Leviticus 11:5
And the rock badger, because it chews the cud but does not part the hoof, is unclean to you.
A lot of my recent posts have bounced off the behavior of my own family . More ty0icall7y, however I find myself responding to things I read at David Goldsteins blog, esp his weekly quote from “the Bible.”
After this quotes, several responses at HORSESASS (a very kosher idea in and of itself) went of the deep end criticizing Jews for having such crazy laws. Another post defended these laws as scientific ..based at least in part on real world experiences seen through the eyes of the rabbis who wrote the Torah.
I think both are wrong. The Christian posting on Jewish rules ought to look to his or her own house. Why do Christians take so much pleasure in pretending to follow our laws or qyelling about them? The other guy means well but has his own issues (I happen to know he is a guy). The laws of kashrut or typical taboos of a primitive people … preserved in our case because of the unique role of reading in Jewish history.
While I would like to imagine that some of the rules reflect an early incarnation of Pasteur, alot are likley shamanistic in origin. There are her rules of kashrut that make some sense … prohibition against eating carrion is a good example. We also seem to b the only folks who rejected trichinosis! Others make no sense. Riddle yourself how the logic of the rabbis could have outlawed shellfish?
I suggest the answer comes in the way Jews inherit ancient ideas. Written Hebrew, was the first language to use characters for vowels and, therefore the first language that 0ordinary folks, not just scribes, could read and write. Becuse we could read, some folks wrote down lots of stuff that other peoples have, perhaps luckily for them, lost.
One result of this ancient root is that it is likely that the Torah entangles itself with ideas and traditions that are much older then the supposed dates when the texts became canonized. A similar event occurred when the Irish acquired the Roman alphabet .. we have a lot of very old writing because the Irish, once literate, had an amazing oral tradition to record. Of course this meant that Irish missionaries spread the Roman Bible across the illiterate landscape of Barbarian. Europe.
Presumably a lot of the Torah has a similar origin. Rules got in there from the times of Jewish shamans t the more recent encounters with other old cultures. Some rules may have been developed out of practical scientific behavior but others likely are part of this deeper root. For example, the earliest Hebrew settlements in Judea/Samaria show an absence of pork bones in their middens! These settlements are much older than the era when we first had rabbis!
One part of kashrut may be closer to the time of the Rabbis … the prohibition of milk and meat. When Jews were taken to Babylon, they encountered the Zoroastrians. Presumably the intellectuals amongst the exiles were very influenced by this new culture. … A lot of what we now see as part of Judaism, especially mentions of angels, comes from that time. The Zoroastrians do not mix meat and milk.
So, we Jews have a lot of history to look back on. My big wish is that Christians would go get their own history and leave us alone!