Hooves and Cud: Criteria or Preexisting Taboo? - Torah portion Shemini
It's so gratifying to find an author who speaks your language, who addresses the topics you want addressed and poses the questions you want asked. That's been my experience reading Jacob Milgrom's commentary on Leviticus. And his section on pure/impure animals is no exception. Non-kosher animals and food taboos A line of thought occurred to me about the "kosher signs" - e.g. split hooves and rumination for quadrupeds - that maybe these signs were chosen after the fact. Perhaps there was a long-standing tradition about what animals the early Israelites would eat, and which ones they found detestable, i.e. had a taboo against. (Sheep, goat and bovine domestication, after all, go back roughly 10,000 years, and pig domestication nearly 13,000 years.) And only later did the Priestly school devise a rule to fit the existing taboo, in effect painting a target around a set of previously shot arrows. My sense is that our drive to offer "explanations" oft...