It was probably considered impure because pigs have a big parasite issue before industrialization and improper cooking often led to people getting sick or dying.
A lot of religious “rules” can typically be boiled down to trying to keep people alive by making sure they avoid potential dangerous things, increasing their hygiene, or just making life easier and reducing hardships.
It’s almost like people in charge realized that it would be easier to get people to do things if it meant going to heaven and avoiding hell instead of jail or something.
He shall kill one of the birds over fresh water in a clay pot. Then he is to take the cedar wood, the hyssop, the scarlet yarn and the live bird, dip them into the blood of the dead bird and the fresh water, and sprinkle the house seven times. He shall purify the house with the bird’s blood, the fresh water, the live bird, the cedar wood, the hyssop and the scarlet yarn. Then he is to release the live bird in the open fields outside the town. In this way he will make atonement for the house, and it will be clean.”
Being a priest must have been a very different job back in the day.
The Quran does not specify the reason for the prohibition and this is the common theory. Other theories i have heard, but not from scholars, revolve around pigs being particularly social and empathetic animals. Although the same can be said for grazing animals and many hunted animals that are considered halal.
I went to school with a muslim and that was the first time i heard that they don’t eat pork. When i asked why, he said because they lived on the bottom of the ark and ate the shit of other animals. I love pigs and don’t care why people don’t eat them, i’m just happy they don’t
That and drawing a division between the in-group (who must follow the laws, but are protected) and the out-groups (who are filthy barbarians whom one does not fraternise with)
The stated reason is because pigs are considered unclean because they’ll live in conditions we consider dirty, and will eat things we consider unclean.
It can be very tempting to look at ways that modern beliefs and practices overlap with historical ones and find ways that make them “make sense” from a modern perspective. This can make it harder to understand what people actually believed, or see the framework they were using, pushing the “oddness” somewhere else, like a bubble under a piece of plastic.
For parasites, we think of pork as carriers of parasites in the modern world because our supply chain has eliminated them from other commonly eaten meats.
This lines up with 2/3 of abrahamic religions having a prohibition against pork: they must have gotten the right answer for the wrong reason.
Except in the times those religions were developed pigs weren’t greater vectors than other animals.
There were also other contemporaneous cultures that didn’t have that prohibition despite very similar circumstances. If it were a food safety issue we would expect to see other cultures have the same prohibition. Similar problems have similar solutions after all.
we think of pork as carriers of parasites in the modern world because our supply chain has eliminated them from other commonly eaten meats
Our supply chain has also eliminated them from pork at this point. As far as I know, most trichinosis in the US, at least, is wild game (bear and boar) and home-reared hogs not subject to the controls on commercial hogs.
Also, I liked that article. It seems like the long story short is that the proto-jews and proto-muslims were pastoralists who wouldn’t have raised pigs themselves, and when they butted into neighboring peoples who did raise pigs, that difference became a cultural identifier, and its importance was magnified to the point of becoming an actual prohibition.
Yup. And bobcat, of all things. Last I checked that was the last US confirmed case. (It makes sense since bobcat obviously can get trichinosis, but eating bobcat seems like such an unlikely thing to do)
I didn’t get persnickety on the details there because common understanding hasn’t caught up with the reality of the food safety situation. It’ll take a while before people really accept that you can cook pork medium rare and be just fine, and longer still for tastes to adapt, since the guidelines only officially changed in 2011 and medium rare pork still feels underdone to a lot of people.
It was probably considered impure because pigs have a big parasite issue before industrialization and improper cooking often led to people getting sick or dying.
A lot of religious “rules” can typically be boiled down to trying to keep people alive by making sure they avoid potential dangerous things, increasing their hygiene, or just making life easier and reducing hardships.
It’s almost like people in charge realized that it would be easier to get people to do things if it meant going to heaven and avoiding hell instead of jail or something.
My favorite example of this is the protocols for finding mold in your house.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Leviticus+14%3A33-53&version=NIV
Sure in isolation it’s an odd thing for God to care about, but without a doubt it saved countless lives
Super interesting!
Being a priest must have been a very different job back in the day.
What kind of mould was this, I wonder? It sounds gross, and if such efforts went into eradication it must have been super toxic.
The Quran does not specify the reason for the prohibition and this is the common theory. Other theories i have heard, but not from scholars, revolve around pigs being particularly social and empathetic animals. Although the same can be said for grazing animals and many hunted animals that are considered halal.
I went to school with a muslim and that was the first time i heard that they don’t eat pork. When i asked why, he said because they lived on the bottom of the ark and ate the shit of other animals. I love pigs and don’t care why people don’t eat them, i’m just happy they don’t
See also Leviticus… lots of food safety prohibitions there.
That and drawing a division between the in-group (who must follow the laws, but are protected) and the out-groups (who are filthy barbarians whom one does not fraternise with)
The stated reason is because pigs are considered unclean because they’ll live in conditions we consider dirty, and will eat things we consider unclean.
It can be very tempting to look at ways that modern beliefs and practices overlap with historical ones and find ways that make them “make sense” from a modern perspective. This can make it harder to understand what people actually believed, or see the framework they were using, pushing the “oddness” somewhere else, like a bubble under a piece of plastic.
For parasites, we think of pork as carriers of parasites in the modern world because our supply chain has eliminated them from other commonly eaten meats.
This lines up with 2/3 of abrahamic religions having a prohibition against pork: they must have gotten the right answer for the wrong reason.
Except in the times those religions were developed pigs weren’t greater vectors than other animals.
There were also other contemporaneous cultures that didn’t have that prohibition despite very similar circumstances. If it were a food safety issue we would expect to see other cultures have the same prohibition. Similar problems have similar solutions after all.
https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2025/letters-from/on-the-origin-of-the-pork-taboo/
Our supply chain has also eliminated them from pork at this point. As far as I know, most trichinosis in the US, at least, is wild game (bear and boar) and home-reared hogs not subject to the controls on commercial hogs.
Also, I liked that article. It seems like the long story short is that the proto-jews and proto-muslims were pastoralists who wouldn’t have raised pigs themselves, and when they butted into neighboring peoples who did raise pigs, that difference became a cultural identifier, and its importance was magnified to the point of becoming an actual prohibition.
Yup. And bobcat, of all things. Last I checked that was the last US confirmed case. (It makes sense since bobcat obviously can get trichinosis, but eating bobcat seems like such an unlikely thing to do)
I didn’t get persnickety on the details there because common understanding hasn’t caught up with the reality of the food safety situation. It’ll take a while before people really accept that you can cook pork medium rare and be just fine, and longer still for tastes to adapt, since the guidelines only officially changed in 2011 and medium rare pork still feels underdone to a lot of people.
Or it’s like evolution. There were a lot of arbitrary rules and the ones which actually made people survive thus survived as well.