Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.
Whether it originated from an us vs them ideology or not, there were practical benefits for a population that made those choices that would have reinforced it in pre-modern times.
Does it? I agree that the risk of trichinosis from pigs was pretty great until modern disease research, chickens for example are a huge risk of Salmonella, and yet they are both kosher and halal. Conversely, camels are a relatively safe food, but they are not kosher. Rabbits and similar animals are also not allowed, despite being relatively safe. Tortoises and whales are not allowed either, despite not posing any special risks. Neither are eels or catfish, again relatively safe foods.
It simply could be that it didn't need to be proscribed because it was never done.
Since you aren't answering your own question, this is what I could find:
"A find in Israel shows evidence of chicken consumption from as early as 400 B.C.E." [1]
"The Old Testament passages concerning ritual sacrifice reveal a distinct preference on the part of Yahweh for red meat over poultry. In Leviticus 5:7, a guilt offering of two turtledoves or pigeons is acceptable if the sinner in question is unable to afford a lamb, but in no instance does the Lord request a chicken." [2]
So, depending on how you date the Torah, the timelines may or may not overlap.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/who-were-first-peo...
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-chicken-conqu...
This view of the world is so wrong I can't believe it. Even very poor people would eat meat, in fact in the middle age they created a tax around salt because it was used both for meat conservation (giving "salaison") and also nutrition for cattle.
If salt consumption was just for humans and meat consumption was low, such a taxation would have made absolutely no sense, yet this is what they did.
In any case I think it can't be linked to food safety or disease risk, which I have also always found compelling for most of the other restrictions. How it later grew into a general prohibition on mixing meat and dairy I have no idea though.
A previous poster mentioned boiling in milk as mixing death (boiling/eating) with life (milk), as a sort of generic badness.
As giraffe_lady just reminded us, the original prescription is boiling the baby in it's OWN MOTHER's milk. This is not a "put cheese on hamburger" situation, it is an explicit expression of cruelty to the mother and to her baby.
And the prohibition was put in place because boiling babies in their mother's milk was considered a delicacy back then. People used to do horrific shit, celebrating cruelty.
Besides, it clearly seems to have been a “don’t copy the ritual process of this other tribe” rule.
I’m pretty sure I - as an ignorant person in this area - could figure out if people around me sometimes ate something, and then got sick within a few days, that maybe I shouldn’t eat that thing.
I doubt I’d be able to figure out that I should eat something on the basis of people getting sick after not eating a whole bunch of things for a few months.
0 - at least one source I found claimed scurvy symptoms could show up as soon as one month after “severe” vitamin C deficiency, but that “more noticeable symptoms would appear later.
Scurvy became a problem with the age of sail, and even in the 1500's sailors were recommending citrus, making pine needle teas, and similar efforts.
I think it is amazing that people figured out how to treat and prevent scurvy without a functional understanding of biology, and 300 years before Vitim C was discovered.
I think the fact that they DID figure it out supports the theory more than a couple hundred year delay undermines it.
How many tens of thousands of years did people have to figure it out?
Science always has a find an issue, then resolve it any other path is just luck. The sailors of other countries other than Europe did have ways of remedying this issue through various ways.
Detecting a pattern between 2 things that did happened (everyone but Dave ate pork, and everyone but Dave got sick) is orders of magnitude easier than detecting a pattern between something that did happened (this patient got sick) and something that didn't (everyone washed their hands).
If you believed the gods were sadistic bastards, whose power you could call on with an act of cruelty - it wouldn't be such a strange thing to believe, after a rough period of hundreds of years where cruel people rewarded again and again - then a little symbolic cruelty to whet Baal's appetite might seem like a clever move.
Pigs are used when we need models of physiology, like entire organ systems --- to know how something will affect large organ systems (this is also why xenotransplantation focuses on pigs so heavily). They aren't otherwise special when it comes to animal models of human disease. In terms of popularity as disease models they are a footnote. They're so infrequently used that the average survey of animal models of human disease will mention them only in passing, at best. https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/24/21/15821
Pigs are not more likely to give us zoonotic diseases than other animals. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7563794/ They are no more carriers of diseases that we're vulnerable to than cattle or chickens.
> “The primary risks for future spillover of zoonotic diseases are deforestation of tropical environments and large-scale industrial farming of animals, specifically pigs and chickens at high density,” says the disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie of Emory University in the US, an expert reviewer of the report.
This article doesn't include a comparative risk assessment. Why are you confident that pigs and chickens have a similar risk? Do you think that the idea that we are more at risk from more similar animals is mistaken?
I imagine that the risks are very different in the modern factory farming context compared to when we lived intermingled with our livestock. The disease risk may be more in the animal behavior than its physiology, for instance if pigs are more friendly or curious or dirtier than chickens or cows, or if their shit is less solid. Or if their wallows are disease reservoirs.
Secondly, if the health consequences were so obvious, I don't think it'd be one of the world's most popular meats millennia before we had such effective treatments for the parasites that come with swine. Furthermore any persistence in eating it despite knowledge of health concerns would surely point to such a taboo being less likely to be effective.
Third, there's a lot of medical practices we know from the time was known to archaeology and virtually none of it was preserved in the Torah. Even if it is medical advice, it's a rather odd way (rhetorically) to specify a specific danger. Whatever medical policy is there seems to serve the goal of social cohesion. Food preparation has been noted multiple times for confirming long-lost branches of the jewish community when knowledge of hebrew, prayers, circumcision, and other rituals faded.
Finally, this just feels like the wrong way to approach these texts as a primary tool to deconstruct them—without comparison of "sibling" cultures (and the best we can do is what samaritanism? Zoroastrianism at a massive reach?), without archeological positive evidence, there's little room for strong conclusions. The question we should be asking is not where this comes from my why it persisted after people forgot the beginning. Religion may serve as a de-facto method of social control, but to think that the people who constructed such a society were just coating secular policy in a hotline-to-god-special is hard to imagine. Whatever cultural event happened to make the taboo stick was clearly very influential.
However—if there is serious danger associated with which god you worship, having strong, difficult-to-hide signals recognized by both man and god to identify friend from foe is pretty compelling to a such a strongly community-oriented faith.
I think this analysis could be theologically consistent as well because that's a pretty smart play by a God who's trying to get us to be successful, but who also has to make compromises for early humans who need clear simple rules and who aren't yet advanced enough to understand the why/nuance behind a lot of them. It also provides a theological basis for the fact that "Cafeteria Catholics" are the norm because we've outgrown / understand better the basis for those rules.
The clear reality is that most of these rules are just various cultural taboos enshrined as religious rites, some of which are beneficial, many of which are not.
In the course of my lifetime, I have witnessed relatively little open dissent, public or private, by persons who profess to be Catholic, regarding christology and other beliefs expressed in the Nicene creed, recited during every Sunday Mass. Sure, there is some, if you have particular conversations. But I’ve never witnessed any fuming on those matters in the local or inter/national news. A huge number of folks in the pews who grew up post 1960s are very poorly catechized thanks to the multi-decade Silly Season that left many of a couple of generations of Catholics (up to today) confused at best. So in many cases, regarding christology, the sacraments, etc., people aren’t sure what a lot of it means, so they’re not in much of a position to dissent on those points (to be heretics re: those teachings), they’re just clueless.
That is in contrast to the open specific informed dissent, even rancor, public and private, around topics such as marriage and premarital sex, artificial contraception, homosexuality, abortion, IVF, and related. And that’s been going on for ~50 years now, so I assert the rampant heresies of our time are clustered around Church teaching on those matters.
And preventing unwanted pregnancies, and partly to stop a few men from monopolising all the women.
I don't think this has changed.