All the Meat You Want - Deuteronomy 12

What’s interesting about chapter 12 is that TB has 3 one hour lectures on it and the IM doesn’t say a single thing, so it will be interesting to go through and see what we can come up with. Moses is prepping the people to change their lifestyle from that of Bedouin shepherds to a permanent settled society. He tells them when they take over these cities that God is going to win for them, they are to “destroy all the places” that were used to worship other gods. From listening to the lectures from TB, the feeling I got was that God wanted a structure to His worship. He didn’t want anyone to do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted, with who ever they wanted. Very similar to today, church services and ordinances are very highly structured in that they are all the same every time and they can only be done by the church approved authority, with the exception of covid. One of the reasons why all these religious cultural aspects are to be destroyed is because God wants a centralized religious system in place so that there is always consistent messaging and is less likely to splinter into apostate factions. This isn’t the main reason, the main reason is so that the people don’t start worshiping other gods, but this is also a part of setting up a religious structure that is centralized. This is emphasized in verses 13 and 14 which says, “take heed to thyself that thou offer not thy burnt offerings in in every place that thou seest: But in the place which the Lord shall choose in one of thy tribes, there thou shalt offer thy burnt offerings, and there thou sahlt do all that I command thee.”

In an interesting turn of events, God also says that “thou mayest kil and eat flesh in all thy gates, whatsoever thy soul lusteth after.” The verse also says “the unclean and the clean may eat thereof,” which I initially interpreted as meaning that they could eat unclean food such as pigs but the word “unclean” is cross referenced with Deuteronomy 15:22 which clarifies that this phrase means that both clean and unclean people can eat the foods that are considered clean. TB says that this change, along with subsequent verses, mean that the people must pay their tithes which are eaten by the priests, and the sacrificial animals are eaten by the priests according to those rules, but other than that the people can eat as much meat as they want. If I’m understanding correctly, the rule in the wilderness was that animals could only be killed in order to serve as a tabernacle sacrifice and could only be eaten according to the extensive rules surrounding this practice given previously. This makes sense keeping in mind that they were still being fed by manna from heaven the whole time. This would be like God saying “I already given you food freely from heaven, do you also want to kill helpless animals now too because you are so lustful for meat?” In fact, this was one of the arguments God gave when the people were saying that they were sick of manna and wanted meat. One of the problems was that the people were so gluttonous with the quails that they got sick and it angered God. The rule change is probably coming because the manna was going to stop once they got to the promised land and they started farming.

It's an interesting contrast to the word of wisdom which tells us to eat meat sparingly, to tell the Israelites they can eat as much meat as they want. TB noted that even though this rule change was given, the average Israelite still didn’t eat meat very often, mostly just on the feast days where they ate the meat from the sacrifices. So even though God said they could eat as much meat as they wanted, the reality was that most people didn’t overconsume meat very often. So why is their rule “eat as much meat as you want” and our rule is “eat meat sparingly”? Eating meat gluttonously wasn’t common in Joseph Smith’s time either, so their definition of “sparingly” would have been different than ours as well. What does the average person eating meat today in our society look like? I can’t speak for everyone, but eating meat with every meal is common and even encouraged. Most people eat at least one serving of meat per day. Google says that the average American eats 12.2 ounces of meat per day, and I would say there is definitely a “health” push right now focused on getting enough protein so that might be higher for a lot of people. And the word of wisdom does say that it’s meant so that even the weakest of all saints can abide by it.

Anciently, even if God said the people could eat as much meat as they wanted, there were still environmental constraints that would limit just how much meat people could obtain for eating. Deer is mentioned several times, those would have to be hunted in order to be caught to eat, and there would have been natural barriers to breeding so much deer that millions of people could eat as much deer meat as they wanted. The deer would need to have enough grass to eat, and would have to be protected from predators. Cattle and goats would only be slaughtered for a couple of days worth of food if the trade off of giving up with milk was worth it, and again how many cows would it take to feed millions of people as much meat as they wanted. There were factors that naturally limited the amount of meat that these ancient peoples could eat while maintaining an ecosystem where they all survived.

Now we have our factory farming, millions and millions of cows are killed every year to keep McDonalds stocked with hamburgers. It’s a while different environment that we have now, where we CAN manufacture feed and cut down acres of forest for pasture land and graze cattle all over the world, and slaughter by the tons everyday, etc. So maybe the reason the Israelites were told that they could eat as much meat as they wanted was because there were naturally limiting mechanisms in place to keep the situation from becoming a voracious free for all. Contrast that to the time we live in now where animals are bred and slaughtered in mass in order to have 32 ounce steaks available at a moments notice or going through the drive thru at McDonalds whenever we want. I’m not saying that I don’t do all this myself because I absolutely do, but I think that’s the reason why they are given a free pass and we are told to exercise restraint is because our restraint is the only thing holding us back from eating all the meat we want, all the time. That’s why the commandments are different between us and them, I think.