A possible interpretation of the direction not to eat meat with the “life blood still in it”, would be that if you are going to eat meat, make sure that you cook it until you can no longer see blood.
Early religious dictates appear to be largely guidelines for a long-life (such as the ‘don’t eat pork’ …because we don’ t have refrigerators yet, and haven’t figured out how to preserve it so that you don’t get worms, and die.
Recalling that there was no CNN, and no Straight Dope, people got their information by word-of-mouth. Eventually, a compendium of directives was compiled. It was called the Bible, and some smart person figured that if they claimed it was the word of God, then people would acknowledge it, obey it, and live long lives giving everything they owned to the less fortunate.
Not a bad idea for a State. People who live longer can be taxed longer, meaning that the Caesars and the Caligulas, the Davids, etc. can continue to rule, and to enjoy the trappings of wealth.
Setting aside for the moment that trichinosis is related to improper cooking rather than improper storage and that the symptoms are so far removed from the cause that I doubt trichinosis was associated with pork thousands of years ago, how does this explain prohibitions against, say, mixing milk and meat?
That’s a nice explaination, but it runs counter to Jewish law for thousands of years. Jewish law is quite explicit that one must remove the blood before cooking the meat.
I find this statement highly improbable. There are many commandments in the Bible that cannot be rationalized as “health” or “longevity” measures.
In addition, if the danger of trichinosis was the only reason that Jews kept kosher, why do you suppose that they still do, even though the danger of trichinosis is largely unheard of in modern, industrialized countries?
But there is a lot in the Bible that has nothing to do (so to speak) with the laws. Of what relevance to the laws is the story of the birth of Peretz and Zerach? How would knowing about Abraham’s third wife and his sons from her make people live longer?
You could apply the same to the U.S. today? Are you willing to posit that the Surgeon General’s office, the CDC and the NIH exist for the sole purpose of gaining more tax revenue from people as they live longer?
On a sufficiently cynical reading, I’d have to say yes. They exist to improve the public health and well-being, but why does the state-as-a-whole care about the health and well-being of its individual members? Because a healthy populace is a working populace and a working populace is essential to an economically viable state. If you accept the view that states are essentially just very large corporations…
But then again healthy people live a long time, and as we currently see in the US w/ the impending social security failure, longer living people begin to suck up gov’t resources.
One thing I might accept is that all humans of early times realize that their just has to be a God of some type. As they explored there world and existance they came up w/ rules that ‘their’ ‘god’ has bestowed upon mankind. Now the people who beleive their god has commanded the people only to eat of the live crockadile and hippo quickly dies out. Others that beleived that they should leave their food in a rancid pile before eating were very sick and quickly conqured by those who’s ‘god’ told them things that just happened to perserve food.
This precise issue was once raised in one of my (long ago) college classes; the students asserted that the dietary laws in the OT were simply collections over time of people’s observations of the results of certain dietary habits. For example, the people who were not sick from eating contaminated pork or shellfish were more successful. “So what have you demonstrated,” asked the teacher, “except that God knows what’s good for you?”
The “health” argument has been attempted during the last couple of centuries as an explanation of the biblical dietary laws. And, OK, the idea of washing your hands before you eat is biblical and we know that it’s related to health. But pig-flesh is not more or less at risk of infection than other meats, and there’s no health reason to avoid shellfish or camels as food, nor is there a health reason for draining the blood.
The most probable explanation is, in fact, simply a matter of purity being equated with cleanness. Pigs are (visibly) dirty animals, routing in the ground for food rather than grazing as do sheep and goats. Shellfish and insects look icky.
Similarly, the mixture of meat (red, blood, symbolic of death) and milk (white, semen, symbolic of life) is simply inelegant (OK, symbolically “icky”.)
Do we know that these colors had these associations at the time that laws pertaining to kashrut (pardon spelling if wrong) were formulated? In some cultures, red is life and white is death.
We know that to the ancient Israelites, red indicated sin (and death) and white indicated purity. That imagery appears several times in the Hebrew bible.
Blood itself has a double imagery, of course, since it can represent the life-force as well. But, for instance, the first plague on Egypt is that the water turns to blood, clearly a life-to-death imagery (especially for Egypt!), and painting blood on the doorway saved the Israelites from the tenth plague of death.
Gravy is kosher, amarinth, as long as it’s made form kosher ingrediments (e.g., no blood.)
Actually, you can get certain diseases – trichinosis, for example – from pork that you can’t get from cattle and other herbivores. And shellfish spoils more easily than “fin” fish.
But the incidence of trichinosis is not nearly high enough to imagine that it would have been noticed 2,500 - 3,500 years ago. That’s a very modern argument, trying to read some rationale back into the ancient code.
And while shellfish does spoil faster than fin fish, it also stinks to high heaven… and tastes awful. Again, the logic need not have been “health” so much as “cleanness” in the sense of purity. The reason given in the text for the rules is “so that you will be holy.” Holiness implies separateness, pure vs mundane, clean vs profane. A food that stinks fairly quickly would not be viewed as “clean”, regardless of connecting it to bad health.
Similarly, the written Torah does not prohibit mixing meat and dairy, but only the specific act of boiling a kid in its own mother’s milk. (Is there an Orthodox Jew here who can specify whether the meat/dairy prohibition is said to be oral Torah, or simply “building a fence”?)
There won’t be an orthodox Jew here for a little over 24 hours, John, since your post was after Friday sundown.
My guess is that the meat/milk distinction was part of oral torah, because the phrase “not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk” is mentioned three times in the Torah.
CK is correct. The mixing of meat & milk has the status of a commandment. An example of “building a fence” would be the mixing of fowl and milk. By Torah law, fowl is not meat, but pareve. However, it was feared that because it is similar in texture and/or taste to real meat, people might err on the matter.
For those unversed, a quick expansion/explanation of what zev said:
The Torah verse commands not to “cook a kid in its mother’s milk.” This verse appears three times.
Rabbinic interpretation of this is not to eat meat and milk at the same meal. (There are other ramifications as well, based on the repetition, that we needn’t go into here.) This has the status of “oral law.” Tradition holds that the Torah was given to Moses on Mt Sinai, but the Torah itself is very sparse. A commandment like “not to cook a kid in its mother’s milk” is unclear. Similarly, a simply “Thou shalt not murder” doesn’t address the complexities of self-defense, war, and other extenuating circumstances. Because the Torah is viewed as a law code, not just an ethical guide, it’s necessary to have explanation of these very terse rules. Hence, by tradition, Moses was also given an “Oral Law” along with the written Law, which explains some of those complexities.
Historically, the rabbis gathered together around 50 BC - 200 AD to set down the Oral Law. By that time (over 1200 years since the time of Moses, by tradition), there had been divergences and disagreements among different families/schools as to what the Oral Law really was. This first codification is called the Mishnah.
The question of not eating meat and milk at the same meal raises the question of chickens. Since birds don’t have “mother’s milk”, there was one school that argued that chicken parmesan (for instance) was OK. The prevailing ruling was that chickens are indeed “meat” (in a way that fish are not), even if the mother doesn’t have milk. Thus, the prohibition against eating fowl with milk is not actually from Oral Law, it’s an expansion of the strict requirements.
Both Orthodox and Conservative agree that a strong rabbinic tradition like this one nowadays has the same authority as Torah Law, and hence no one would try to overturn or reverse that decision. (For Reform Jews, there is no such binding authority of rabbinic tradition, or even of Torah “ritual” laws.)
This is probably way more than you wanted to know, but since John W Kennedy raised the question and zev answered in a way that seemed to only make sense if you know what was going on, I thought I’d anticipate the inevitable “huh?”
Perhaps you can enlighten me. I recall that there the Torah contains guidance on what I think of as “field sacrifices”. In particular, to leave the blood (animal life force) to God in thanks, which would not be too dissimilar to the Plains Indians thanking an animal’s spirit before the kill. The only commentary I recall on this stated that the practice faded as sacrifices were formalized.
Properly dressing a slain animal is clearly important in any temperatures above freezing, but I see no reason a believer would not take the motivation of thanskgiving at face value. (A social evolutionists can make claims that societies with such practices would be naturally selected. I will make no such claims.) It would make sense to me (and I am not claiming any kind of knowledge about this!) that a hunting guideline would migrate into a butchery practice, with or without the same motivation. The prohibition against blood in meat would then have evolved from a hunting practice of thanksgiving to a butchery practice of thanksgiving.
I’m not familiar with this at all. For the most part, sacrifices could only be offered at the Temple in Jerusalem or (before that) at the Sanctuary in Shiloh. Before the Temple was built and while the Tabernacle wasn’t at Shiloh, some sacrifices could be brought on a private altar, but the rules were pretty much the same as they were for standard sacrifices.
But even a cursory reading of the Torah will tell you that ancient Israelite society was an agricultural one, not a nomadic, hunting one.