Hold The Bacon: Making Sense of Biblical Dietary Laws

Peasants slaughtering a pig, by Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel, after 1616

About a quarter of the world’s population has a religious restriction against eating pork. For other cultures, pork represents a sustainable way to find food independence, apart from empire. On this show we discuss scholarly and intuitive hypotheses related to the reason why the Hebrew Bible and later rabbinic and Islamic traditions refrain from eating certain animals. We end with a discussion about the importance of integrating our lives in such a way that ethics, spirituality, and diet are aligned, whatever our values may be. 

Topics mentioned

*Kashrut

*Hallal

*Updates on our vegetarian experiment

*Grilling oysters

*Mary Douglas

*Marvin Harris

*Jacob Milgrom

*Howard Eilberg-Schwartz

*Philo of Alexandria

*Tao Te Ching scholar Derek Lin

*Molech a.k.a. Moloch

*Rastafarian dread locks

*The Farm in Tennessee

*Sustainability of crawdads in a diet

*Trichonosis

*Veganism

*Crawdads

*Ecotourism

Bibliography

Moshe Blidstein, “How Many Pigs Were on Noah's Ark? An Exegetical Encounter on the Nature of Impurity Author(s),” The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 108, No. 3 (2015), pp. 448-470.

Paul Diener, et al., “Ecology, Evolution, and the Search for Cultural Origins: The Question of Islamic Pig Prohibition,” Current Anthropology, Sep., 1978, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Sep., 1978), pp. 493-540. 

Gerald Hausman, Rastafarian Children of Solomon: The Legacy of Kebra Nagast and the Path to Peace and Understanding (Bear & Co., 2013). 

Richard A. Lobban, Jr., “Pigs and Their Prohibition Author,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, Feb., 1994, Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 57-75. 

Jorden Rosenblum, The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge 2016)

Jordan Rosenblum, “‘Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?" Jews, Food, and Identity in Roman Palestine, The Jewish Quarterly Review , Winter 2010, Vol. 100, No. 1 (Winter 2010), pp. 95-110. 

Stefan Schorch, ”A Young Goat in Its Mother's Milk"? Understanding an Ancient Prohibition Author(s),” Vetus Testamentum, 2010, Vol. 60, Fasc. 1 (2010), pp. 116-130.