessary to mention the little owl and the great owl separately from the generic owl? Was there some great concern that people would rules lawyer their way into eating owls? Are owls particularly delicious? I wouldn’t think so given common use of the expression “tougher than a boiled owl”.
@44:
Really? Can you explain how this proscription list would have lowered disease incidence more so than any other random list? I’m not an expert on food-borne illness, but I have taken a parasitology class, and as far as I can tell the clean/unclean distinction has no relationship at all to what you should and shouldn’t eat.
Actually, I think you’ve got this backwards. People back then (like nearly any “primitive” culture you can find today) would have been experts on what was and wasn’t safe to eat. The sources of parasites, which would have been a minor cause of disease and are entirely avoidable by cooking, would not have been evident to them; but the sources of food poisoning would have been very evident to them, and they would have known what animals and body parts they could eat and how to prepare and store them. It took the priestly class to come along and tell them to stop eating things that they knew were perfectly safe.
Well that’s just awesome. Jehovah hates the Seahawks.
How come all the dinosaurs that were on the ark don’t get a mention? Does that mean all dinosaur meat is kosher?
@NelC 61
Just stretch the bird and lizard rules and I’m sure you could cover most of them. Predatory and carrion eating birds are out, so predatory and carrion eating dinosaurs (at least land dwelling ones) would be out. Other birds are all excluded by name, so any land dwelling herbivorous dinosaur should be fine. Well, unless we hold them to the even toes and chews cud rule. Marine and aquatic species need to have fins and scales, that should exclude some, unless we’re calling them birds too. OK, I take it back, maybe it wouldn’t be so easy. I’ll ask a rabbi.
My point was merely that I detest the apologetics that argue that these arbitrary, pre-scientific strictures were somehow based on an enlightened despotism by Jehovah and encode information which now, from our 21st century perspective, can be seen to be good for us. This argument is often generalized to defend the Buy-bull on the grounds that we may not understand it now, in the fullness in which Jehovah has given it to us, but we can rest assured that Jehovah gave it to us (in English…) as a reliable, unquestionable, not at all arbitrary moral code, and therefore you better believe. And regarding bacon, Crip Dyke, #57, there is an argument, which I find compelling, that bacon was forbidden to the Israelites because it tasted too much like people and tended to remind and tempt the Israelites of their days before Jehovah forbade human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism.
ooh I love all these other theories other people are talking about! Especially Crip Dyke’s! And that tribalistic one.
@33, AlexanderZ
brianpansky #30
Erm, what about this causes a problem for the health related hypothesis? Did you just pick a random dissimilarity between the two situations? I could come up with a dozen dissimilarities, but unless the differences are relevant, there is no point to pointing them out.
Hmm, yes but you could apply this as a complaint to pretty much any other hypothesis someone comes up with too.
@63, Dr. Pablito
ah yes, that kind of apologism. I see what you mean.
To be fair, we can’t blame the original text for the idiocy of the King James Version. Rabbits didn’t exist in the middle east at all. The bible did mean the hyrax. Which the Jacobian English would never have heard of. The “fowl” were never birds and were always insects and not actually confused in the original. The leaping legs of insects were not considered legs.
And Unicorns are certainly kosher but very hard to catch (they’re damned large and strong). By the way, giraffes are kosher except no-body knows how to slaughter them properly.
Never gonna take that fussy old god to the food hall at the mall. We’d be there for hours just deciding. Won;t go to the fashion store either, that’d be a bugger.
Brother Maynard fetch the holy hand grenade!
What’s with all the inane redundancy? E.g. the creeping things that creep upon the earth. Versus what? The creeping things that do not creep upon the earth? IMO “Creepy crawly” would be better as it would make the redundancy more charming: The creepy crawly things that creepy crawl upon the earth.
The ye shall be holy; for I am holy refrain is really pathetic. Reminds me of ST TOS Dr. Richard Daystrom reassuring the ultimate computer, the M5, that “you are great, I am great”.
There’s nothing as effective as actually reading the bible to convince me that the Abrahamic god is one of man’s lamest inventions. No wonder xians have to have bible studies. Just imagine the ridicule if they let newbies read it without spin.
I dunno, all that sounds pretty creepy to me, eggmoidal.
Interesting about the Jamaican “coney”. I didn’t know a New World rodent was called like that.
They’re also mistranslated auerochsen.
Why would anyone give a flying fuck about what the people that wrote all that non-sense had to say about anything…
This kind of thing always reminds me of the idiots who claim that ancient civilizations had superior knowledge and understanding and that we have so much to learn from their wisdom….No…they didn’t know shit compared to us, that’s a fact…and that most absolutely includes morality, let alone the number of extremities insects have…
They were profoundly ignorant, ridiculously supersticious and strongly bigoted…qualities that i don’t apreciate in any authority.
No, no, PZ! It’s because God LOVES his creatures. And that’s why he forbids humans to kill and eat so many of them!
Some of these are probably rooted in ancient medical/sanitary ideas.
But many others are simply exercises in community the building. We are the people, and we are all in this together, so we will all eat and not eat the same kinds of things. Not like those barbarians across the hill who will put any disgusting thing in their pieholes (yuck!)….
Since reading Stephenson’s “Snow Crash,” I’d always figured that the purpose of all these dietary restrictions was to stop all that race-mingling that was going on. Or rather, since the mingling was inevitable, it was a no-brainer way to distinguish the “us” from the “them” when everyone was living alongside one another. When everyone looks the same and talks the same and tends to believe in different overlapping subsets of deities, the “eat/does not eat” and the circumcision thing would be quick ways of identifying whether your neighbors were True Allies or Foreigners who may safely be treated like dirt.
woozy
That one would fly a lot better if insects besides grasshoppers had leaping legs.
Those legs are homologous!
Well, waddya know it, the bible presaged evolution theory!
To Numenaster (@31): According to Israel Finkelstein, until the Philistines showed up nobody in the area was eating pigs, despite the fact that oaks are dominant plants in the hilly areas. There seems to have been a general taboo. Conflict around whether a group consumed pork or not became salient in Helenic times.
Yeah, by my reckoning bees and other flying insects ought to be kosher as they have six rather than four legs.
But as apologetic as the explanation sounds, I’m inclined to accept it as I can’t really believe any people at any time wouldn’t know how many legs an insect has. I’d be inclined to think “walk on all fours” is an idiom that came in later by an idiot translator who wasn’t thinking it out except … well, no-one else seems to think that is the case. But seriously, how could they not know how many legs an insect has?
Okay, googling and get past the “the bible is utterly infalliable therefore…” and the “the bible is dripping with errors” crowd… The verse does refer to insects; does talk in original language of going on all fours; and *no-one* knows why (the “leaping legs don’t count as legs” *was* entirely an apologetic fabrication). Some think, as I’m currently inclined to, that it was simply an idiom meaning to crawl. But no-one actually knows.
The word for “creeping things” wasn’t just insects but all sorts of “vermin”. “Creeping” is kind of equivalent to “crawling out from under a rock” in a way. But the “flying creeping things” is pretty clearly insects. So who the fuck knows.
I’m inclined to think now that its “going on all fours” in terms of “vermin” idioms while not really considering that it’s mostly insects with six legs that they were talking about.
But who the fuck knows.
Well, the ebola strain now ravaging West Africa is thought to be spread through bats, so maybe that one gets a pass. I don’t see “bush meat” in there anywhere.
It’s a cook book!