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God or not-God;- Food

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posted on Jul, 24 2020 @ 05:00 PM
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Discernment is the act of recognising the distinction between two categories.
Judgement is the act of recognising a preference between the two categories.
In the Biblical perspective, true and final judgement is God’s work, not ours.
Yet we may and must exercise our discernment, an obligation imposed by the lines of division between two categories which fill every part of the Bible.

The Creator and the Creation

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
There is the most fundamental division, right from the start.
On the one hand, the Creator. On the other hand, what was created.
Because creation has no independent existence, the relationship between the two is asymmetrical.

Beyond the initial distinction between God and the created world, there is a distinction within the created world between what is, and what is not, in line with God’s will.
And again this division is asymmetrical. The two sides of the boundary line do not have equal value. What is right (being God’s will) takes precedence over what is not right, just as the Creator himself takes precedence over his created world..

The rest of the Bible is about the long project of bringing us back into harmony with God’s will.
One of the first steps in this journey is the re-discovery of the true boundary between good and evil, the boundary which follows God’s judgement.
That is the intended purpose of the Law. The Law provided by Moses fulfils that purpose imperfectly, but it serves to encourage people and train people to look for the difference between the two.
The fundamental distinction in the Law is between “treating people the right way” and “treating people the wrong way”, and I looked at the social side of the Law in a previous series; God's Law
But the difference is also expressed in the ritual distinctions between “holy and unholy”, and between “clean and unclean”.

The clean and the unclean; Food and sacrifice

For example, the Law distinguishes between clean and unclean animals (Leviticus ch11).
Since the sacrifice of animals began as a way of surrendering part of a meal to the God who provided the food, this distinction serves for both purposes.

On the whole, the list of acceptable food corresponds with the natural diet of a pastoral society (there is no mention of plant life). Pride of place belongs to the hooved animals, which are bred and kept for the purpose. In other words, the sheep and the goats and the cattle.
The official criterion is that they should be cloven-footed animals which also chew the cud, though the text does not try to explain why this should be a criterion. The same consideration rules out any animals which have paws instead of hooves. The dog is notoriously unclean (at least in the ritual sense).

Four animals are singled out as not fully passing the test. The camel, the rock badger or hyrax, and the hare are described (mistakenly, in the last case) as chewing the cud but not having cloven hooves. The camel would not have been much known in Israel before about 900 B.C., and was then used as a work-animal. The next two animals had not been domesticated, making them food for hunters rather than pastoralists (“First catch your hare” is the opening line of one legendary English recipe).

Modern translators appear to be uncertain about the difference between the hare and the rabbit; this is hardly surprising, given that Bugs Bunny, the most famous member of either species, seems to be confused himself about his real identity. As far as I can ascertain, ancient Israel would have known the hare (a solitary animal living above-ground) rather than the rabbit (a communal animal living in underground burrows), so the “hare” translation would be more correct.

At the opposite extreme, the pig is domesticated, but would not fit into the pastoralist lifestyle. It’s the kind of animal that would be kept by sedentary farmers. The objection specified here is that the pig does not chew the cud. Though many modern scholars believe that the pig was really banned as the sacred animal of the female rivals of Israel’s God.

The ass, a working beast and another animal which does not chew the cud, is not mentioned in this chapter, but is classed as “unclean” in the chapters about sacrifice.

Israel was an inland nation, with no recent experience of desperate food-gathering along the coast, so they were not interested in molluscs. They would eat the larger fish (those with fins and scales), but nothing else that can be found in the waters.

Other categories of living creatures are banned wholesale.
Pigeons had been domesticated, evidently, and could be offered in sacrifice, but the list of unclean birds seems to cover most of the local wild forms of bird life. There is no suggestion that the Israelites can hunt down the more palatable varieties.
Insects and reptiles are also banned, with the curious exception of the locust and its relatives. The official reason is that the locust has the ability to jump, though again the text does not try to explain why this should make a difference.
A more practical explanation would be that ancient Israelites developed a taste for eating locust, when they appeared in large numbers- “their flesh, tasting when roasted like fried shrimps” (Winston Churchill, “The River War”, p85)- and that was enough to qualify them as “clean”.

For practical purposes, then, the list of unclean animals in Leviticus is really a list of “living things which we don’t care to eat”. With the exception of the pig, as already mentioned, the list appears to be governed by, instead of governing, the normal diet of the Israelites.
What was the need, then, that it should be presented as a religious command?

In the first instance, it may have been built up on the pig taboo as a way of preserving the difference between the Israelite people, as Abel-resembling pastoralists, and the Cain-resembling farmers of the land, worshipping local gods. The boundary was getting blurred as the Israelites themselves settled down to a farming life.

One possible benefit, in the long-term, is that having a list of clean and unclean food sets up a distinction, and gets people’s minds into the habit of looking for distinctions. (The same might be said of the taboos against mixing different kinds of animal, or seed, or clothing- Leviticus ch19 v19, Deuteronomy ch23 v9)

This, in turn, gets them trained into looking for the one distinction that really matters- the distinction between good and evil.



edit on 24-7-2020 by DISRAELI because: (no reason given)



posted on Jul, 24 2020 @ 05:01 PM
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“The boundary was getting blurred as the Israelites themselves settled down to a farming life.”
The sect of the Rechabites (Jeremiah ch35) were even more conservative, not allowing themselves to plant seeds at all or even to live in houses. Naturally they also forbade the use of wine. Wine-drinking is a farmer’s vice, made possible by planting vines.



posted on Jul, 24 2020 @ 05:01 PM
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A moment of homage to “Aphrodite and the sacred pig”, a radio lecture delivered on the old B.B.C. Home Service, which I chanced to hear twice over during the late Sixties, and which is the ultimate source of one of the remarks in the opening post. This was probably my first acquaintance with modern Biblical scholarship.



posted on Jul, 24 2020 @ 10:04 PM
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Her Sacred Pig yahk.

ReCHABITES..... I got to look them up there a little bit too rough I got to look them up.Jer. 35 ok

..man, what were they thinking



a reply to: DISRAELI



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 12:18 AM
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Pigs back those days were not eaten in Israel because they ate just about anything and they knew people could get sick off of the meat. The cows and stuff that chewed the cud, they were considered safe, carnivores can carry some bad microbes that can cause people illness if not cooked really well....they did not always have a lot of wood. I wouldn't eat a pig that was eating all of the garbage of the tent cities they had, and unless I cook cornivour meat well, I do not eat it.

Those rules were rules to try to protect the people, they also would break the clay pots and containers if people got sick from using them, if the mineral content got lowered from use, it would not kill microbes anymore...it got absorbed into the foods and drinks and the clay was not good at keeping things from spoiling anymore.

Some of those early practices from three thousand years BC show that they had passed on a lot of general knowledge about foods five thousand years ago, they were by no means dumb, the same goes with other cultures I researched, they had a lot of knowledge on food preservation and medicinal herbs already back then.



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 03:35 AM
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a reply to: rickymouse
The appeal of the "pastoral diet" theory is that it allows one simple explanation to cover a whole range, while fitting in well with other things we know about Israel's history. I've already observed how the difference between farmer and pastoralist is embedded into the tradition about Cain and Abel.





edit on 25-7-2020 by DISRAELI because: (no reason given)



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 05:08 AM
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a reply to: GBP/JPY
They had their tents. That was the point. Abraham was a tent-dweller.



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 07:38 AM
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a reply to: DISRAELI

The answer is so simple....I love your topic choice OP.

Why over-complicate things?

Clean and U-N-C-L-E-A-N.

Once you define the words "clean" and "unclean".

Healthy and Unhealthy ?

Clean of WHAT EXACTLY?

IS there a COMMONALITY amongst the Clean OR the Unclean Group?

Something is MAKING THESE ANIMALS...NOT CLEAN.....what is it?

I know what it is....many people know what it is....through our history billions of people have known what it is.....just not todays Sheeple who have been Farmed and dumbed down.

What do you think the evil ones know that the god ones cannot put together again?



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 07:43 AM
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a reply to: one4all
In these threads I'm taking different examples of the distinction to look at what the Old Testament meant by it. If you have a simple explanation, it will also have to cover leprosy and contact with the dead, which are both "unclean" in different ways.



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 07:56 AM
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a reply to: DISRAELI

You may want to consider that Yahweh is Enki and didnt want jews to live for too long so the good stuff like suet was only for him 🙂Or not. I'm not open-minded enough to discard every book of the old testament either but it's interresting
that youtube guy

edit on 25/7/2020 by PapagiorgioCZ because: (no reason given)

edit on 25/7/2020 by PapagiorgioCZ because: (no reason given)



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 01:53 PM
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originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: rickymouse
The appeal of the "pastoral diet" theory is that it allows one simple explanation to cover a whole range, while fitting in well with other things we know about Israel's history. I've already observed how the difference between farmer and pastoralist is embedded into the tradition about Cain and Abel.






Yeah, some people can go crazy from eating certain veggies, that is what Cain and Abel taught me. Plant defense chemistry is very powerful and it can either mess people's minds up or cure certain diseases. The tree of life weed can help to extend life and deter some diseases, but overconsumption also is not good, it is good at helping the liver to process things.

The fact that they knew all about this thousands of years ago is impressive, mankind has not excelled as much as we believe we have in the last two thousand years.



posted on Jul, 25 2020 @ 07:28 PM
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originally posted by: DISRAELI
a reply to: one4all
In these threads I'm taking different examples of the distinction to look at what the Old Testament meant by it. If you have a simple explanation, it will also have to cover leprosy and contact with the dead, which are both "unclean" in different ways.



Yes,both those are covered in the simple explanation.



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