Tyndale Open Bible Dictionary

DIETARY LAWS*

Regulations of food preparation and consumption provided by God for his people in OT times. The dietary laws formed part of broader regulations on “cleanness” that were designed to maintain Israel’s status as a holy people.

Preview

• Holiness and Dietary Law

• Before Moses

• The Mosaic Law

• After Moses

• Symbolism

• Reactions from the Church

Holiness and Dietary Law

Biblical laws concerning diet and cleanness were based on the idea of holiness. The underlying meaning of the Hebrew word for “holiness” is difficult to ascertain but most probably was “to cut,” or “to be separate,” or “to set apart.” The Lord told Israel, “You shall be holy to me; for I the Lord am holy, and have separated you from the peoples, that you should be mine” (Lv 20:26, rsv). God is the supreme example of holiness; he is the one uniquely separate in his character and being (Is 6:3). But God wanted his covenant people to be holy, too. One of the ways that God made the Israelites different from the other peoples of the world was by giving them dietary laws: “I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy” (Lv 11:44, niv). Keeping the dietary laws did not automatically make the people “holy” (i.e., separated to God); rather, it was one of the ways OT believers could show their gratitude to God for his deliverance.

Before Moses

From the Creation, God approved all varieties of fruit and vegetables as legitimate, clean food (Gn 1:29). After the fall of humanity, God distinguished between clean and unclean animals. At the time of Noah, God directed that additional specimens of clean animals be taken aboard the ark (7:2; 8:20). After the Flood, God prohibited the eating of blood because blood represented life (9:4). To commemorate the patriarch Jacob’s wrestling with the Angel of the Lord, Jacob’s descendants refrained from eating a certain hip muscle (32:32), though that was not a command from God.

The Mosaic Law

The primary revelation of the Lord’s dietary standards for Israel was given through Moses. Dietary laws are found among the ceremonial regulations received at Mt Sinai (Lv 11). Moses repeated many of those laws 39 years later, shortly before the people entered the Promised Land (Dt 14:3-21). The dietary laws concerned only animal products, except for the prohibition of wine to certain people (Lv 10:9; Nm 6:3-4; cf. Jgs 13:14; Jer 35:6).

Five categories of living things were regulated for food. To be edible an animal had to have cloven (divided) hooves and had to chew its cud. According to Leviticus, that requirement ruled out camels, horses, rabbits, and pigs (Lv 11:2-8). Sea life had to have fins and scales (vv 9-12). Birds were edible if they were not predatory (vv 13-19); Moses went on to list 20 species specifically prohibited because they were birds of prey or scavengers. Winged insects were forbidden (vv 22-23) except for certain types of locusts and grasshoppers (food commonly eaten by desert nomads). Finally, “the animals that move about on the ground,” including reptiles and rodents (vv 29-31, niv), were ruled out.

Further prohibitions were made about food that otherwise would have been considered clean. For example, nothing found already dead (Dt 14:21) or that had been torn by beasts (Lv 17:15) was to be eaten. Food could become defiled by contact with some other thing that was unclean, like a dead mouse that happened to fall into a food container (11:32-34). A young goat was not to be boiled in its mother’s milk (Ex 23:19; 34:26; Dt 14:21). When clean animals were slaughtered, their blood was to be drained out (Lv 17:14). All pieces of fat (3:16; 7:23), especially a sheep’s fat tail (Ex 29:22; Lv 3:9), were restricted for use in sacrifices to the Lord. Through Moses the Lord reiterated the prohibition against eating blood (Lv 17:10; 19:26; Dt 12:16; 15:23).

Several reasons, stated in or inferred from Scripture, account for the dietary laws and apply to the Bible’s cleanness regulations in general. Some seem to be natural reasons; others may be symbolic or relational.

Hygiene

Some dietary laws, such as those against eating vermin or decomposing flesh, circumvented obvious health hazards and were given for the people’s protection. But hygiene alone cannot account for all the regulations; in fact, some foods that might have been acceptable from a hygienic viewpoint, such as rabbit or clams, were excluded.

Aversion

Worms and snakes are generally considered loathsome, whatever their actual food value. Such animals were not kosher (proper).

Relationship to Pagan Practice

Boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk has now been documented as a pagan rite among Moses’ contemporaries, the Canaanites. God’s people were not to imitate the practices of the peoples around them (Dt 18:9).

After Moses

The dietary laws given at Mt Sinai continued to be recognized throughout Israel’s history. Before the birth of Samson, the child’s mother was warned, “Now see to it that you drink no wine or other fermented drink and that you do not eat anything unclean” (Jgs 13:4, niv). During the Philistine wars of the next century (c. 1041 BC), King Saul’s soldiers sinned by disregarding requirements about the proper draining of blood from animals (1 Sm 14:32-34).

Later, when the Israelites were exiled in heathen lands, they were faced with situations in which the selection of food and its preparation could render it unclean (Ez 4:12-14). Daniel’s refusal to be defiled by pagan delicacies at Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylonian court (605 BC) illustrated his loyalty to God (Dn 1:8).

From the prophet Isaiah’s day (740 BC) onward, the most abhorrent food to the Israelites was the meat of swine (Is 65:4; 66:3, 17). In the Maccabean period the “abomination of desolation,” which the Jewish hero Judas Maccabeus and his followers resisted to the death, included sacrifices of pigs on the temple altar in Jerusalem by the pagan ruler Antiochus Epiphanes (1 Macc 1:54, 62-63; 2 Macc 6:5; 7:1).

Symbolism

Certain food products were ruled out because of something they symbolized. God said not to eat blood: “Be sure that you do not eat the blood; for the blood is the life, and you shall not eat the life with the flesh” (Dt 12:23, rsv). Blood had a ritual function. It was used to make atonement on God’s altar and therefore was not to be eaten (Lv 17:11-12). The NT writers recognized the sacrificial blood of the OT as a “type” or foreshadowing of the blood of Jesus Christ shed on the cross as a sacrifice for sin (Heb 10:1, 4, 12; 1 Pt 1:18-19). A symbolic regard for maternal life may explain why one who came upon a bird’s nest was allowed to take the eggs or the young but had to leave the mother bird unharmed (Dt 22:6-7). The need to preserve a fragile desert ecosystem may also have been a factor.

Reactions from the Church

At first the early church, with its Jewish background, found it difficult to break away from Hebrew dietary traditions. The apostle Peter was given a vision, repeated three times, about no longer calling either non-Jewish food or the non-Jews who ate it “unclean” (Acts 10:9-16; 11:1-10). Later, a council at Jerusalem officially decided not to retain Moses’ ceremonialism in the church, except that gentile Christians should abstain “from food polluted by idols, from sexual immorality, from the meat of strangled animals and from blood” (Acts 15:20, niv) in order not to offend Jewish Christians. That was an application of the NT teaching of consideration for those with sensitive consciences. “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. . . . But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Rom 14:20, 23, niv).

Jewish dietary laws also have relevance to Christians because of certain OT promises. God promised, first to Abraham and, by reiteration or allusion, throughout the OT, that the Gentiles would be included in his covenant. By preserving the health of the Hebrew people, God was ensuring their continuation as a nation. According to the NT, the salvation of both Jews and Gentiles was achieved by Christ, a Jew. The nation through which Christ came was protected in order that God’s promise could be fulfilled. Thus, the dietary laws need not be seen as burdensome restrictions of the law; they were part of God’s way of working out his redemptive plan.