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Many of the bodily sins in the Bible are really just common sense health advice. Some are period oriented, such as eating pork, which was notoriously hard to make sanitary. Others are to insure a society functions well, like for example not banging your neighbors wife or not causing harm to people.

So, in this light it makes sense to treat it like a sin. And to be fair, it is a sin in modern society as well. We even have “sin taxes” for such vices we determine can be used for tax gain.

I see no real problem with this. I am unaware of any large program that forces you to give yourself up to the Christian God, but most require you to give yourself up to a higher power. This is obviously designed to give you a release from things you can’t control so you can use that mental power to help yourself get better.

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"which was notoriously hard to make sanitary"

Why were the jews unable to handle pork? Didn't their neighbours manage it?

Some historians speculate that it is a shibboleth to distinguish them from the pork eating gentiles.

honest question, as i simply have no clue about this, is there evidence that they did? given that the koran also forbids pork i doubt that a way to make pork sanitary has been found before then.

Pigs were domesticated (specifically for their meat) for several thousand years already by the time the earliest Jewish dietary restrictions took shape.

There are many theories that try to tie it specifically to the conditions in the Middle East, but none that I'm aware of are particularly convincing.

Pigs –being omnivorous– can acquire parasites that are harmful to humans at a higher rate than herbivorous ungulates.

That was as true 1000 years ago as it is today.

Cooking and salting the meat both greatly reduce incidence.

It is possible that cultures which avoided pork altogether lacked adaptations against the parasites at the genetic level or simply that somebody among them noticed the relationship with illness whilst missing the link with undercooked meat.

Let's say that was possible, why would it be likely, or even the most likely explanation?

How do you square this against, say, the possibility that the early jews wanted to differentiate themselves from the egyptians? I'm not sure about the specifics of the archaeological record but perhaps it was the case that pork was an upper class thing in Egypt due to it being fat and tasty, and slaves and workers were instead fed beef. Then the rule in Leviticus might reflect this and conserve a part of an older identity. In early judaism at least some of the fat from mutton and so on was burnt as a cultic sacrifice, so maybe the idea was to keep tradition from before the exile to the Sinai.

I was indeed going off the premise that there was a scientific reason behind the dietary laws.

Purely cultural reasons are plausible but pork is a staple meat in all cultures where it is allowed. It would be an inordinate sacrifice to make for tradition alone.

If differentiation was the motivation, couldn't they make laws against eating peas or some other inconsequential crop?

In context, pork was only one of many forbidden foods. Certain kinds of locusts being allowed while others not, certain kinds of seafood being allowed while others not.

They have been debunked as being good heuristics for food safety with 21st century knowledge but that doesn't mean they didn't stem from observations of poison, parasites, etc.

You could apply the same reasoning to the Jewish culture of cleanliness in general. It certainly differentiated them from many other contemporaneous cultures, but why would they wash themselves in the first place?

What do you mean by "inordinate"? Reason as a main source of social norms is a much later ideological invention, usually considered a result of the dominance of the roman catholic church and its adoption of aristotelian philosophy.

You're still defending possibility as such, and not arguing for relative likelihood. I find the lack of anchoring in early judaic society suspicious.

If you read the Torah you'll find that it is not a collection of argumentative texts. To the extent that Leviticus makes an argument it stops at two criteria, cloven hoofs and rumination, without further explanation. This is also how more well-known early judaic legal norms were communicated, e.g. the noahide laws and the decalogue are presented as is without further argument.

The context of early judaism was also quite deadly in itself, people died all the time from a variety of opaque reasons. Figuring out that someone died due to some meat-transmitted parasite rather than a disgruntled shedim wasn't very likely.

The Torah is quite unconcerned with things like health or actions that are supposed to result in a long life, insisting instead that these things are decided by G-d. Dying isn't given a very prominent place in this early theology either, it just kind of shrugs it off with a vague idea about Sheol as a container for souls, in case they just don't stick around like some ancestral ghosts or something.

Pork was widely eaten at the time, so the "good heuristics for food safety" thing seems entirely useless to me. People already knew how to prepare pork and did it, and pork isn't particularly insidious, if kept in a warm environment it'll ward off your nose and taste buds in no time. Beef (and mutton) is more likely to trick you into eating it even though it has gone bad, and it also carries a risk of giving you parasitical or bacterial infections.

I am not going to win in an argument about ancient religious texts.

Personally, even rejecting the food poisoning mechanic, it still rings more likely to me that some more superficial heuristic like "pigs and eels revel in the mud thus they are unclean" existed before religious and/or cultural significance("these beasts are unclean and I'm the Rabbi") was attached to it, rather than the wish for differentiation from other peoples appearing first("the enemy drinks water, henceforth we shall only drink beer").

But perhaps you're right and my mind can't wrap around that of those people from three thousand years ago.

Sheep usually have fecal matter in their rear wool, and pigs aren't the only animals that enjoy a bath in mud or muddy water when it's hot.

I suspect the ancient jewish idea of cultic purity had less to do with washed skin and hair, and more to do with behaviour and discipline. It's much harder to ritually slaughter a pig than a sheep or cow, and perhaps this was associated with rumination by the early jews.

I recently watched a video about the anthropological origins of the pork taboo. The hygiene theory is popular, but not uncontested:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI0ZUhBvIx4

Jewish law on this topic is like a thousand years older than the prophet Muhammad, or more, it's not exactly clear when the contents of Leviticus first stabilised.

As for pork as food, it's as old as neolithic societies. Wild boars were a very popular food source, hence why they were eventually domesticated. Now pigs don't produce tasty milk in the same way sheep, goats and cows do, but they produce a lot of meat and offspring without being picky about diet.

Leviticus does not say 'pig meat makes your tummy ill and then you die, so obviously don't eat it', instead it says 'pigs don't chew cud, hence they're impermissible', and frames it as a cultic uncleanliness, similar to contact with menstruating women or somesuch. People don't get parasites and die from a hug with a menstruating woman, but there are still rules in early judaism about it and as far as I know no speculations about it being in any way health related.

If pork wasn't a main meat in Egypt and the Levant in like the bronze age, then it would likely not have been a prominent diet rule in early judaism. G-d has this tendency to make up rules about stuff that people do rather than stuff that they already don't. When it's about things that people don't have to be constrained from doing or encouraged to do that they're already keen on doing, the genre tends to be poetry rather than law.

But the point is it shouldn't be considered a sin, as in a moral failing, when it's a biochemical change in the body causing a disorder, and the solution is abstention and medicine (for example, GLP-1 agonists have been shown to significantly cut down on cravings [0]). It's like saying getting sick is a sin, when there preventative and curative solutions unrelated to believing in a deity or higher power.

[0] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...

It’s foolish to ignore the social component of addiction.

Some of the medicines and treatments showing the most promise are still too expensive for many. AA programs are accessible and can be helpful. You think they treat alcoholism (or alcohol abuse disorder) as a sin? In the meetings there isn’t a whole lot of judging going on. It’s mostly mutual support and compassion.

> Many of the bodily sins in the Bible are really just common sense health advice.

And yet others were designed to distinguish the ingroup from the outgroup. That distinction is worth keeping in mind.

why so ?

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