Questions
1. Does the torah identify pig as food which is unclean to eat or does it never put pig in food category?
Some people eat people , but people are never identified as food in the torah, is this the same for pig?
2. For the later biblical writers, does a human who worships idols become unclean in a metaphysical sense?
The Temple of the Living God
14 Do not be mismatched with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and lawlessness have in common? Or what partnership is there between light and darkness? 15 What agreement does Christ have with Beliar? Or what does a believer share with an unbeliever? 16 What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we[a] are the temple of the living God, as God said,
“I will live in them[b] and walk among them,
and I will be their God,
and they shall be my people.
17 Therefore come out from them,
and be separate from them, says the Lord,
and touch nothing unclean;
then I will welcome you,
18 and I will be your father,
and you shall be my sons and daughters,
says the Lord Almighty.”
7 Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of flesh and of spirit, making holiness perfect in the fear of God.
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It seems to me that the writer of this passage saw spiritual uncleaness in humans but physical aswell.
so whats going on here? Is this the view of the torah aswell?
As time went on it seems ritual impurity began to overlap with ideas of moral sin. For example, a menstruating woman has not committed a sin. She is simply ritually impure. However someone who worships idols is both ritually impure and sinful. These ideas, like the idea of sacrifice, changed over time. It really depends on where you are in the tradition. I think the classic work is still Jonathon Klawans’ relatively recent Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism.
Here is an excerpt from “Pilgrim’s Progress” (John Bunyan):
FAITHFUL: “This brings to my mind that chapter of Moses, by which he describes the clean animals for eating. They are such as part the hoof and chew the cud — not which part the hoof only, or which chew the cud only. The rabbit chews the cud — but yet is unclean, because it does not part the hoof. And this truly resembles Talkative; he chews the cud — that is, he seeks knowledge, he chews upon the Word. But he does not divide the hoof — that is, he does not part with the way of sinners. He is therefore unclean.”
CHRISTIAN: “For all that I know, you have spoken the true Gospel sense of those texts. And I will add another thing: Paul calls some men, yes, and those great talkers too, ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.’ They are ‘things without life, giving sound.’ Things without life, that is — without the true faith and grace of the Gospel. Consequently, they are those who shall never be placed in the kingdom of Heaven among those who are the children of life — though their talk is, as if it were, the tongue or voice of an angel.”
FAITHFUL: “Well, I was not so fond of his company at first — but I am sick of it now! What shall we do to get rid of him?”
In an effort to improve my previous post involving fictitious characters Talkative, Faithful and Christian which in retrospect can be called fanciful, (although interesting) I’d like to share scholar Jacob Milgrom and others’ take on impurity. That is, common to all Near Eastern cultures, impurity is the implacable foe of holiness. Wherever it exists, it assaults the sacred realm even from afar. It is a dynamic and malefic force, an aerial miasma which possessed magnetic attraction for the realm of the sacred. In this sense I think it could be considered transferable. (I kind of get the idea of the Charles Schultz’ Pig Pen character from the Peanuts series.) Humans carried these impurities which could be removed by a ritual bathing or by confession. The day of Atonement was the major yearly expungement or scrubbing of impurity from the sanctuary to keep, through the sprinkling of sacrificial blood, polluting impurities in the sanctuary from accumulating and thereby causing the presence of God to vacate.
The laws about clean and unclean food though arbitrary were put in place to follow by all Israel in order to mark them as God’s separate and holy people. See Lev 20:25-26.
BDEhrman
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