NOTES for Lev 11:1-47

The question of clean (kosher) and unclean (non-kosher) food, both in Yahwism and in Judaism, has been and remains one of the central questions. A significant part of Jewish religious prescriptions is connected precisely with food prohibitions, which form the basis of what Judaism calls kashrut: the set of norms and rules of ritual purity.

At first glance, from a spiritual point of view, the list of clean and unclean animals is a pure formality. In fact, however, it reflects a certain feature of the pre-Christian world that a person who wanted to be sanctified and to live accordingly could not ignore. This concerns the objective danger to a person posed by certain manifestations of the fallen world, manifestations that are purely natural.

It would seem strange: this is God's world, God's creation, which God Himself evaluates as "very good." After the Fall, however, the evil that showed itself especially vividly and with impunity before the coming of Christ entered it. Anything at all was possible here, and a person had to exercise special caution. What could be called the metaphysical landscape was not always harmless: fairy tales and traditions about "bad" places are not entirely groundless, and if now we can be afraid of no such thing, it is only because after the coming of Christ the world has already become different to a significant degree, although not yet completely.

In former times one had to be careful even with food, and not only in a hygienic or dietary sense. Food, after all, is physiology; in a physiological sense, we are what we eat. Through sacrifice it was necessary to sanctify not only a person's spirit, but also his body, his nature, and that nature was sanctified through a sacrificial meal, through eating sacrificial meat. Here nature and spirit, holiness and physiology came into too close a contact for everything connected with the food a person eats to be ignored.

Meanwhile human experience contained much that was not worth ignoring: for example, the distinctive effects of various kinds of meat, and of food in general, on a person's physical and even mental state. In times when fallen nature weighed heavily on a person, and God's presence only weakened its influence but did not overpower it, physiology was far more important for spiritual life than it is now. Hence the norms connected with clean and unclean food. And if today we can give no thought to any of this, the credit is not ours, but belongs to the One who brought the Kingdom into the world.