Living Levitically #6: Day Three

I ran into a dietary inconvenience today at lunch: there were a few items off limits on the menu. While I could have ordered the items and requested that the pork product or “au jus” (which included blood and fat, I found out) be taken off, it would have made the dish significantly less tasty. Wenham’s commentary on Leviticus 11’s list of clean and unclean animals is helpful. He divides the animal laws into four categories: arbitrary, cultic, hygienic, or symbolic.

These categories are helpful, as is Wenham’s discussion on modern theories about the food laws being hygienically motivated. Wenham makes the point that the Old Testament authors could have easily revealed the reasoning behind the law, as they had elsewhere. Also, hygiene and cooking practices had not advanced very much by the time that Jesus abolished food laws. There were surely other harmful things to eat that were not included in the “unclean” category, such as poisonous plants.

Wenham’s analysis of Mary Douglas’ interpretation of the laws is enlightening and inspires more questions. Douglas supposes that all of the animals listed as “unclean” somehow have characteristics that are not common within their animal kingdom. The theory is that “…man must conform to the norms of the moral and physical perfection, and animals must conform to the standards of the animal group to which they belong” (170). Did some animals adopt different characteristics at the moment of the fall, just as man fell from moral and physical perfection?