Text for the Week: Caring for Life

Scripture: Leviticus 11:1-8

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron: ² Say to the Israelites: These are the creatures that you are allowed to eat from the land animals: ³ You can eat any animal that has divided hoofs, completely split, and that rechews food. ⁴ But of animals that rechew food and have divided hoofs you must not eat the following: the camel—though it rechews food, it does not have divided hoofs, so it is unclean for you; ⁵ the rock badger—though it rechews food, it does not have divided hoofs, so it is unclean for you; ⁶ the hare—though it rechews food, it does not have divided hoofs, so it is unclean for you; ⁷ the pig—though it has completely divided hoofs, it does not rechew food, so it is unclean for you. ⁸ You must not eat the flesh of these animals or touch their dead bodies; they are unclean for you.

Theme- We need reminders about the sanctity of life

Questions

1. What does it mean that an animal is pure or clean vs impure/unclean?
2.  Why are the choices of clean animals so drastically limited for the Israelite community?
3. Why are the dietary regulations linked with issues like disease and the emission of bodily fluids in the holiness code?

Helpful Information

Related texts: Genesis 1:28-30, Deuteronomy 14, 1 Corinthians 8, John 1:1-5, Acts 10-11, Acts 15

It is important to remember in this Leviticus 11-15 that the text is discussing ritual purity and that is different from sin. Sin harms the relationship between the person/community and God ritual impurity does not harm the relationship but makes the person unfit for sacred space.

The purity code severely limits Israel’s options for food from animals.

Animals are responsible under the Torah (because they like humans have souls) Israelite animals must maintain a Sabbath and so if an animal eats the blood of another animal it is impure and therefore not appropriate for Israelite consumption.

The purity laws in Leviticus 11-15 are intended to keep one “holy” that is to make a person ready to enter completely into the sacred space, because the person represents as much of God as humanly possible.

The food laws for the Israelites were to remind them that humanity is to govern creation wisely and humanely (see Genesis 1:27-31), that life, even animal life, is sacred, and that everything about our lifestyle is to point us back to the nature and character of God.

The command against strangling an animal is a way to tell the Israelites that if they are going to kill an animal they must do so in the most humane way possible, this would later be refined to a very specific practice carried out by the priest.

In the sections that discuss bodily emissions the connection between the loss of such fluids and the loss of life is behind the need for cleansing. When a person looses life giving fluid that individual though not sinful must be purified in recognition that life comes from God we cannot enter God’s presence drained of life.

Reflection

I to become dismissive of the dietary restrictions placed on the Israelites in Leviticus 11. After all, passages like those in1 Corinthians 8 and Acts 15 indicate that such dietary restrictions do not apply to gentiles and so are not applicable for most of us. But I think this dismissive mindset is because we approach the Bible with a legalistic mindset that wants do’s and don’ts and because we not longer view this set of laws as applicable we overlook it. However, if we approach the Bible with a mindset that it is wisdom for our lives, we can look at something as foreign as the dietary restrictions of ancient Israel and find a reality that penetrates far beyond the facade. And to help with this the best place to begin is in Acts 15 where the leaders of the early church were gathered to discuss what to do with non-Jewish Christians. The earliest Christians understood the prophets had said that one day the nations would gather around Israel and worship God, but the debate was about how much of the specifically Jewish legal code was incumbent upon these converts. In the end the leadership decided that little of the legal code applied to Gentile converts: sexual fidelity, monotheistic worship, and for our purposes do not consume blood or meat from strangled animals. Why of all the dietary laws were these two keep while the rest of the purity code was abandoned?

The reason these two commands were keep while the others were not, is that while most of the dietary restrictions on Israel served a symbolic function these rules governed ethical behavior. And it is these two that are at the heart of what Leviticus is trying to teach Israel, life is sacred, even animal life has sacred value for us and we should act appropriately. Leviticus prohibits strangling animals because it causes the animal to suffer and humanity is supposed to remember that taking life is a weighty matter and if we are going to do so we must understand the cost. The Bible presents meat as a dietary concession given by God to humanity and so humanity must remember that though we may eat meat, we do not control the animals, nor do we have the right to abuse them. This is seen in the fact that God commands Israel to drain the blood from animals they plan to eat, it is the animal’s life and draining it is a sign that the person does not have complete authority over the animal’s life. All the other dietary restrictions placed on the Israelites in this chapter build from this fundamental idea that life is sacred. Each of the animals listed as unclean has some projection to death. The limitations of clean animals were a sign to Israel that they are holy, set apart for God’s work and they would only consume meat from animals which were likewise not contaminated by death. The restrictions governing Israel’s killing of animals and consumption of meat would but ethical treatment of animals and the sanctity of life in the foreground every time an Israelite slaughtered an animal.

While the earliest Christians wrestled with whether the Gentile Converts needed to follow all the dietary laws, they did not seem to wrestle with the ethical commands. The Scriptures say that even animals are held accountable for the blood of humans and so the commands to treat life as sacred are universal to all humanity. But while this passage is specifically dealing with the sanctity of animal life and implicitly relating it to humanity’s charge in Genesis 1:28-30, the consequences reach further. One of the realities of human psychology is that the more a creature resembles us the more compassion we have for it. And if with the Israelite dietary system, we are learning to treat animals with compassion, even when they do not resemble us, we are implicitly learning compassion for all life. The end result is that we cannot look upon animal life as sacred without then growing in concern for human life. One of the chief concerns in our world today is how little we value life, from the unborn, to the marginalized, to the elderly we are dealing with the impact on our society’s lack of concern for life. Perhaps meditating on Leviticus 11’s challenge to think of the food we eat as sacred can be a starting point for learning to see every life as a good gift from God.