Isn’t it obvious from your list that every dietary law listed, except for alcohol, is based on a simple premise: Germy foods are bad. Rats, pigs, bugs, catfish, shrimp, birds of prey and carrion-eaters - all things that eat garbage and have a high probability of contaminating food if crudely butchered or not completely washed out. And blood and milk, which spoil easily, must be handled separately.
All good advice, even today, in any place with high temperatures and scarce water and now treatment for open wounds.
Yet you wave that away as unimportant and prefer the esoteric “reverence for life”. Like cows and deer don’t count in that department.
It’s not “life” that separates good food from bad, since some of each class of animals are permitted, but tendency to spoil and give you the runs and kill you.
The impetus was not spiritual, but practical. Some might even say this was Science with a capital S. And the priests made laws to protect their communities just as the lawgivers of the FDA do today.
[ Less sure about this part: Maybe even alcohol, which is natural on unclean and mouldy fruit, and can be plenty gross if not at high concentrations, and might attract vermin, might also be part of that scientific thinking. ]
So why do you believe that camels, an unclean animal, are more ‘germy’ than carp, a clean animal? Carp eat large amounts of carrion and excrement. Camels eat only plant material.
Why do you believe that rabbits are more germy than goats? Why are termites unclean while locusts are clean? How can a carrion feeding chicken be considered clean while an entirely insectivorous kite be considered unclean?
What evidence is there that milk requires more careful handling than liver? I don’t believe that blood is more likely to cause disease than intesinal sausage casings is not handled separately.
The fact is that there is very little logical reason for the Hebrew dietary laws. Animals that are biologically clean are deemed unclean, while animals that are biologically unclean are deemed clean.
We asked a teacher this very question in one of my college courses. He answered, “What have you proved except that God knows what’s good for you?” This is not to say that smart people didn’t notice that people who ate omnivores like pigs sometimes got sick, and, unable to know the real reason simply concluded that this was a judgement of their god. But the reason people listened was that they were taught that God made the rule.
Alcohol, of course, is a different thing entirely. While we all know it’s dangerous in high doses, in areas where the water supply may not be safe, and where refrigeration is non-existent, wine and beer consumption would lead to a healthier, not a less healthy, population.
It’s not reasonable to leap immediately to “drunken behavior.” Cholera and dysentery are even more scary, and that’s what you get if you drink untreated water in densely-populated areas.
Most of France today has a glass of wine with meals and they don’t seem to be especially violent or scary. Read up on typical meals of the days before clean water was readily available. Beer, hard cider and wine were the normal beverages for most of western Europe and their colonies in North America until fairly recent times.
And European children drank small beer* because the water supply was contaminated enough to kill them.
*Small beer: A term for a beer containing little alcohol.
Alcohol was, at least in Europe, considered a part of the diet, as opposed to an occasional indulgence or a public health menace. Historically diseased water was a big part of the reason.
The prohibition against alcohol is part of Islam, not part of Judaism. And the reason behind it, as described in the Staff Report, because it interferes with clear thinking. One cannot be submissive to God’s Will (islam) if one’s behavior is influenced by a fuzzy mind.
On the other arguments about health, Blake has pretty much hit the nail on the head. One can certainly argue that some of the rules are related to health (requiring ritual slaughter rather than eating an animal who died of disease, for instance). One is hard-pressed to argue that ALL the dietary rules are health-related, however.