One of the T-shaped limestone pillars at the site of Göbeklitepe in southeastern Anatolia includes images of a crouching cat and a wild boar. The sculpture dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (ca. 10,000–8200 b.c.), a time when wild boars were an important source of food for hunter-gatherers.Jarrett A. Lobell
Bacon! Bacon! Bacon! Yum.
“enthusiastic pig eaters”
Certainly in my DNA 😏
Most scholars believe that the Hebrew Bible was written down in Jerusalem between around 600 and 300 b.c.
I put it more at 13th century BC, at least for the Torah (the earliest prohibitions of pork in the Bible). The more recent dating of the Torah at 6th century to 4th century are from people trying to pretend that Moses didn't really exist and was made up almost a thousand years later.
As far as WHY for prohibiting pork, I have a couple of theories, neither of which I'm certain of. One is that the Canaanites used pork in some of their sexual hedonistic sacrifices. So God telling the Jews to diss pork was in some ways God telling them to not even flirt with things that remind them of the sexual hedonism of the Canaanites. (And since Abraham moved his son, Isaac, and nephew, Lot, from that area centuries before Moses, an argument could be made that prohibiting pork was a way of saying to do away with their ties to their ancestors' past neighbors, and current neighbors.)
The other theory of God prohibiting pork is for health issues, especially parasites that can be in pork. With today's meat handling regulations that might mean little, especially during the Modern Warm Period when deaths by plague don't happen as frequently. But during cooling periods like the one before the Minoan Warm Period, and also during the Greek Dark Age Cooling Period, healthy habits are vital for a culture to survive.
Look at the two red humps titled "Holocene Climate Optimum". As that goes down to the right (a cooling period) it bottoms out roughly the era when Moses began his ministry. Thus, the Jewish patriarchs lived during a horrible cooling period. The Minoan Warm Period after that (from the lowest part of the blue to the highest point of the untitled red hump to the left of the Roman Warm Period) corresponds to the Era of Judges (Moses to Samuel). The Greek Dark Age Cooling Period (which FYI corresponds to the Era of Kings) begins at the top of the un-labeled red hump and goes down to the lowest blue point in the big dip left of the Roman Warm Period. It was during this horrible cooling period that the Minoan Civilization ceased to exist (some say it was from this cooling period introducing plagues similar to the Plague at Athens).
When I first learned about the compatibility of pig heart transplants in humans it made me wonder about Gods admonition to the Israelites about consuming pork.
My thought process was that as human flesh consumption can cause disease (Kuru) perhaps the close compatibility of pork could cause something similar, but all I could find was parasitic concerns and nothing similar to kuru, even among subsets of the human population - thinking maybe some were more genetically disposed than others.
(Avid pork/bacon consumer)
I tend to think it’s partly due to observing the omnivorous pigs. “Don’t eat what eats anything.”
“Yessir. Makes ye wonder some about the Bible and about hogs too, don’t it? Yes, Holme said.” Cormac McCarthy.
The Pork Taboo.
Great restaurant.
I really enjoyed the ribs and the pulled pork.
Service was good, great food at a reasonable price.
Highly recommend
