I will repeat myself. I am not, nor will I ever be, a Bible scholar. But I do know a few things. The Bible is filled with gruesome and violent tales, there are lots of rules and prophecies, and there’s a whole lot of eating going on.

Since I was raised Catholic, we were not encouraged to actually read The Bible and spout out chapters and verses. I remember getting little red copies of the New Testament in grade school, but I was never able to get past the “begats.” In my freshman year of college, I took a humanities class where we studied a few books of The Bible and discussed them as literature. I managed to read all of Genesis and get the gist of Exodus, so after college, I thought I might pick up where I left off with Leviticus.

This was the book that kick-started the idea of moralizing about food within the whole judeo-christian-islamic belief complex. There’s all this stuff about what to eat and what not to eat in Leviticus and later in Deuteronomy. I especially like the rules about not eating the meat of a baby goat that’s cooked in its mother’s milk. So you have to realize that people must have been doing a whole lot of that if they had to make a rule against it, right?

Sure, there are some good common sense reasons not to eat vultures and pigs, who will eat just about anything. Best to stick to the chickens and the “cud-chewers,” who can keep us closer to the top of the food chain. Oh, and vegetables, of course.

It reminds me once again of the ancient Mexican tribes who shared their peyote trips on down the line. Of course, in this situation, only the priests were able to remain “clean.” At least with the early people of God, they shared their superiority with each other and only dumped the unclean food on foreigners and outsiders.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2010 at 11:39 am and is filed under food travels, losing my religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.