Sinclair is correct. The prohibition on swine is merely a codification of cultural practice. According to Marvin Harris (in Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches), pigs were naturally a foraging forest creature. When put in the context of the environment of the Middle East, they competed with humans for food, so it became uneconomical to raise pigs for food. Thus, the communities that stopped eating pork became generally more successful than the communities that continued to eat pork. It was cultural survival of the fittest. And once pork-shunning became dominant, it was encoded into cultural norms.
That’s the same way that beef-shunning became dominant in India. The difference is that cattle still played a very important role, in providing dairy products and as draft animals for farming. (Indeed, that was the reason that it was more economical not to kill cows for food.) Thus, cattle became revered in Hinduism whereas pigs became shunned in Judaism.
Not just before Shabbat dinner - Judaism has a fairly complex ritual washingsystem, which includes washing hands before each meal. However, current theory states that this last custom actually originated from Hellenistic influence, which post-dates the prohibition on pork.
I sometimes wonder whether folks think that the ancients were morons. Ancient people had the same potential for intelligence that we do. There may have been fewer whose Mothers had proper nutrition, so fewer who reached their full potential, but there woudl also have been quite a few more than capable of making simple deductions.
“There is a debilitating disease (trichinosis, say,) that occurs among those seven peoples, and never among these three. The three that never get it also don’t eat pork. Otherwise they live in the same region and in generally the same way. . . Hmmmnnnnnn”
I don’t find it so terribly surprising. there were, as we know, traveling wise men and traders who visited from place to place.
It’s not like pork has some unique status as “the meat that will make you sick.” It’s not a poison. It’s a meat product that for the most part is just as beneficial to people as any other meat product. Occasionally pork can harbor some kind of danger, but that’s true of any kind of meat. It’s also true that people would quickly have learned that thorough cooking of pork would largely eliminate most dangers of infection, just like with any other meat. On health grounds, the ancients would have no more reason to shun pork entirely than any other kind of food source.
Pigs eat dead animals, just like buzzards do. People saw that and said “yuck, don’t eat pigs or buzzards!” They saw catfish eating doo doo and said “yuck, don’t eat catfish!”
The claim of being “grain fed” pigs and catfish soothes a lot of fears, but for some reason “grain fed buzzards” still don’t sell.
Perhaps they were actually lemmings and the story got pumped up a bit because a herd of demon-infested lemmings doesn’t really make much of a campfire story.
In fact, as I’m sure you remember, the Latin for “pig” is “sus”, and so, in dog-Latin at least, but not in pig-Latin, ironically, “suicide” would pass muster as meaning “pig-killing”.
Whose “current theory” is this? Immersion in water to purify one’s self from ritual impurity is mentioned explicitly in the Bible, the Rabbis added a minor level of ritual impurity to the hands (because they touch lots of stuff, and people are unlikely to keep track of the purity status of everything they touch), necessitating that Kohanim eating foods with a certain degree of holiness wash (or immerse) their hands beforehand, and the practice was adapted to all Jews before meals (bread being the staple of the meal) after the destruction of the Holy Temple, so we’ll always remember Temple practice.
Actually, neither of these things would necessarily be apparent to ancient Middle Easterners. Wild pigs are forest foragers who, although they are omnivorous, when given a choice, they mostly eat vegetable matter. They take shelter from the heat under the forest canopy.
It’s only when pigs are domesticated by people in a hot place with little shade that they are forced to cool themselves in the mud, which includes their own feces, because that’s the situation that’s available to them. And, of course, in such situations, their diet is whatever human society manages to offer them.
And, anyway, if it had been so apparent that pigs are disgusting creatures, then why are they one of the most commonly domesticated and eaten animals in the world? Along with cattle, chickens, goats, and sheep, pigs are among the main types of livestock.
Furthermore, as Harris points out, there survived pockets of areas in the Middle East, even amongst Muslims, where pork continued to be consumed (sometimes on the sly, if necessary). And those pockets were located in precisely those places where keeping and raising pigs for food remained compatible with the environment and was economical.
As for vultures, I might point out that carnivorous birds, or, indeed, any carnivorous animal, is rarely an efficient source of calories for humans.
Their approach was basically “quarantine until it clears up”. Which is about as good as they could do, with anything short of 20th-century medical technology. The old canard about rubbing some moldy bread on it doesn’t actually work, and would probably make things worse: It’s a lot more complicated than that to make penicillin.
