Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (5 page)

FOUR

“Of Their Flesh Shall Ye Not Eat”

G
od told Abraham to leave his homeland, Mesopotamia, and settle in Canaan.
“I will indeed bless you,” God told him, “and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven.” Those descendants, after a time, found themselves exiled in Egypt. There Abraham’s heirs became so powerful that Pharaoh began to fear them and ordered all boys born to the Hebrews to be cast into the Nile. One mother set her infant son afloat in a basket of bulrushes, and he was rescued and adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, who named him Moses. When the boy had grown, God ordered him to lead the Hebrews back to Canaan. This Moses did, despite resistance from Pharaoh and a lengthy sojourn in the desert.

God then renewed the covenant with his people, issued the Ten Commandments, and gave highly detailed instructions on
how the Hebrews must worship him. The greatest danger his followers faced was that they would make themselves impure and thereby force God to abandon them. He therefore laid out the rules of religious ritual and everyday behavior, including which animals were proper to eat.
Among the forbidden beasts were pigs: “Of their flesh shall ye not eat, and their carcass shall ye not touch; they are unclean to you.”

This is the story presented in Jewish scripture. Most of its details can’t be independently confirmed, but archaeologists tell us that after 1200
bc
, the human population exploded in the hills of central Israel and the Palestinian West Bank.
These settlers were the Israelites—a mixed lot that, scholars speculate, included recent arrivals from Egypt, refugees from Palestinian cities, and seminomadic herders who chose to settle down.

Assume that the biblical story is true: Abraham was born in Mesopotamia, and the Israelites escaped from bondage in Egypt. The elites of both these great civilizations shunned pigs. They didn’t sacrifice them to the gods, and they didn’t eat pork. A formal ban on pork would have raised no eyebrows among the Israelites’ neighbors. When the dietary laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were set down—most likely in the eighth century
bc
—very few people in the region ate pigs.
Israelite priests, in banning pork, simply codified the beliefs of their place, their time, and their class.

Pork eating had become so rare in the Near East by this point that you might say that Jewish leaders banned something that didn’t need banning. But ban it they did, and with far-reaching consequences. Because the ban was recorded as divine law, Jews maintained it after migrating to other regions of the world. And the Jewish ban influenced the pork prohibition within Islam, another Near Eastern religion that traces its heritage to Abraham. Today, there are about 14 million Jews in the
world and 1.6 billion Muslims—meaning that the religions of nearly a quarter of the global population reject swine.

In the early years, the Israelite ban on pork wasn’t all that important to the Jews: pork was rare in the region, so the issue rarely came up. Later, as pork-eating Greeks and Romans entered the picture, pigs took on a larger role. Avoiding pork, long a requirement of ritual purity, became a marker of cultural identity. Who were the Jews? They were the people who didn’t eat pork.

T
here are many theories regarding why the Jews formally prohibited pork. Anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued that Israelites deemed the cloven-footed, non-cud-chewing pig unclean because it was a “taxonomic anomaly.” Like dirt, it was “matter out of place,” threatening chaos by upsetting an orderly organizational scheme.
Douglas’s argument, though, suffers from circularity because the Israelites appear to have structured their taxonomic rules precisely to exclude the pig: perhaps the pig was unclean because it was a taxonomic anomaly, or perhaps it was a taxonomic anomaly because it was unclean.

Some have pointed to the unsuitability of pigs for desert conditions and the fact that pigs might devour foods, such as wheat and barley, that people needed for themselves.
The pork prohibition therefore simply codified wise economic and environmental decisions. This view, although broadly correct, doesn’t acknowledge that pigs can be kept on a small scale as urban scavengers, feeding off human garbage rather than challenging people for a limited food supply.

Others see in the pork ban the influence of pastoralist views, pointing out that some people who practiced long-distance herding held pig-keeping urbanites in contempt for
their settled ways.
This was the case with nomadic Mongols, for instance, who associated pigs with their sedentary Chinese enemies. But not all Israelites were nomads, and in any case there is little evidence of such views in the Near East.

Another theory holds that pigs were judged unclean because the Jews’ idolatrous neighbors worshipped and sacrificed them. The evidence suggests, however, that others in Canaan sacrificed pigs only rarely.
When they did, the sacrifices had links to the netherworld—that is, Canaanites sacrificed pigs not because they were clean but because they were dirty. And they certainly did not worship pigs.

One of the most persuasive recent theories points to the fact that the poor often raised pigs in order to gain control over their own food supply. A powerful central state, intent on controlling all aspects of the economy, would have seen such dietary autonomy as a threat to its control and a potential source of sedition. The elite banned pigs, in other words, so the poor would be hungry unless fed by the state. Pigs offered a dangerous independence and therefore had to be outlawed under cover of religious sanction.
Though promising, this theory rests on a great deal of conjecture, and the best evidence for it comes not from ancient times, when the Israelite ban was codified, but from the rise of Islam in the seventh century
ad
.

Although the scholars who hold these theories tend to disagree on nearly everything, they come together on one point: all reject the view that the pork prohibition had anything to do with trichinosis. This theory found wide support starting in 1859, when scientists first proved the link between
Trichinella spiralis
and undercooked pork. It’s not certain, however, that this parasite existed in ancient Palestine. And even if humans came down with the disease, they would have had a hard time connecting it with pork, because there’s generally a ten-day delay
between eating tainted meat and falling ill.
Just about any kind of meat could make people sick—sheep can transmit anthrax, for instance—yet Jewish dietary law permitted other, equally dangerous types of flesh and singled out pork for prohibition.

Though the theory that the pork taboo was a public health measure has been thoroughly discredited, people have been reluctant to abandon it. Such beliefs stretch back at least to medieval times, and even then some authorities objected.
“God forbid that I should believe that the reasons for forbidden foods are medicinal,” wrote Jewish scribe Isaac Abrabanel. “For were it so, the Book of God’s Law would be in the same class as any of the minor brief medical books.”

This is a good reminder that there doesn’t necessarily have to be a clear explanation for the pork ban. Scripture is, after all, primarily concerned with a people’s relationship with their God, so to explain the Levitical dietary restrictions in terms of medicine or health or economics may miss the point. As Job learned after being stripped of his wealth and afflicted with boils, God wasn’t much for explaining himself. Imposing an arbitrary food ban would not have been his most inscrutable act.

T
he pork prohibition, though, was far from arbitrary: it was thoroughly consistent with the sacred logic of the Bible and with God’s command that the Israelites remain pure in order to preserve their relationship with him.

God demanded that the Israelites provide him with a physical home. They first constructed the Tabernacle, a portable structure housing the stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments that the Israelites carried with them during their wandering in the desert. The Tabernacle was replaced by the more permanent Temple built by King Solomon in Jerusalem
about 950
bc
. The Temple occupied the central place in the religion of the Israelites. It preserved the presence of God among his people and ensured that blessings would continue to flow from him. To fulfill this role, however, the sanctuary had to remain pure, and it was under constant threat of defilement. If the people became polluted, they would pollute the sanctuary, and the relationship between God and his people would be severed.

To remain pure, the Israelites must eat only pure things. The eleventh chapter of Leviticus lays out the taxonomy: there were clean and unclean birds, clean and unclean insects, and clean and unclean fish. And then there were the land animals.
The key rule was this: “Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.” Animals that “goeth upon paws”—dogs, wolves, lions—chewed no cud and divided no hooves and therefore were unclean.
The same rule disqualified pigs: “The swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he is unclean to you.”

Diet played an important role in scripture even before God handed down the rules of Leviticus. Adam and Eve were vegetarians: in the book of Genesis, God gives them the grains, fruits, and vegetables to eat. Only after God had expelled them from the Garden and later scoured the earth with a flood did people begin to eat flesh. Meat, in other words, is the food of the fallen.
God told Noah that he could eat “every moving thing that liveth” but then added a stipulation:
“You shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood.” Noah’s descendants were allowed to eat meat but never blood,
which was thought to contain the “life force,” or
nefesh
in Hebrew. Because the life or soul of an animal resided in its blood, to eat flesh with blood was to mingle life and death, two things that should be kept separate:
“Eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”

Just as God’s people did not eat blood, they also did not eat animals that ate blood.
Deuteronomy forbids eating carrion or “anything that dies of itself”—though it’s lawful to “sell it to a foreigner” (caveat emptor)—presumably because the blood had coagulated within its veins and could not be drained. This explains why certain animals came to be declared unclean: they are predators and scavengers that eat the flesh of animals from which the blood has not been drained. Unlike Adam and Eve, the Israelites were no longer vegetarians—even so, they could eat only vegetarian beasts.

In specifying that God’s people could eat only animals that chewed the cud and split the hoof, the priests displayed an intuitive sense of biological classification. Cud chewers, such as cows and sheep, are vegetarians. The pig didn’t “chew the cud” because its gut had evolved to digest high-energy foods, including meat.

Scripture expresses disgust for the two most common scavengers, pigs and dogs.
In the Christian Bible Jesus advises, “Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” “Dog” is an insult in the Bible, reserved for the most despised of people and linked to the animal’s eating habits.
“As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly,” we learn from Proverbs.
According to the book of Kings, “Thus says the Lord: ‘In the place where dogs licked the blood of Naboth shall dogs lick thy blood.’” In the next chapter: “So the king died . . . and the dogs licked up his blood.” Such is the standard version of those verses.
But in the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Jewish Bible made in the second and third centuries
bc
, those dogs do not dine alone: “The pigs and dogs licked the blood of Naboth,” and “the pigs and dogs licked up the blood” of the king. Some scholars speculate that this was the original version of the text.

Uncleanliness, in the Bible, is a contagion: predators and scavengers become unclean by eating bloody meat; men become unclean by eating the unclean flesh of animals that have eaten bloody meat; unclean men contaminate the temple so that God can no longer dwell with his people. That is why pigs, lickers of blood and eaters of carrion, could not be food for those who wished to remain pure: they were a vector for the unholy and would pollute anyone who consumed them.

S
criptural dietary rules grew more significant with time. When the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy were set down, few people in the Near East were eating pork. Archaeologists find no pig bones at all, or just a scattered few, in settlements from this period.
Then, starting in about 300
bc
, pig bones begin to appear in great profusion. The Greeks had arrived—and pigs would soon enjoy a renaissance after some nine hundred years of persecution.

Greek rule spelled major changes for the Israelites. The Greek king Alexander the Great had conquered the Persian Empire in 333
bc
and taken over all the lands Persia had controlled, including Palestine. Whereas the Persians had worked through local rulers and allowed local peoples to live as they wished, the Greeks forcefully imposed Hellenistic culture on their subjects. In 167
bc
the ruler Antiochus IV, a successor to Alexander, invaded Jerusalem and tried to stamp out Judaism, a story recorded in the Books of the Maccabees. The first book relates how Antiochus demanded “that all should be one people, and that each should give up his customs.”
Many Jews acquiesced and “sacrificed to idols and profaned the Sabbath.”
Worst of all, Antiochus ordered the Jews “to defile the sanctuary, . . . to sacrifice swine and unclean animals, and to leave their sons uncircumcised.”

In the Second Book of the Maccabees, the invaders force pork into the mouth of Eleazer, an elderly Jewish scribe, but he spits it out. His tormenters, old friends who have gone over to the enemy’s side, bring him aside and quietly tell him they will secretly replace the pork with kosher meat so that he can obey God’s law while pretending to obey Antiochus. Again Eleazer refuses: “Many of the young should suppose that Eleazer in his ninetieth year has gone over to an alien religion,” he says. “For the sake of living a brief moment longer, they should be led astray because of me.”
His purpose, he explains, is to leave “a noble example of how to die a good death willingly and nobly for the revered and holy laws.” So he goes to the rack and is beaten to death over a mouthful of pork.