NOTES for Deu 14:1-29
We may read this list of animals with bewilderment, since many of them cannot be seen even in a zoo. What is the point of establishing these categories of clean and unclean animals? Will so elaborate a law not later help spread a legalistic kind of religiosity, the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees? The same question can be asked about present-day Christian realities—customs, rituals, rules, and so on.
Most of these questions disappear if we turn to the purpose of these statutes (v. 23). It turns out that all of this was intended to nurture a living religious sense, reverence, faithfulness, and gratitude. What could be more opposed to Pharisaic formalism than a living relationship with God—the very relationship that the statutes of the law were meant to sustain?