I can give you the Protestant view, and don’t let my Methodism get me expiated.
What is it in Hebrew? mishneh asaret hadevariim?
In cowboy Latin it’s the deuteron decagon. Exodus 34 establishes the sentiment, that going in to the land of Canaan, the boys and girls had been briefed on not eating with the 7 rivals that had to be expiated. That’s a long time from the Maccabee revolt.
Though the Maccabee revolt isn’t in most Protestant bibles. The Bible people were like, “got to cut costs.” And not one Christian or Jew said, did David cut costs? The major controversy there, a Jebusite gives David a threshing floor, and he goes out of his way to pay it.
The claim that it was an original disagreement that happened in the Maccabees sort of it hard to support, since whenever exodus is put into practice would be hundreds of years to thousands of years before that.
Thanks for this article though, it was cool to read all the history the Protestants missed since about 1900. And asharah is 10, that damned pole is a 10 pole.
You're right that Exodus 34 puts the sentiment centuries before the Maccabees; my argument isn't that the rule started there, it's that Antiochus is where it turned into the thing you'd die over rather than just a thing you did.
Even more so in Corinth, where that was a literal errand. Paul gets asked your grocery store question directly, since most of the meat for sale had been through a temple first, and his answer in 1 Corinthians 10 is essentially: buy it, don't ask. The asking is what creates the problem.
And humor was the ancient coping mechanism too. Elijah on Carmel telling Baal's prophets to shout louder, since maybe their god is asleep, or busy, or off relieving himself.
I’ve always assumed that the Levitical ban on eating pork, like the ban on eating seafood, was part of the overall prohibition against doing business with pagans. Israelites were sheep herders, not swineherds, and lived in the hill country instead of on the coast, so if an Israelite wanted a pork or seafood dinner, they’d have to travel to a pagan village and buy one there.
Linking dietary laws to local geography and economic boundaries makes a lot of sense, especially given how distinct Israelite culture was from its coastal and pig-farming neighbors, such as the Philistines.
While modern scholars offer a few overlapping explanations for the bans, ranging from boundary-marking for holiness and symbolic purity to health concerns and practical ecology, your point about economic isolation and cultural identity hits on a core biblical theme: keeping Israel distinct from surrounding nations in everyday life.
“Jews and Muslims will tell you that they don’t eat pork because it gives you parasites.”
False.
Some Jews have semi-casual conversations about the rationale behind the law, and the public health reasons are certainly a popular hypothesis. But most observant Jews will tell you that the actual reason that they don’t eat pork or other prohibited animals is because the law says not to. Full stop.
The majority of people that try to explain the scriptural prohibitions dealing with food and other aspects of life are usually non-Jews wondering aloud about the context of their own origin stories.
Jews are working with the Torah as the primary source of law, and the Talmud certainly has seemingly endless commentary about every single aspect of every one of the 613 commandments.
As far as modern observance, the laws about food are settled. There isn’t any serious questioning or handwringing about the “why’s” beyond the conversations with children and outsiders. The fact that porcine bones are found in the holy land doesn’t really change much for its modern inhabitants. It adds context to the rich and complicated history of a people, but will hardly spike the interest of most Jews.
That line describes the explanation you hear in popular conversation, and you're right that it isn't what you'd get from inside the tradition, where the law is the reason and that's the end of it.
Even if pork turned out to cure cancer, plenty of Jews and Muslims would still refuse it. So we do agree that the honest underlying cause is the law says so.
The article is aimed at where the rule came from historically, which is a separate question from why anyone keeps it now.
Leviticus 11 gives a test rather than a list: fins and scales. Anything in the water missing either one fails, so shrimp, lobster, crab and clams are out, and they get harsher language than the pig does. Because the rule defines what qualifies, everything unqualified is excluded automatically without ever being named.
The Qur’an takes the opposite approach. Food is permitted unless something specifically excludes it, and the exclusions are short: carrion, blood, pork, and anything slaughtered for another god. Seafood gets an explicit permission instead, in 5:96, where the catch of the sea is called lawful provision.
That said, the Hanafi school, the largest of the Sunni legal traditions, reads "the game of the sea" narrowly to mean fish, so some Hanafis avoid crab, lobster and clams, though shrimp usually gets classed as a fish and passes. The other schools permit the whole sea.
Pigs require a LOT of water, which is in short supply in the Middle East. And, as the writer points out, pigs have no utility except as food. One can see the economic reasons why the people of that dry region gave up on pork.
However, during the latter Roman period, Christianity began to spread throughout the Mediterranean, then into northern and eastern Europe. Over time, the old Hebrew dietary laws became increasingly difficult for locals to accept. These new environments had more water, and pork had been part of the diet for centuries; most people just didn't want to give it up. The same applied to shellfish. The various ethnic groups which made up the vast Roman Empire tended to be omnivores. Why should they give up their traditional foods? So the early Christian churches dispensed with the ancient Hebrew dietary laws.
This is such an insightful and grounded perspective!
The combination of geography, practical ecology, and culture plays a huge role in shaping human history that often gets overlooked. In the arid Middle East, raising pigs was an ecological luxury, whereas in the lush forests and oak groves of Europe, letting pigs forage on acorns was one of the most efficient ways to produce protein.
As Christianity expanded into Europe, forcing local populations to abandon deeply ingrained, ecologically sensible agricultural practices like pig farming just didn't make practical sense. By focusing on spiritual faith rather than regional dietary restrictions. a shift famously championed by the Apostle Paul, the early church made it much easier to adapt to diverse cultural environments, allowing local traditions and diets to thrive.
The earliest Christians were Jews who kept kosher. After 135 CE, the gentile Christian churches declared Jewish Christians to be heretics and started collecting stories about Peter's dreams, which made it into the Bible.
The Pharisees had started the process of turning Jews away from the Torah with their prosbul contracts. Such debt contracts couldn't be forgiven in Jubilee years. This was an economic accommodation with Rome. So were the dietary changes the Christians adopted.
You know what Jesus thought of the Pharisees. The Book of Enoch calls them an apostate generation.
The interplay between shifting group dynamics, Roman economic pressure, and religious evolution during that period is incredibly complex. The transition of early Christianity from a Jewish movement to a predominantly Gentile one involved significant debate, especially around the authority of the Mosaic Law.
While the New Testament credits figures like Paul and Peter (such as Peter's vision in Acts 10) with opening the faith to Gentiles, scholars agree that the political and social fallout of the Jewish-Roman wars, including the events around 135 CE, deepened the rift between mainstream Rabbinic Judaism and the early Gentile Church. Furthermore, legal and economic adaptations such as Hillel's Prosboul highlight how both ancient Jewish and early Christian communities continually navigated the practical realities of living under Roman economic rule.
Egyptian medicine is well documented, and the Ebers and Edwin Smith papyri are genuinely impressive on wounds and surgery, but there's nothing in either that resembles parasitology. The Egyptians also ate pork happily outside the priesthood, which is hard to square with a court that understood the risk. Whatever Moses picked up there, I see no reason to think germ theory was in it.
You're right that nothing rules it out. But "we can't disprove it" isn't a foundation you can build history on. If absence of counter-evidence counted, every claim about the ancient world would survive, and we'd have no way to choose between them. What we have to work with is what people actually left behind, and on this they left nothing.
All this talk about justifying eating something that thrives on eating garbage... In other words, people think we're crazy for not eating pork, but then they like to eat the meat that is and always has been processed with everybody else's trash.
I'm just thinking out loud here.
Maybe God was onto something. 🤔
And just to be clear, I understand Leviticus gives no reason. Not hygiene, definitely not diet, not garbage.
What it does give is a very strict criteria, which are split-hoof vegetarian animals. So I'm not trying to reinvent a rationale. However, the criteria do produce a very real pattern. Every permitted land animal is a non-predatory herbivore. The forbidden bird list consists of raptors and meat-eaters, almost start to finish. Fins and scales screen out the bottom feeders, which means there's nothing that eats death that makes the permitted list.
Milgram worked this out in detail in the Anchor Bible Commentary. It's not about diet being the criterion; it's about the criterion and what the criterion kept producing. And that's a completely different claim and, in my opinion, a more interesting one.
If there was anything to correct about ancient pig farming, it was the feed, not the animal. Pigs do fine on grain and plant scraps and stay healthy on it, the disease problem comes from raw animal waste, not from being a pig.
But that’s the trade nobody was going to make. What made pork attractive across so much of the ancient world was exactly that you fed the animal garbage and got meat back. Take that away, and the pig loses the argument that made it worth keeping.
The piece isn't really about what anyone eats; it's about how a regional habit turned into a national law, but I get that the food angle isn't for everybody. Thanks for reading anyway.
The end of your article calls to mind a recent conversation on Medium. A Karen in a grocery store was losing her mind and telling everyone to avoid the meat because it was halal and sacrificed to idols. I asked if she would have done the same for kosher, because the practice is almost identical. The main thing is killing the animal humanely. Someone else corrected me and said camel meat is as forbidden as cat. My response was I wasn't overly concerned about buying camel meat in the US.
Thanks for another informative article. I was unaware that pig bones had been found in the digs. It certainly does dispel the myth that pigs weren't eaten in Israel. I'm sure someone will jump in and explain that JEWS weren't eating pork; it was those other people who lived within the community. People hate when you tear down their opinions with facts.
The halal and kosher slaughter methods are close to identical, which makes the grocery store panic even stranger. A lot of that panic rides on the word Allah, which is the Arabic word for God and nothing more exotic than that. Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians were using it for the God of Abraham before any Muslim did, and it still sits in the Arabic Hebrew Bible and the Arabic New Testament.
The Jerusalem pig is a great detail too, a whole articulated skeleton in a wealthy house inside the city the rule supposedly comes from. Judah was never as consistent as the law codes make it sound. Thanks for reading, and for the support.
Oh, but say it ain’t so! Pork eating Jews? But of course, they indulged, they even worshipped pagan gods on frequent occasions, so what’s the big deal? Some of those annoying dudes even ran around claiming a human God walked among them! So many silly tales, hard to keep track of them all. Facts can sure be a bummer though, walking on water not possible, but I bet in your opinion it certainly is! Oh, the opinions so may CHRISTIANS honor as truth!
Wow! Methinks you project too much! Look at your own hatred first. I hate absolutely no one and have enjoyed a lifetime surrounded by Christians, many whom are dear friends, and some who are beloved family members.
You shine with ignorance. Best to simply ignore your venom.
Good summary. I believe the hygiene argument developed during the 19th century Jewish enlightenment as Jewish philosophers searched for a rational basis for their religion. It falls apart when you consider that so many other cultures figured out a way to safely prepare pork.
You might consider a religious connection. Pigs were Demeter's animals and were sacrificed in the eastern Mediterranean as part of the cycle of fertility, death, regeneration. (Same for Ceres in Rome). What is holy in one culture becomes tabu in its neighbor.
A minor critical comment - the cause of trichinosis might not have been identified until the 19th century, but people before that could make the association between uncooked pork and the disease.
The Demeter and Ceres connection is a good one, and it fits the pattern where an animal used in someone else's rites becomes the thing you refuse.
People could connect bad pork to sickness long before anyone knew why, though that same association would have hit spoiled beef and mutton and never produced a law. Appreciate the careful read, and thanks for supporting the work.
As an agnostic I accept the health reason because there are a myriad of health issues ancient peoples treated successfully thousands of years before they knew the real cause. But I also think just pinning decisions on just one reason is a mistake. What you outlined was also probably in play at the same time. And other ideas in the replies too.
I can give you the Protestant view, and don’t let my Methodism get me expiated.
What is it in Hebrew? mishneh asaret hadevariim?
In cowboy Latin it’s the deuteron decagon. Exodus 34 establishes the sentiment, that going in to the land of Canaan, the boys and girls had been briefed on not eating with the 7 rivals that had to be expiated. That’s a long time from the Maccabee revolt.
Though the Maccabee revolt isn’t in most Protestant bibles. The Bible people were like, “got to cut costs.” And not one Christian or Jew said, did David cut costs? The major controversy there, a Jebusite gives David a threshing floor, and he goes out of his way to pay it.
The claim that it was an original disagreement that happened in the Maccabees sort of it hard to support, since whenever exodus is put into practice would be hundreds of years to thousands of years before that.
Thanks for this article though, it was cool to read all the history the Protestants missed since about 1900. And asharah is 10, that damned pole is a 10 pole.
This is a great comment, thank you.
You're right that Exodus 34 puts the sentiment centuries before the Maccabees; my argument isn't that the rule started there, it's that Antiochus is where it turned into the thing you'd die over rather than just a thing you did.
And yes, the asherah pole is its own headache.
Thanks again for reading!
It’s wild to think about at the grocery store. Which of these products was made by a group that’s trying to get me to worship Milicom?
Kind of have to make it funny, or it’s really depressing
Even more so in Corinth, where that was a literal errand. Paul gets asked your grocery store question directly, since most of the meat for sale had been through a temple first, and his answer in 1 Corinthians 10 is essentially: buy it, don't ask. The asking is what creates the problem.
And humor was the ancient coping mechanism too. Elijah on Carmel telling Baal's prophets to shout louder, since maybe their god is asleep, or busy, or off relieving himself.
I’ve always assumed that the Levitical ban on eating pork, like the ban on eating seafood, was part of the overall prohibition against doing business with pagans. Israelites were sheep herders, not swineherds, and lived in the hill country instead of on the coast, so if an Israelite wanted a pork or seafood dinner, they’d have to travel to a pagan village and buy one there.
Linking dietary laws to local geography and economic boundaries makes a lot of sense, especially given how distinct Israelite culture was from its coastal and pig-farming neighbors, such as the Philistines.
While modern scholars offer a few overlapping explanations for the bans, ranging from boundary-marking for holiness and symbolic purity to health concerns and practical ecology, your point about economic isolation and cultural identity hits on a core biblical theme: keeping Israel distinct from surrounding nations in everyday life.
Much like we still do today! ( just in jest, but couldn’t resist ). Seafood dinners a favorite!
Ha. Some prohibitions age better than others.
“Jews and Muslims will tell you that they don’t eat pork because it gives you parasites.”
False.
Some Jews have semi-casual conversations about the rationale behind the law, and the public health reasons are certainly a popular hypothesis. But most observant Jews will tell you that the actual reason that they don’t eat pork or other prohibited animals is because the law says not to. Full stop.
The majority of people that try to explain the scriptural prohibitions dealing with food and other aspects of life are usually non-Jews wondering aloud about the context of their own origin stories.
Jews are working with the Torah as the primary source of law, and the Talmud certainly has seemingly endless commentary about every single aspect of every one of the 613 commandments.
As far as modern observance, the laws about food are settled. There isn’t any serious questioning or handwringing about the “why’s” beyond the conversations with children and outsiders. The fact that porcine bones are found in the holy land doesn’t really change much for its modern inhabitants. It adds context to the rich and complicated history of a people, but will hardly spike the interest of most Jews.
That line describes the explanation you hear in popular conversation, and you're right that it isn't what you'd get from inside the tradition, where the law is the reason and that's the end of it.
Even if pork turned out to cure cancer, plenty of Jews and Muslims would still refuse it. So we do agree that the honest underlying cause is the law says so.
The article is aimed at where the rule came from historically, which is a separate question from why anyone keeps it now.
Thanks for taking the time.
What about shellfish? Kosher forbids it, but they aren't haram (as far as I know)
Leviticus 11 gives a test rather than a list: fins and scales. Anything in the water missing either one fails, so shrimp, lobster, crab and clams are out, and they get harsher language than the pig does. Because the rule defines what qualifies, everything unqualified is excluded automatically without ever being named.
The Qur’an takes the opposite approach. Food is permitted unless something specifically excludes it, and the exclusions are short: carrion, blood, pork, and anything slaughtered for another god. Seafood gets an explicit permission instead, in 5:96, where the catch of the sea is called lawful provision.
That said, the Hanafi school, the largest of the Sunni legal traditions, reads "the game of the sea" narrowly to mean fish, so some Hanafis avoid crab, lobster and clams, though shrimp usually gets classed as a fish and passes. The other schools permit the whole sea.
Very interesting stuff. Oddly, my need to know made this very easy to consume.
Thank you. When the need to know is already there, the argument tends to read itself.
It is absurd to think Bronze Age people had understanding of causes of disease that wasn't actually discovered until well into 19th century.
Agreed. And the tell is that the same people ate beef and mutton carrying tapeworms with no rule attached.
No parasites now in my frying bacon…
Modern pork inspection did what twenty-five centuries of law couldn't. Enjoy the bacon.
Thank you…will do…
Very interesting hypothesis. Your article addresses the fact that not all cultural trends in the bible must be analyzed in religious terms.
Thanks. The bones are useful precisely because they don't care what anybody believed. They just record what got eaten and where.
Pigs require a LOT of water, which is in short supply in the Middle East. And, as the writer points out, pigs have no utility except as food. One can see the economic reasons why the people of that dry region gave up on pork.
However, during the latter Roman period, Christianity began to spread throughout the Mediterranean, then into northern and eastern Europe. Over time, the old Hebrew dietary laws became increasingly difficult for locals to accept. These new environments had more water, and pork had been part of the diet for centuries; most people just didn't want to give it up. The same applied to shellfish. The various ethnic groups which made up the vast Roman Empire tended to be omnivores. Why should they give up their traditional foods? So the early Christian churches dispensed with the ancient Hebrew dietary laws.
This is such an insightful and grounded perspective!
The combination of geography, practical ecology, and culture plays a huge role in shaping human history that often gets overlooked. In the arid Middle East, raising pigs was an ecological luxury, whereas in the lush forests and oak groves of Europe, letting pigs forage on acorns was one of the most efficient ways to produce protein.
As Christianity expanded into Europe, forcing local populations to abandon deeply ingrained, ecologically sensible agricultural practices like pig farming just didn't make practical sense. By focusing on spiritual faith rather than regional dietary restrictions. a shift famously championed by the Apostle Paul, the early church made it much easier to adapt to diverse cultural environments, allowing local traditions and diets to thrive.
Thanks for sharing such a thoughtful breakdown!
The earliest Christians were Jews who kept kosher. After 135 CE, the gentile Christian churches declared Jewish Christians to be heretics and started collecting stories about Peter's dreams, which made it into the Bible.
The Pharisees had started the process of turning Jews away from the Torah with their prosbul contracts. Such debt contracts couldn't be forgiven in Jubilee years. This was an economic accommodation with Rome. So were the dietary changes the Christians adopted.
You know what Jesus thought of the Pharisees. The Book of Enoch calls them an apostate generation.
The interplay between shifting group dynamics, Roman economic pressure, and religious evolution during that period is incredibly complex. The transition of early Christianity from a Jewish movement to a predominantly Gentile one involved significant debate, especially around the authority of the Mosaic Law.
While the New Testament credits figures like Paul and Peter (such as Peter's vision in Acts 10) with opening the faith to Gentiles, scholars agree that the political and social fallout of the Jewish-Roman wars, including the events around 135 CE, deepened the rift between mainstream Rabbinic Judaism and the early Gentile Church. Furthermore, legal and economic adaptations such as Hillel's Prosboul highlight how both ancient Jewish and early Christian communities continually navigated the practical realities of living under Roman economic rule.
Thanks for bringing this up.
We don't know what medical knowledge was in the library of Alexandria, but Moses had access to Egyptian science in his 40 years as a prince of Egypt.
Thanks for reading.
Egyptian medicine is well documented, and the Ebers and Edwin Smith papyri are genuinely impressive on wounds and surgery, but there's nothing in either that resembles parasitology. The Egyptians also ate pork happily outside the priesthood, which is hard to square with a court that understood the risk. Whatever Moses picked up there, I see no reason to think germ theory was in it.
You're right that nothing rules it out. But "we can't disprove it" isn't a foundation you can build history on. If absence of counter-evidence counted, every claim about the ancient world would survive, and we'd have no way to choose between them. What we have to work with is what people actually left behind, and on this they left nothing.
Don't really care what ignorant goat herders living a tiny part of the world thought about anything.
No problem with a provocative take. In fact, the whole newsletter runs on them. But I'm not comfortable with looking down on people to make a point.
All this talk about justifying eating something that thrives on eating garbage... In other words, people think we're crazy for not eating pork, but then they like to eat the meat that is and always has been processed with everybody else's trash.
I'm just thinking out loud here.
Maybe God was onto something. 🤔
And just to be clear, I understand Leviticus gives no reason. Not hygiene, definitely not diet, not garbage.
What it does give is a very strict criteria, which are split-hoof vegetarian animals. So I'm not trying to reinvent a rationale. However, the criteria do produce a very real pattern. Every permitted land animal is a non-predatory herbivore. The forbidden bird list consists of raptors and meat-eaters, almost start to finish. Fins and scales screen out the bottom feeders, which means there's nothing that eats death that makes the permitted list.
Milgram worked this out in detail in the Anchor Bible Commentary. It's not about diet being the criterion; it's about the criterion and what the criterion kept producing. And that's a completely different claim and, in my opinion, a more interesting one.
If there was anything to correct about ancient pig farming, it was the feed, not the animal. Pigs do fine on grain and plant scraps and stay healthy on it, the disease problem comes from raw animal waste, not from being a pig.
But that’s the trade nobody was going to make. What made pork attractive across so much of the ancient world was exactly that you fed the animal garbage and got meat back. Take that away, and the pig loses the argument that made it worth keeping.
Sorry to say that I couldn't possibly care who eats or doesn't eat pork, or the reasons, true or false, behind their choice.
The piece isn't really about what anyone eats; it's about how a regional habit turned into a national law, but I get that the food angle isn't for everybody. Thanks for reading anyway.
The end of your article calls to mind a recent conversation on Medium. A Karen in a grocery store was losing her mind and telling everyone to avoid the meat because it was halal and sacrificed to idols. I asked if she would have done the same for kosher, because the practice is almost identical. The main thing is killing the animal humanely. Someone else corrected me and said camel meat is as forbidden as cat. My response was I wasn't overly concerned about buying camel meat in the US.
Thanks for another informative article. I was unaware that pig bones had been found in the digs. It certainly does dispel the myth that pigs weren't eaten in Israel. I'm sure someone will jump in and explain that JEWS weren't eating pork; it was those other people who lived within the community. People hate when you tear down their opinions with facts.
The halal and kosher slaughter methods are close to identical, which makes the grocery store panic even stranger. A lot of that panic rides on the word Allah, which is the Arabic word for God and nothing more exotic than that. Arabic-speaking Jews and Christians were using it for the God of Abraham before any Muslim did, and it still sits in the Arabic Hebrew Bible and the Arabic New Testament.
The Jerusalem pig is a great detail too, a whole articulated skeleton in a wealthy house inside the city the rule supposedly comes from. Judah was never as consistent as the law codes make it sound. Thanks for reading, and for the support.
On a completely seperate note, do you still have problems messaging me directly on substack?
Oh, but say it ain’t so! Pork eating Jews? But of course, they indulged, they even worshipped pagan gods on frequent occasions, so what’s the big deal? Some of those annoying dudes even ran around claiming a human God walked among them! So many silly tales, hard to keep track of them all. Facts can sure be a bummer though, walking on water not possible, but I bet in your opinion it certainly is! Oh, the opinions so may CHRISTIANS honor as truth!
Do you troll everyone or is it just me? Let me guess - you hate Christians in general and I just happen to be a convenient target. Have a happy day!
Wow! Methinks you project too much! Look at your own hatred first. I hate absolutely no one and have enjoyed a lifetime surrounded by Christians, many whom are dear friends, and some who are beloved family members.
You shine with ignorance. Best to simply ignore your venom.
I wasn't even talking to you when I posted my comment. You engaged, then you insulted. Whatever, Dude.
Good summary. I believe the hygiene argument developed during the 19th century Jewish enlightenment as Jewish philosophers searched for a rational basis for their religion. It falls apart when you consider that so many other cultures figured out a way to safely prepare pork.
You might consider a religious connection. Pigs were Demeter's animals and were sacrificed in the eastern Mediterranean as part of the cycle of fertility, death, regeneration. (Same for Ceres in Rome). What is holy in one culture becomes tabu in its neighbor.
A minor critical comment - the cause of trichinosis might not have been identified until the 19th century, but people before that could make the association between uncooked pork and the disease.
The Demeter and Ceres connection is a good one, and it fits the pattern where an animal used in someone else's rites becomes the thing you refuse.
People could connect bad pork to sickness long before anyone knew why, though that same association would have hit spoiled beef and mutton and never produced a law. Appreciate the careful read, and thanks for supporting the work.
As an agnostic I accept the health reason because there are a myriad of health issues ancient peoples treated successfully thousands of years before they knew the real cause. But I also think just pinning decisions on just one reason is a mistake. What you outlined was also probably in play at the same time. And other ideas in the replies too.