Bible Summary:

God gives Moses and Aaron a list of animals the people of Israel may eat and ones to avoid.

Animals they can eat:

• Land animals with divided hoofs that chew cud, except camels, rock badgers, or rabbits.
• Any fish with fins and scales, but nothing else in the waters.

Animals that must not be eaten:

• Pigs, since they do not chew cud.
• All animals with hoofs, except those with divided hoofs that chew cud.
• All four-footed animals with paws.
• These birds: eagles, owls, hawks, falcons, buzzards, vultures, crows, ostriches, seagulls, storks, heron, pelican, cormorants, or bats.
• All winged insects, except those that hop like locust, crickets, or grasshoppers.
• Small animals that crawl or walk on the ground, with four legs or more, including Moles, rats, mice and lizards.

Also, if you touch a dead animal, you must wash your hands and will still be unclean until the evening. If it comes in contact with your clothes, you need to clean them. If a dead animal touches a pot, clay stove or oven, it is to be broken and thrown away.

My Thoughts:

Cultures and Foods: It is interesting how different cultures eat or do not eat certain foods. The people of Israel were not allowed to eat pork, but could eat locust, crickets and grasshoppers. Today, the people in India do not eat cows since they consider them sacred and the people of China seem to eat about anything.

For what it is worth, I have eaten frogs legs, turtle soup, alligator, and rattle snake – and as the joke goes, they do all taste like chicken!

Hygiene: God taught the Israelites about hygiene, to clean after touching dead animals. This may have been in response to the dead animals and disease that killed many of the Egyptians. The ban on pork may also be due to an outbreak of trichinosis back then.