The Dietary Prohibitions of the Hebrews Jean Soler How can we explain the dietary prohibitions of the Hebrews? To this day these rules rich variations, but always guided by the Mosaic laws are followed by many orthodox Jews. Once a number of false leads, such as the explanation that they were hygienic measures, have been dismissed, the structural app roach appears to be enlightening. Levi-Strauss has shown the importance of cooking,
which is peculiar to man in the same manner as language. Better yet,
cooking is a language through which a society expresses itself. For
man knows that the food he ingests in order to live well becomes assimilated
into his being, will become himself. There must be, therefore, a relationship
between the idea he has formed of specific items of food and the image
he has of himself and his place in the universe. There is a link between
a people's dietary habits and its perception of the world. Moreover, languages and dietary habits also show
an analogy of form. For just as the phonetic system of a language retains
only a few of the sounds a human being is capable of producing, so a
community adopts a dietary regime by making a choice among all the possible
foods. By no means does any given individual eat everything: the mere
fact that a thing is edible does not mean that it will be eaten. By
bringing to light the logic that informs these choices and the interrelation
among its constituent parts -- in this case the various foods -- we
can outline the specific characteristics of a society, just as we can
define those of a language The study of my topic is made easier by the existence
of a corpus whose boundaries cannot be considered arbitrary. The dietary
laws of the Hebrews have been laid down in a book, the Book, and more
precisely in the first five books of the Bible, which are known as the
Torah to the Jews and the Pentateuch to the Christians. This set of
writings is composed of texts from various eras over a wide span of
time. But to the extent that they have been sewn together, have co-existed
and still do coexist in the consciousness of a people, it is advisable
to study them together. 1 shall 1 therefore leave aside the historical
dimension in order to search for the rules that give cohesion to the
different laws constituting the Law. It is true, of course, that these five books
tell a story, running from the creation of the world to the death of
Moses, the man to whom these laws, and even this set of writings, are
attributed. Attention will therefore have to be given to the order of
the narrative; but whether and when the events mentioned in it actually
occurred whether or not the persons mentioned actually existed, and
if so, when, has no bearing whatsoever on my analysis, any more than
does the existence or nonexistence of God. Man's food is mentioned in the very first chapter
of the first book. It has its place in the plan of the Creation: "Behold,
1 have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of
all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have
them for your food" (Gen. 2:29),1 says Elohim. Paradise is vegetarian. In order to understand why most eating is implicitly
but unequivocally excluded, it must be shown how both God and man are
defined in the myth by their relationship to each other. Man has been
made "in the image" of God (Gen. 1:26-27), but he is not,
nor can he be, God. This concept is illustrated by the dietary taboo
concerning the fruit of two trees. After Adam and Eve have broken this
prohibition by eating the fruit of one of these trees, Elohim says:
"Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil;
and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life,
and eat, and live forever" (Gen. 3:22). This clearly marked distance
between man and God, this fundamental difference, is implicitly understood
in a three fold manner. First, the immortality of the soul is unthinkable.
all life belongs to God, and to him alone. God is Life, and man temporarily
holds only a small part of it. We know that the notion of the immortality
of the soul did not appear in Judaism until the second century B.C.
and that it was not an indigenous notion. Secondly, killing is the major prohibition of
the Bible. Only the God who gives life can take it away. If man freely
uses it for his own ends, he encroaches upon God's domain and oversteps
his limits. From this it follows that meat eating is impossible. For
in order to eat an animal, one must first kill it. But animals, like
man, belong to the category of beings that have within them "a
living soul." To consume a living being, moreover, would be tantamount
to absorbing the principle that would make man, God's equal. The fundamental difference between man and God
is thus expressed by the difference in their foods. God's are the living
beings, which in the form of sacrifices (either human victims, of which
Abraham's sacrifice represents a relic, or sacrificial animals) serve
as his "nourishment," according to the Bible. Man's are the
edible plants (for plants are not included among the "living things").
Given these fundamental assumptions, the origins of meat eating constitute
a problem. Did men, then, at one point find a way to kill animals and
eat them without prompting a cataclysm? This cataclysm did indeed take place, and the
Bible does speak of it. It was the Flood, which marks a breaking point
in human history. God decided at first to do away with his Creation,
and then he spared one family, Noah's, and one pair of each species
of animal. A new era thus began after the Flood, a new Creation, which
coincided with the appearance of a new dietary regime. "Every moving
thing that lives shall be food for you; as I gave you the green plants,
I give you everything" (Gen. 9:3). Thus, it is not man who has taken it upon himself
to eat meat; it is God who has given him the right to do so. And the
cataclysm does not come after, but before the change, an inversion that
is frequently found in myths. Nevertheless, it must be understood that
meat eating is not presented as a reward granted to Noah. If God has
wanted "to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from
under heaven" (Gen. 6:17), it is because man has "corrupted"
the entire earth: "and the earth was filled with violence"
(Gen. 6:17), in other words, with murder. And while it is true that
he spares Noah because Noah is "just" and even "perfect"
(Gen. 6:9), the human race that will come from him will not escape the
evil that had characterized the human race from which he issued. The
Lord says, after the Flood: "I will never again curse the ground
because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his
youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I
have done" (Gen. 8:21). In short, God takes note of the evil that
is in man. A few verses later, he gives Noah permission to eat animals.
Most eating is given a negative connotation. Yet even so, it is possible only at the price
of a new distinction: for God adds the injunction: "Only you shall
not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood" (Gen. 9:4). Blood
becomes the signifier of the vital principle, so that it becomes possible
to maintain the distance between man and God by expressing it in a different
way with respect to food. Instead of the initial opposition between
the eating of meat and the eating of plants, a distinction is henceforth
made between flesh and blood. Once the blood (which is God's) is set
apart, meat becomes desacralized -- and permissible. The structure remains
the same, only the signifying elements have changed. At this stage the distinction between clean and
unclean animals is not yet present, even though three verses in the
account of the Flood refer to it. Nothing is said that would permit
Noah to recognize these two categories of animals, and the distinction
is out of place here, since the power to eat animals he is given includes
all of them: "Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you." It is not until Moses appears that a third dietary
regime comes into being, one that is based on the prohibition of certain
animals. Here we find a second breaking point in human history. For
the covenant God had concluded with Noah included all men to be born
from the sole survivor of the Flood (the absence of differentiation
among men corresponded to the absence of differentiation among the animals
they could consume), and the sign of that covenant was a cosmic and
hence universal sign, the rainbow (Gen. 9:12 - 17). The covenant concluded
with Moses, however, concerns only one people, the Hebrews: to the new
distinction between man corresponds the distinction of the animals they
may eat: "I am the Lord your God, Who have separated you from the
peoples. You shall therefore make a distinction between the clean beasts
and the unclean; and between the unclean bird and the clean; you shall
not make yourselves abominable by beast or by bird or by anything with
which the ground teams, which I have set apart for you to hold unclean"
(Lev. 20:24-25). The signs of this new covenant can only be individual,
since they will have to become the distinctive traits of the Hebrew
people. In this manner the Mosaic dietary code fulfills the same function
as circumcision or the institution of the Sabbath. These three signs
all involve a cut: - a cut on the male sex organ: a partial castration
analogous to an offering, which in return will bring God's blessing
upon the organ that ensures the transmission of life and thereby the
survival of the Hebrew people; The cut is at the origin of differentiation and
differentiation is the prerequisite of signification. Dietary prohibitions are indeed a means of cutting
a people off from others, as the Hebrews learned at their own expense.
When Joseph's brothers journeyed to Egypt in order to buy wheat, he
had a meal containing meat served to them: "They served him by
himself, and them by themselves, for the Egyptians might not eat bread
with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to the Egyptians"
(Gen. 43:32). It is likely that the nomadic Hebrews already had dietary
prohibitions but, according to Biblical history, they began to include
their dietary habits among the defining characteristics of their people
only after the exodus, as if they were taking their model from the Egyptian
civilization. Dietary habits, in order to play their role,
must be different; but different from what? From those, unquestionably,
of the peoples with whom the Hebrews were in contact. Proof of this
is the famous injuction: "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's
milk," for here a custom practiced among the people of that region
was forbidden. Yet the dietary regime of the Hebrews was not contrary
to the regimes of other peoples in every point; had this been the case
they would have had very few things to eat! Why, then, did they strictly
condemn some food items and not others? The answer must not be sought
in the nature of the food item, any more than the sense of a word can
be sought in the word itself. (It is contained in the dictionary, which
defines that word by other words, which refer to yet other words, with
all of these operations taking polace within the dictionary.) A social
sign -- in this case a dietary prohibition -- cannot be understood in
isolation. It must be placed into the context of the signs in the same
area of life; together they constitute a system; and this system in
turn must be seen in relation to the systems in other areas, for the
interaction of all these systems constitutes the sociocultural system
of a people. The constant features of this system should yield the fundamental
structures of the Hebrew civilization or -- and this may be the same
thing -the underlying thought patterns of the Hebrew people. One first constant feature naturally comes to
mind in the notion of "cleanness," which is used to characterize
the permissible foods, in order to shed light on this notion, it must
first of all be seen as a conscious harking back to the Origins. To
the extent that the exodus from Egypt and the revelation of Sinai represent
a new departure in the history of the World, it can be assumed that
Moses -- or the authors of the system that bears his name -- felt very
strongly that this third Creation, lest it too fall into degradation,
would have to be patterned after the myth of Genesis (whether that account
was elaborated or only appropriated by Moses). Man's food would therefore
be purest Mail if it were patterned as closely as possible upon the
Creator's intentions. Now the myth tells us that the food originally
given to man was purely vegetarian. Has there been, historically, an
attempt to impose a vegetarian regime on the Hebrews? There is no evidence
to support this hypothesis, but the Bible does contain traces of such
an attempt or, at any rate, of such an ideal. One prime trace is the
fact that manna, the only daily nourishment of the Hebrews during the
exodus, is shown as a vegetal substance: "It was like corlander
seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafer made with honey"
(Exod. 16:31). Moreover, the Hebrews had large flocks, which they did
not touch. Twice, however, the men rebelled against Moses
because they wanted to eat meat. The first time this happened in the
wilderness of Sin: "Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord
in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh-pots" (Exod. 16:3).
God thereupon granted them the miracle of the quails. The second rebellion
is reported in Numbers (11:4): hat we had meat to eat," wail the
Hebrews. God agrees to repeat the miracle of the quails, but does so
only unwillingly and even in great wrath: "You shall not eat one
day, or two days, or five days, or ten days, or twenty days, but a whole
month, until it comes out at your nostrils and becomes loathsome to
you" (Num. 11:19-20). And a great number of the Hebrews who fall
upon the quails and gorge themselves die on the spot. Here, as in the
myth of the Flood, meat is given a negative connotation. It is a concession
God makes to man's imperfection. Meat eating, then, will be tolerated by Moses
but with two restrictions., The taboo against blood will be reinforced,
and certain animals will be forbidden. The setting apart of the blood
henceforth becomes the occasion of a ritual. Before the meat can be
eaten, the animal must be presented to the priest, who will perform
the "peace offering," in which he pours the blood upon the
altar. This is not only a matter of separating God's share from man's
share; it also means that the murder of the animal that is to be eaten
is redeemed by an offering. Under the elementary logic of retribution,
any murder requires in compensation the murder of the murderer; only
thus can the balance be restored. Since animals, like men, are "living
souls," the man who kills an animal should himself be killed. Under this basic assumption, meat eating is altogether
impossible. The solution lies in performing a ritual in which the blood
of the sacrificial animal takes the place of the man who makes the offering.2
"For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it
for you upon the altar to make atonement for your souls; for it is the
blood that makes atonement, by reason of the life" (Lev. 17:11).
But if a man kills an animal himself in order to eat it, "bloodguilt
shall be imputed to that man; he has shed blood; and that man shall
be cut off from among his people" (Lev. 17:4); that is, he shall
be killed. The importance of the blood taboo thus becomes very clear.
It is not simply one prohibition among others; it is the conditio sine
qua non that makes most eating possible. It should be noted that this ritual is attested
in Deuteronomyh. With the institution of a single sanctuary in Jerusalem,
it became difficult for the Hebrews who lived outside the city to go
to Jerusalem every time they wanted to eat meat. In this case, they
were permitted to perform the offering of animals themselves. The procedure
was to be the same as for hunting, where ritual offering obviously could
not be performed: "You may slaughter and eat flesh within any of
your towns ... as of the gazelle and as of the hart. Only you shall
not eat the blood; you shall pour it out upon the earth like water"
(Deut. 12:15-16). This is a tangible example of how the variations of
a system must adapt to the tiven infrastructure of geography.3 As for the prohibition of cerain animals, we
must now analyze two chapters (Lev. 11 and Deut. 14) devoted to the
distinction between clean and unclean species. Neither of these texts,
which are essentially identical, provides any explanation. The Bible
only indicates the particular traits the clean animals must possess
-- though not always; for when dealing with the birds, it simply enumerates
the unclean species. The text first speaks of the animals living on
land. They are "clean". if they have a "hoofed foot,"
a "cloven hoof," and if they "chew the cud." The
first of these criteria is clearly meant to single out the herbivorous
animals. The Hebrews had established a relationship between the foot
of an animal and its feeding habits. They reasoned like Cuvier, who
said, "All hoofed animals must be herbivorous, since they lack
the means of seizing a prey."4 But why are herbivorous animals clean and carnivorous
animals unclean? Once again, the key to the answer must be sought in
Genesis, if indeed the Mosaic laws intended to conform as much as possible
to the original intentions of the Crator. And in fact, Paradise was
vegetarian for the animals as well. The verse dealing with human food,
"I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face
of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have
them for your food," is followed by a verse about the animals (and
here, incidentally, we note a secondary differentiation, serving to
mark the distance between humankind and the various species of animals):
"And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air,
and to everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green
plant for food" (Gen. 1:29-30). Thus, carnivorous animals are not included in
the plan of the Creation. Man's problem with meat eating is compounded
when it involves eating an animal that has itself consumed meat and
killed other animals in order to do so. Carnivorous animals are unclean.
If man were to eat them, he would be doubly unclean. The "hoofed
foot" is thus the distinctive trait that contrasts with the claws
of the carnivorous animals -- dog, cat felines, etc. -- for these claws
permit them to seize their prey. Once this point is made, the prohibition
against eating most of the birds that are cited as unclean becomes comprehensible:
they are carnivorous, especially such birds of prey as "the eagle,"
which is cited at the head of the list. But to return to the beasts of the earth. Why
is the criterion "hoofed foot" complemented by two other criteria?
The reason is that it is not sufficient to classify the true herbivores,
since it omits pigs. Pigs and boars have hoofed feet, and while it is
true that they are herbivores, they are also carnivorous.5 In order
to isolate the true herbivores it is therefore necessary to add a second
criterion, "chewing the cud." One can be sure that ruminants
eat grass; in fact, the eat it twice. In theory, this characteristic
should be sufficient to distinguish true herbivores. But in practice,
it is difficult to ascertain, especially in wild animals, which can
properly be studied only after they are dead. Proof of this is the fact
that the hare is considered to be a ruminant by the Bible (Lev. 11:6
and Deut. 14:7), which is false; but the error arose from mistaking
the mastication of the rodents for rumination. The physiological characteristic therefore had
to be reinforced by an anatomical criterion, the hoof, which in turn
was strengthened by using as a model the hoof of the ruminants known
to everyone: cows and sheep. (In the myth of Creation, livestock constitutes
a separate category, distinct from the category of wild animals. There
is no trace of the domestication of animals; livestock was created tame.)
This is why clean wild animals must conform to the domestic animals
that may be consumed; as it happens, cows and sheep tread the ground
on two toes, ech encased in a layer of horn. This explains the third
criterion listed in the Bible: the "cloven hoof." One important point must be made here: the criterion
"cloven hoof' eliminates a certain number of animals, even though
they are purely herbivorous (the horse, the ass, and especially the
three animals expressly cited in the Bible as "unclean": the
camel, the hare, and the rock badger). A purely herbivorous animal is
therfore not automatically clean. This is a necessary though not a sufficient
condition. In addition, it must also have a foot analogous to the foot
that sets the norm: that of domestic animals. Any foot shape deviting
from this model is conceived as a blemish, and the animal is unclean. The notion of the "blemish" and the
value attributed to it is elucidated in several passages of the Bible.
Leviticus prohibits the sacrificing of animals, even of a clean species,
if the individual animal exhibits any anomaly in relation to the normal
type of the species: "And when any one offers a sacrifice of peace
offerings to the Lord, to fulfill a vow or as a freewill offering, from
the herd or from the flock, to be accepted it must be perfect; there
shall be no blemish in it. Animals blind or disabled or mutilated or
having a discharge or an itch or scabs, you shall not offer to the Lord
or make of them an offering by fire upon the altar of the Lord"
(Lev. 22:21). This prohibition is repeated in Deuteronomy (17:1): "You
shall not sacrifice to the Lord your God an ox or a sheep in which is
a blemish, any defect whatever; for that is an abomination to the Lord
your God." The equation is stated explicitly: the blemish is an
evil. A fundamental trait of the Hebrews' mental structure is uncovered
here. There are societies in which impaired creatures are considered
divine. What is true for the animal is also true for
man. The priest must be a wholesome man and must not have any physical
defects. The Lord says to Aaron (Lev. 21:17-18): "None of your
descendants throughout their generations who has a blemish may approach
to offer the bread of his God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw
near, a man blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb
too long, or one who has an injured foot or an injured hand, or a hunchback,
or a dwarf, or a man with a defect in his sight or an itching disease
or scabs or crushed testicles; no man of the descendants of Aaron the
priest who has a blemish shall come near to offer the Lord's offering
by fire." The men who participate in cultic acts must be true men:
"He whose testicles are crushed or whose male member is cut off
shall not enter the assembly of the Lord" (Deut. 23:1) To be whole
is one of the components of "cleanness"; eunuchs and castrated
animals are unclean. To the blemish must be added alteration, which
is a temporary blemish. Periodic losses of substance are unclean, whether
they be a man's emission of semen or a woman's menstruation (Lev. 15).
'Me most unclean thing of all will therefore be death, which is the
definitive loss of the breath of life and the irreversible alteration
of the organism. And indeed, death is the major uncleanness for the
Hebrews. It is so strong that a high priest (Lev. 21:11) or a Nazirite
(Num. 6:6-7) may not go near a dead body, even if it is that of his
father or his mother, notwithstanding the fact that the Ten Commandments
order him to "honor" them. The logical scheme that ties cleanness to the
absence of blemish or alteration applies to things as well as to men
or animals. It allows us to understand the status of ferments and fermented
substances. I shall begin with the prohibition of leavened bread during
the Passover. The explanation given in the Bible does not hold; it says
that it is a matter of commemorating the exodus from Egypt when the
Hebrews, in their haste, did not have time to let the dough rise (Exod.
12:34). If this were the reason, they would have been obliged to eat
poorly leavened or half-baked bread; but why bread without leavening?
In reality, even if the Passover is a celebration whose meaning may
have changed in the course of the ages -- and this is the case with
other institutions, notably the Sabbath -- it functions as a commemoration
of the Ori gins, a celebration not only of the exodus from Egypt and
the birth of a nation but also of the beginning of the religious year
at the first full moon after the vernal equinox. The Passover feast is a sacrifice of renewal,
in which the participants consume the food of the Origins.6 This ritual
meal must include "bitter herbs," roasted meat," and
"unleavened bread" (Exod. 12:8). The bitter herbs must be
understood, it would seem', as the opposite of vegetables, which are
produced by agriculture. Roast meat is the opposite of boiled meat,
which is explicitly proscribed in the text (Exod. 12:9): the boiling
of meat, which implies the use of receptacles obtained by an industry,
albeit a rudimentary form of it, is a late stage in the preparation
of food. As for the unleavened bread, it is the bread
of the Patriarchs. Abraham served cakes made of fine meal to the three
messengers of God on their way to Sodom (Gen. 18:6). These cakes were
undoubtedly identical to those that Lot prepared shortly thereafter
for the same messengers: "and he made them a feast, and baked unleavened
bread, and they ate" (Gen. 19:3). But unleavened bread is clean
not only because it is the bread of the Origins. It is clean also and
above all because the flour of which it is made is not changed by the
ferment of the leavening: it is true to its natural state. This interpretation
allows us to understand why fermented foods cannot be used as offerings
by fire: "No cereal offering Which you shall bring to the Lord
shall be made with leaven; for you shall burn no leaven nor any honey
as an offering by fire to the Lord" (Lev. 2:11). A fermented substance
is an altered substance, one that has become other. Fermentation is
the equivalent of a blemish. Proof a contrario is the fact that just
as fermentation is forbidden, so salt is mandatory in all offerings
(Lev. 2:13). Thus, there is a clear-cut opposition between
fermentation, which alters a substance's being, and salt, which preserves
it in its natural state. Leavened bread, honey7, and wine all have the
status of secondary food items; only the primary foods that have come
from the hands of the Creator in their present form can be used in the
sacred cuisine of the offering. It is true, of course, that wine is
used in cultic libations. But the priest does not consume it; indeed
he must abstain from all fermented liquids before officiating in order
to "distinguish between the holy and the common, and between the
clean and the unclean" (Lev. 10:10). Fermented liquids alter man's
judgment because they are themselves altered substances. The libation
of wine must be seen as the parallel of the libation of blood, which
it accompanies in burnt offerings. Wine is poured upon the altar exactly
like blood, for it is its equivalent in the plant; wine is the "blood
of the grapes" (Gen. 49: 11, etc). To return to my argument, then, the clean animals
of the earth must conform to the plan of the Creation, that is, be vegetarian;
they must also conform to their ideal models, that is, be without blemish.
In order to explain the distinction between clean and unclean fish,
we must once again refer to the first chapter of Genesis. In the beginning
God created the three elements, the firmament, the water, and the earth;
then he created three kinds of animals out of each of these elements:
"Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let
birds fly above the earth across the firmament of the heavens"
(Gen. 1:20); "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according
to their kinds, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according
to their kinds" Mn. 1:24). Each animal is thus tied to one element, and
one only.8 It has issued from that element and must live there. Chapter
11 of Leviticus and chapter 14 of Deuteronomy reiterate this classification
into three groups: creatures of the earth, the water, and the air. Concerning
the animals of the water, the two texts only say: "Everything in
the waters that has fins and scales ... you may eat." All other
creatures are unclean. It must be understood that the fin is the proper
organ of locomotion for animals living in the water. It is the equivalent
of the leg of the animal living on land and of the wing in the animal
that lives in the air. Recall also that locomotion distinguishes animals
from plants, which in the Bible are not included in the category of
"living" things. In this manner, the animals of the earth
must walk, fish must swim, and birds must fly. Those creatures of the
sea that lack fins and do not move about (mollusks) are unclean. So
are those that have legs and can walk (shellfish), for they live in
the water yet have the organs of a beast of the earth and are thus at
home in two elements. In the same manner, scales are contrasted with
the skin of the beasts of the land and with the feathers of the birds.
As far as the latter are concerned, the Biblical expression "birds
of the air" must be taken quite literally; it is not a poetic image
but a definition. In the formulation "the likeness of any winged
bird that flies in the air" (Deut. 4:17), the three distinctive
traits of the clean bird are brought together: "winged," "which
flies," and "in the air." If a bird has wings but does
not fly (the ostrich, for instance, that is cited in the text), it is
unclean. If it has wings and can fly but spends most of its time in
the water instead of living in the air, it is unclean (and the Bible
mentions the swan, the pelican, the heron, and all the stilted birds). Insects pose a problem. "All winged animals
that go upon all fours are an abomination to you," says Leviticus
(11:20). This is not a discussion of four-legged insects, for the simple
reason that all insects have six. The key expression is "go upon"
[walk]. The insects that are meant here are those that "go upon
all fours," like the normal beasts of the earth, the quadrupeds.
Their uncleanness comes from the fact that they walk rather than fly,
even though they are "winged." The exception mentioned in
Leviticus (11:21) only confirms the rule: so uncleanness is imputed
to insects that have "legs above their feet, with which to leap
on the earth." Leaping is a mode of locomotion midway between walking
and flying. Leviticus feels that it is closer to flying and therefore
absolves these winged grasshoppers. Deuteronomy, however, is not convinced
and prohibits all winged insects (14:19). Leviticus also mentions, toward the end, some
unclean species that cannot be fitted into the classification of three
groups, and it is for this reason, no doubt, that Deuteronomy does not
deal with them. The first of these are the reptiles. They belong to
the earth, or so it seems, but have no legs to walk on. "Upon your
belly you shall go," God had said to the serpent (Gen. 3:14). This
is a curse. Everything that creeps and goes on its belly is condemned.
These animals live more under the earth than on it. They were not really
"brought forth" by the earth, according to the expression
of Genesis 1:24. They are not altogether created. And like the serpent,
the centipede is -condemned Lev. 11:30) in the expression "whatever
has many feet" Lev. 11:4). Having too many feet or none at all
falls within the same category; the clean beast of the earth has four
feet, and not just any kind of feet either, as we have seen. All these unclean animals are marked with a blemish;
they show an anomaly in their relation to the element that has "brought
them forth" or to the organs characteristic of life, and especially
locomotion, in that element. If they do not fit into any class, or if
they fit into two classes at once, they are unclean. They are unclean
because they are unthinkable. At this point, instead of stating once
again that they do not fit into the plan of Creation, I should like
to advance the hypothesis that the dietary regime of the Hebrews, as
well as their myth of the Creation, is based upon a taxonomy in which
man, God, the animals, and the plants are strictly defined through their
relationships with one another in a series of opposites. The Hebrews
conceived of the order of the world as the order underlying the creation
of the world. Uncleanness, then, is simply disorder, wherever it may
occur. Concerning the raising of livestock and agriculture,
Levitucus 19:19 mentions the following Drohibition: "You shall
not let your cattle breed with a different kind." A variant is
found in Deuteronomy 22:10: "You shall not plow with an ox and
an ass together." The reason is that the animals have been created
(or classified) "each according to its kind," an expression
that is a leit-motif of the Bible. Just as a clean animal must not belong
to two different species (be a hybrid), so man is not allowed to unite
two animals of different species. He must not mix that which god (or
man) has separated, whether the union take place in a sexual act or
only under the yoke. Consider what is said about cultivated plants:
"You shall not sow your field with two kinds of seeds" (Lev.
19:19), an injunction that appears in Deuteronomy as: "You shall
not sow your vineyard with two kinds of seed." The same kind of prohibition applies to things:
"nor shall there come upon you a garment of cloth made of two kinds
of stuff' (Lev. 19:19). In Deuteronomy 22: 11, this becomes: "You
shall not wear a mingled stuff, wool and linen together." Here
the part plant, part animal origin of the material further reinforces
the distinction. In human terms, the same schema is found in the prohibition
of mixed marriages -- between Hebrews and foreigners -- (Deut. 7:3),
and also in the fact that a man of mixed blood (offspring of a mixed
marriage), or according to a different interpretation, a bastard (offspring
of adultery) may not enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut. 23:3). This
would seem to make it very understandable that the Hebrews did not accept
the divine nature of Jesus. A God-man, or a God become man, was bound
to offend their logic more than anything else.9 Christ is the absolute
hybrid. A man is a man, or he is God. he cannot be both
at the same time. In the same manner, a human being is either a man
or a woman, not both; homosexuality is outlawed (Lev. 18:22). The prohibition
is extended even to clothes: "A woman shall not wear anything that
pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman's garments" (Deut.
22:5). Bestiality is also condemned (Lev. 18:20) and, above all, incest
(Lev. 18:6ff.): "She is your mother, you shall not uncover her
nakedness." This tautological formulation shows the principle involved
here: once a woman is defined as "mother" in relation to a
boy, she cannot also be something else to him. The incest prohibition
is a logical one. It thus becomes evident that the sexual and the dietary
prohibitions of the Bible are coordinated. This no doubt explains the Bible's most mysterious prohibition: "You shall not boil a kid in its mother's milk" (Exod. 23:19 and 34:26; Deut. 14:21).10 These words must be taken quite literally. They concern a mother and her young. They can be translated as: you shall not put a mother and her son into the same pot, any more than into the same bed. Here as elsewhere, it is a matter of upholding the separation between two classes or two types of relationships. To abolish distinction by means of a sexual Or culinary act is to subvert the order of the world. Everyone belongs to one species only, one people, one sex, one category. And in the same manner, everyone has only one God: "See now that 1, even 1, am he, and there is no God beside me" (Deut. 32:39). The keynote of this order is the principle of identity, instituted as the law of every being. The Mosaic logic is remarkable for its rigor, indeed its rigidity.
it is a "stiffnecked" logic, to use the expression applied
by Yahveh to his people. It is self-evident that the very inflexibility
of this order was a powerful factor for unification and conservation
in a people that wanted to "dwell alone."11 On the other hand,
however, the Mosaic religion, inseparable as it is from the sociocultural
system of the Hebrews, could only lose in power of diffusion what it
gained in power of concentration. Christianity could only be born by
breaking "with the structures" that separated the Hebrews
from the other peoples. It is not surprising that one of the decisive
ruptures concerned the dietary prescriptions. Matthew quotes Jesus as
saying: "Not what goes into the mouth defiles a man, but what comes
out of the mouth, this defiles a man" (15:11). Similar words are
reported by Mark, who comments: "Thus he declared all foods clean"
(7:19). The meaning of this rejection becomes strikingly clear in the episode
of Peter's vision at Jaffa (Acts 10): a great sheet descends from heaven
with all kinds of clean and unclean animals in it, and God's voice speaks:
"Rise, Peter; kill and eat." Peter resists the order twice,
asserting that he is a good Jew and has never eaten anything unclean.
But God repeats his order a third time. Peter's perplexity is dispelled
by the arrival of three men sent by the Roman centurion Cornelius, who
is garrisoned in Caesarea. Cornelius wants to hear Peter expound the
new doctrine he is propagating. And Peter, who had hitherto been persuaded
that Jesus' reform was meant only for the Jews, now understands that
it is valid for the Gentiles as well. He goes to Caesarea, shares the
meal of a non-Jew, speaks to Cornelius, and baptizes him. Cornelius
become the first non-Jew to be converted to Christianity. The vision
in which the distinction between clean and unclean foods was abolished
had thus implied the abolition of the distinction between Jews and non-Jews. From this starting point, Christianity could begin its expansion, grafting
itself onto the Greco-Roman civilization, which, unlike the Hebrew civilization,
was ready to welcome all blends, and most notably a God-man. A new system
was to come into being, based on new structures. This is why the materials
it took from the older system assumed a different value. Blood, for
instance, is consumed by the priest in the sacrifice of the Mass in
the form of a signifier: "the blood of the grape." This is
because the fusion between man and God is henceforth possible, thanks
to the intermediate term, which is Christ. Blood, which had acted as
an isolator between two poles, now becomes a conductor. In this manner,
everything that Christianity has borrowed from Judaism, every citation
of the Biblical text in the text of Western civilization (in French
literature, for example), must in some way be "tinkered with,"
to use Levi-Strauss's12 comparison. By contrast, whatever variations the Mosaic system may have undergone
in the course of history, they do not seem to have shaken its fundamental
structures. This logic, which sets up its terms in contrasting pairs
and lives by the rule of refusing all that is hybrid, mixed, or arrived
at by synthesis and compromise, can be seen in action to this day in
Israel, and not only in its cuisine. --translated by Elborg Forster
1.Copyright 1979, The Johns Hopkins University Press. The Oxford Annotated
Bible with the Apocrypha, revised standard edition, ed. Herbert G. May
and Bruce M. Metzger (New York and Oxford, 1965). 2.That the life of an animal can atone for/save the life of the men
who have sacrificed it can be seen in the episode of Exod. 12, where,
during the night preceding the exodus from Egypt, the Hebrews sacrifice
a lamb (the Passover lamb) and paint the doors of their houses with
its blood. During that night, God strikes all the first-born of Egypt,
except those who live in the houses marked with the blood. In Abraham's
sacrifice also, the life of an animal and the life of a child can be
made to stand for each other. 3.In keeping with the principle of the arbitrary nature of the sign,
life can have other signifiers than blood. In certain societies, for
instance, it is the head, the heart, or the womb. In Leviticus itself,
the fat that covers the entrails is forbidden to man and set apart for
God (3:16-17). The metaphoric use of the word also seems to indicate
that fat is conceived as the vital substance of the solid parts of the
body: "and I will give you the best of the land of Egypt, and you
shall eat the fat of the land" (Gen. 45:18, etc.). The sciatic
nerve, which also may not be eaten, is perhaps interpreted as the element
par excellence of locomotion, a privilege that belongs to living beings
only. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, he was paralyzed with this nerve
was touched (Gen. 32:26-33). Fat and the sciatic nerve may well be secondary
variants -- of blood in a different context. 4.Cited in the Dictionnaire Robert, s-v. "sabot." See also
F. Jacob, La Logique du vivant (Paris, 1970), p. 119. English translation,
The Logic of Life (Pantheon, 1974; Random House, paper, 1976). 5.The boar with its tusks, which are hyperdeveloped canine teeth, was
naturally included among the wild beasts of which it is said: "And
I shall loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your
children, and destroy your cattle" (Lev. 26:22). 6.Cf. Mircea Eliade, Aspects du mythe (Paris, 1963), p. 59; English
translation, Myth and Reality (Harper & Row, 1963): "To take
nourishment is not simply a physiological act, but also a 'religious'
act: one eats the creations of the Supernatural Beings, and one eats
them as the mythical ancestors ate them for the first time at the beginning
of the world." 7.See C. Levi-Strauss, Du miel aux cendres (Paris, 1964), p. 253; English
translation, From Honey to Ashes (Harper & Row, 19731: Honey is
an already "prepared" item: "it can be consumed fresh
or fermented": and it "pours forth ambiguity from each one
of its facets." 8.In Purity and Danger (London, 1966), a work that came to my attention
after I had finished writing the present study, Mary Douglas adopts
a similar approach, and the similarity of our conclusions on this particular
point is striking indeed. 9.Cf. the Gospel according to John (10:31-33): "The Jews took
up stones again to stone him. Jesus answered them, 'I have shown you
many good works from the Father; for which of these do you stone me?"
The Jews answered him: 'It is not for a ood work that we stone you but
for blasphemy; because you, being a man, make yourself God."' 1O.Cf. the prohibition against taking the mother together with the
young ones or the eggs from a bird's nest. Here the eggs are sufficient
to represent the young ones, just as the milk represents the kid's mother
(Deut. 22:6-7). See also the prohibition against sacrificing on the
same day a cow or a eewe and her young (Lev. 22:28). Both of these acts
might lead to culinary incest. 11."Lo, a people dwelling alone and not reckoning itself among
the nations!" (Num. 23:9) 12.C. Levi-Strauss, La Pensee sauvage (Paris, 1962), pp. 26ff. English
translation, The Savage Mind (Chicago, 1966).
Paper Topic 11 I II However, in some later writing there are hints about a concept of resurrection.
See Ezekiel 37. Is this personal or national, literal or metaphoric?
Isaiah 25:8f is the appropriation of a Canaanite mythological motif
in which the hero god defeats his enemy called Death. Look at Isaiah
26:16 - 20. Also Daniel 12:2f. Both these passages deal with the concept
of resurrection. Can you describe the concept as it is understood in
either or both these passages? Read Job 14:14 in which he asks the question, "If a man die, shall
he live again?" What is Job's answer? Also read II Kings 2:1 - 12, Genesis 5:21 - 24, Psalm 49:15 and 73:24. Lastly look at the puzzling and uncertain text of Job 19:25f (look
in several translations, if possible). Using these passages, try to describe the various opinions about life after death in Israelite society, the probable sources of the arguments and the reason for the uncertainty.
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