The Jewish dietary laws were a living parable. In distinguishing between clean and unclean foods every day, the devout Jew learns to take the will of God into account in daily life. Clean and unclean foods figuratively represent good and evil. Doing good and avoiding evil is represented by eating clean foods and avoiding unclean foods. But the truths taught by these words are much more fully understood and incorporated into one’s very being by means of deeds, rather than by words alone. Similar living parables occurred in the case of various Old Testament prophets, who acted out various scenes, in order to teach the people of Israel, not by words alone, but by words and deeds.

The Jewish dietary laws may have been chosen by God as an adaptation of a much older categorization of animals, according to which are suitable for eating, and which are not. This categorization would be, first of all, a necessity for survival, and secondly, a useful distinction to obtain the most suitable foods for a growing civilization. So this categorization most likely pre-dated the dietary laws, the latter developing out of the former.

As adapted in the Jewish dietary laws, there may well have been some changes as to which animals were clean and which were unclean. The original purpose of this distinction was practical: to identify the most suitable animals to be used for food. If people noticed that consuming pork (likely to be not thoroughly cooked by ancient methods) often resulted in grave illness, pork became seen as an unclean food. And the same would be true for other foods. Shellfish grow along shores, and so they can easily be contaminated by bacteria from human waste. So shellfish would be categorized as unclean.

Subsequently, when the Jewish dietary laws were established by God, these distinctions were adapted to an additional purpose: to function as a daily living parable for distinguishing between good and evil, between what is the will of God and what is contrary to the will of God. Since people generally eat food multiple times a day, this practice offers a daily opportunity to express one’s faith in God. But I stress that this discipline is a parable in action, a figure that is lived. What is important is not which animals/foods are categorized as clean or unclean, but rather a daily symbolic expression of the fundamental distinction in religion: what pleases God and what does not please God.

by
Ronald L. Conte Jr.
Roman Catholic theologian and
translator of the Catholic Public Domain Version of the Bible.