His Peculiar People
by Matthew Umbarger
Feast of Sts. Athanasius and Cyril, Patriarchs of AlexandriaAnno Domini 2020, January 18
It usually goes something like this:
- Christians live under grace, not law, so you are not required to avoid eating certain kinds of meat for the sake of your salvation, but
- God’s Word tells us that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit, and that implies that we should care for it with reverence.
- God must have told Israel to avoid these meats for a practical reason, because God’s laws are not arbitrary.
- The practical purpose of the dietary code probably has something to do with health.
- We find, in fact, all sorts of reasons that avoiding pork and shellfish is good for your health. (Here there is usually abundant information about the high concentration of toxins in these foods).
- So, if a Christian really wants to follow God’s perfect will for her life, she will take care of her Temple by never allowing pork or shellfish to contaminate it. (Needless to say, the same applies to alcohol and tobacco).
There is a much more simple version that Christians who want to justify enjoying bacon appeal to, but that operates on the same principle: God told Israel to avoid pork because He knew about trichinosis, and back then people really struggled to get their meat thoroughly cooked, so He was just trying to spare them the affliction of roundworms. Now that we live in the scientific age, trichinosis is not a substantial threat, so Christians are free to enjoy as much pork as they want.
There are all kinds of problems with both of these views. Both neglect the fact that there are all kinds of meat listed in Leviticus 11 besides pork and shellfish. But since you and I can’t readily procure camel meat at the local grocer, we tend to overlook this. And it seems as though you really don’t have to cook pork to quite such a high temperature to kill those worms, after all.
But here’s the real issue. Leviticus 11 tells us exactly why God told Israel to avoid everything on this list: “44 I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves with any swarming thing that crawls upon the earth. 45 For I am the Lord who brought you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God; you shall therefore be holy, for I am holy.”
It was never about health. It was always about holiness.
I suppose that the reason we get sidetracked by alternatives to what the text of Leviticus 11 plainly says is that we don’t really understand what “holy” means these days. Even active Christians have vague impressions that it is a purely religious word, having something to do with avoiding sin. Unfortunately, holiness has for many of us taken on a dangerous association with puritanical prudery, probably derived from that old descriptive phrase “holier than thou.”
Modern scholarship on Leviticus 11 can help us out. In 1966, Catholic anthropologist Mary Douglas published Purity and Danger, and she revolutionized the field of biblical studies by applying the anthropological concept of taboo
to the purity laws of Leviticus, including the dietary code. Later, Jacob Milgrom, perhaps the greatest authority on the Book of Leviticus to have ever lived, affirmed most of what Douglas suggested, corrected some of it, and utilized it in his masterful commentary on Leviticus. That is the basis for most of what I have to share here.
For the Hebrews, purity is about marking boundaries. Someone is unclean not because they are in a state of sin, but because they have come into contact with something that is “out of bounds,” i.e., not where it should be. The clearest example of this is corpse contamination. The dead should not be among the living. And obviously, then as now, a Hebrew had a duty to mourn and bury the dead, and this actually requires that a Torah-abiding Israelite will intentionally contract ritual uncleanness at appropriate times. (Sexual intercourse is another commandment-fulfilling activity that renders the couple unclean). There are all sorts of boundary-marking purity laws. Of course, sinful activity is one form of boundary-transgression, and so sinfulness does render the sinner morally unclean. Some laws divide the sacred and the profane (more on that later). Some divide the living and the dead. And a whole handful of these laws are intended to isolate Israel from the nations. That is the purpose of the dietary code.
The greatest threat to Israel’s identity has always been assimilation. Over and over again in the Torah, Israel is warned about the threat that the nations will pose to them, not so much in military entanglements, but by absorbing Israel into themselves. Some of these commandments pose a challenge to us today, because they seem to necessitate genocide. (Let’s save that
discussion for another time, please!). But the intent of these laws is very clear. For instance, Exodus 23:32 plainly states, “You shall make no covenant with them or with their gods.” And here we see the real problem with assimilation. Covenants are a package deal. When you make a covenant with someone, their gods are always going to expect to become part of the family, as well.
The way that covenants (which were means of building kinship relations in the ancient world) were ratified was always through a sacrificial ritual, culminating in a banquet wherein the parties of the covenant feasted on the victims with one another. Consequently, covenant relationships were conveyed most strongly in table-fellowship. Generally speaking, in the ancient world, you didn’t eat an important meal with someone that you did not recognize as family on some level.
Is Leviticus 11 beginning to make more sense yet?
*The rest of this essay will be printed in The Moot 2.1, available to all Eighth Day Patrons and Pillars, and released at the 10th annual Eighth Day Symposium on January 23-25. If you are not yet a member, we are offering 50% off Patron and Pillar memberships through the end of January. Sign up before the Symposium and attend free!
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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