Scooping and Copping

Number 10 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

by Farrell Till

The Twilight Zone, where the children of Israel lived and worshiped their god Yahweh, was indeed a strange place. Perhaps the only thing stranger than this god was the legal system that he imposed on his "chosen people." On our last journey, we learned that Yahweh abhorred anything that was blemished, and so he had ordered all people with physical handicaps to distance themselves from the tabernacle altar, lest they profane Yahweh's holy sanctuary with their presence. Even blemished animals, especially those with crushed testicles, would profane Yahweh's altar if they were offered as sacrifices.

Divine Hygiene?

From *The Skeptical Review*, 2002 / May-June:

by Farrell Till

In the mailbag column of this issue (p. 12), Vallon England saw divine guidance in the Israelite Levitical law that required ceremonial bathing and various ritual cleansings. This is an argument that has made the rounds as long as I can remember. I even recycled it myself when I was a fundamentalist preacher. Usually, dietary restrictions are also touted as part of the divine guidance intended to protect Yahweh's "chosen ones" from diseases. He declared pigs unclean, so the argument goes, because pork can transmit trichinosis if it isn’t sufficiently cooked. If that was Yahweh’s concern in giving this law, one has to wonder why he didn’t just command that the meat be cooked thoroughly? Why ban the entire product when there is a simpler solution, but who am I to question the creative genius of the universe? 

 

If there is any merit at all to this argument, then surely there were health reasons for Yahweh’s ban on the eating of camels and hares (Lev. 11:4-6), fish without scales (v:9), and various birds like eagles, falcons, hawks, and owls (vs:13-19). What were these reasons? What risk to his health does a person take if he eats a catfish or a rabbit? Of course, we know that catfish and rabbits, as well as any other kind of food, would pose a health risk if it is contaminated, but the fundamentalist argument is that the danger from trichinosis was so overwhelming that Yahweh ordered "his people" not to eat pork at all. If this is so, then surely the omni-one had similar reasons for banning all the other prohibited foods in Leviticus 1l. What were they? Unless such dangers can be demonstrated, fundamentalists have no convincing argument in this matter. 

Probably nothing more than tribal custom and personal whims were involved in these dietary restrictions. As a nation, we avoid eating horse meat, whereas other countries consider it a delicacy. We don't generally eat insects either, but they are a staple in some parts of the world. The ancient Hebrews apparently ate locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers, because they were permitted under the dietary laws, whereas all other insects were prohibited (Lev. 11:20-23). Yuck! If I had written Leviticus, I would have banned all insects and thrown in broccoli for good measure. Whoever wrote this book had probably been conditioned by tribal customs to eat certain insects and not others, and so what he wrote reflected the tribal preferences and revulsions that he was accustomed to. In "Kosher Baloney," Dr. Tim Gorski, a physician in Arlington, Texas, wrote on this subject from a medical point of view to show that there is no basis at all for arguing that the Levitical dietary laws were Yahweh's way of protecting "his people" from health hazards. In his article, Dr. Gorski made a statement that is worth reconsidering.

Even allowing that these [previously listed examples] may be instances of kosher practices having some practical utility, this would hardly argue for their being of divine origin. The operation of natural selection on the simple process of trial and error would be sufficient to result in the prevalence of useful, and especially lifesaving traditions. Nor does anything in the Bible argue to the contrary. God never tells his "chosen people," for example, that the reason they’re to avoid pork or not mix milk and meat products is because of "creeping things" too small to see that can make them sick (The Skeptical Review, November/December 1998, p. 6).

If the Levitical dietary laws had contained any explanation for the restrictions, such as the one that Dr. Gorski mentioned above, that would have given biblicists a strong argument, because a reference to tiny or invisible "creeping things" that could cause illness would be hard to explain in a time when microscopic organisms were unknown. Without any direct reference like this, however, any apparent benefits that seem to be derived from some of the Levitical restrictions could be explained as nothing more than what Gorski mentioned above, i. e., the result of having learned through trial and error. After all, if even a primitive people observed outbreaks of illness (now known to be trichinosis) enough times after pork was eaten, it shouldn’t have taken them too long to conclude that eating pork was not a good idea.