--

Yes, the interest of this issue for me is that there's a long history of trying to "figure out" the pig prohibition—with layers of assumptions that don't, on examination, make any sense.

Many say that pork can have trichinosis and this seems an explanation for why the Bible says not to eat it. But as Marvin Harris pointed out, pigs are immune to other maladies, brucellosis and anthrax, as afflict cattle, etc.

And pigs, as he notes, are unusually clean when kept as household pets. So they’re not really “unclean.” They eat what’s given to them and they’re capable of eating food that other animals couldn’t eat.

So we get back to the fact that the Bible was not, in fact, a set of rules to protect humans from ‘unclean’ meat. And the interpreters who saw it that way were ignoring even the evidence they knew.

--

--

No responses yet