Kosher - Leviticus 11

I was really surprised by chapter 11 because TB does 4 ½ lectures on this one chapter alone so I thought that it was going to be something completely different than it ended up being. TB notes that chapter 11 starts the third and final section of the Torah, the law so I guess he wanted to do a lot of background and context about what there was going forward and it got swept up into the chapter 11 lessons. There was a lot about what it means for something to be holy vs unholy, clean vs unclean, godly vs ungodly. It was interesting but I’m not going to really get into it here very much because it seemed pretty straight forward to me. One of the biggest difference between TB’s natural audience of generic Christians and us is that we have the Book of Mormon as a comparison to see how a population of native Jews handled the law of Moses both before and after Christ. Even Nephi said that he didn’t teach his people all the ways of the Jews because they were too rigid in the structure and not focused enough on the content. So we can see how they did Judaism differently and we have that as more of a reference on what was really important, etc instead of just what the Hebrew elders did in Jerusalem.

Instead of focusing on everything that TB talked about, I’m going to talk about the things that I found interesting. So just to briefly go over what the Kosher diet is according to the Torah, it covers land, air, and sea animals. Land animals that were allowed to be eaten were “whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and chewed the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.” So this is cows, goats, sheep, etc. Not pigs or pawed animals. In the sea, “whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.” So fish basically, dolphins and whales I guess if you could get ahold of them, but no bottom feeding animals such as shrimp, lobsters, etc.

The description of what you can eat as far as air animals goes is different because instead of saying what you CAN eat, he says what you can’t eat. No eating eagles, ossifrage, ospray, vultures, ravens, owls, hawks, and several others. Google says that chicken is kosher, so I’m not exactly sure what category that falls into but there’s that. What I found very interesting about talking about the animals was this statement by TB, “food was a major issue since the time of Adam and Eve; in fact we find it wasn’t until AFTER the Great Flood that the killing of animals for meat was even permitted by the Lord.” I was floored by this statement because I’ve thought about this a lot. My daughter is a vegetarian and I don’t necessarily think that eating meat is immoral as a principle, but I think that the industrial scale that we do it today is horrific and wrong. That being said, I’m not a vegetarian at this point either so… Anyway, I’ve wondered a lot if during the millennium is we would be killing animals and eating them, but it’s pretty clear from this statement that we won’t because it wasn’t even allowed from Adam to Noah. TB even quoted several parts of Genesis, starting at Genesis 9:3 where God tells Noah, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.” So that whole concept was a surprise to me and the conclusion to a thought experiment that I’ve had going for a long time.

The other thing that is interesting about this chapter to me is that later on it talks about handling the dead carcasses of these unclean animals and the consequences of violating the kosher laws. If you handled the carcasses of unclean animals, then you had to change and wash your clothes and then you’d be considered unclean until the end of the day and the same with violating the kosher eating laws you were just considered unclean until the end of the day. TB pointed out that God is not shy with his punishment for disobeying the laws and it often included death so for the punishment to just be “you’re unclean until the end of the day” seems like a slap on the wrist and there’s no regard for repeat offenders. He just meant to show that this law was given as a mechanism for the people who obeyed it to become closer to God, not because there was some deep, hidden purpose. I wonder if the Word of Wisdom is like that. Yeah smoking, drinking, drugs, etc are all bad but the other stuff, I wonder if that is the same thing, a mechanism for the people to be obedient and grow closer to God. It’s interesting to think about. The IM has an interesting take on it, saying, “God was using the diet as a teaching tool. People may forget or neglect prayer, play, work, or worship, but they seldom forget a meal. By voluntarily abstaining from certain foods or by cooking them in a special way, one made a daily, personal commitment to act in one’s faith. At every meal a formal choice was made, generating quiet self-discipline.”

On of the topics TB covered during these extensive lectures was the concept of Greek-style, western logical thinking vs. eastern style analogic thinking. His point was with the logic style of thinking, the question is always “why,” and God doesn’t give a why concerning the purpose for giving this law of food. One thing that I did want to bring up was that one of the reasons why the Jews were blamed for the plague that decimated Europe in the middle ages was because they had such a lower prevalence of the disease in their communities. Back in those days, it made sense to blame a group of people for problems instead of saying, “they have a specific dietary requirements and stringent hygiene practices that prevent the communication fo disease within their community. So that might have been one of the reasons for this specific code. The IM specifically mentions this aspect, saying, “There were practical reasons for these laws related to health and sanitation. The flesh of swine is highly susceptible to trichinosis, a malady easily transmitted to man. Shellfish can develop a deadly poison if they are not killed and handled properly, and so on.” Lots of reasons why this law was given, and it’s important to consider them all and also what it means that animals were not always allowed for people’s consumption.