Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law (JSOT Supplement Series)

JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT SUPPLEMENT SERIES

140

Editors David J.A. Clines Philip R. Davies

Editorial Board Richard J. Coggins, Alan Cooper, Tamara C. Eskenazi, J. Cheryl Exum, Robert P. Gordon, Norman K. Gottwald, Andrew D.H. Mayes, Carol Meyers, Patrick D. Miller

JSOT Press Sheffield

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Purity and Monotheism Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law

Walter Houston

Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 140

To the memory of Henry Houston 1905-1965 and Joan Houston 1912-1982

Copyright © 1993 Sheffield Academic Press Published by JSOT Press JSOT Press is an imprint of Sheffield Academic Press Ltd 343 Fulwood Road Sheffield S10 3BP England

Typeset by Sheffield Academic Press and Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd Guildford

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Houston, Walter Purity and Monotheism: Clean and Unclean Animals in Biblical Law.—(JSOT Supplement Series, ISSN 0309-0787; No. 140) I. Title II. Series 241.5 ISBN 1-85075-368-7

CONTENTS

Preface Abbreviations A Note on Hebrew

7 9 11

Chapter 1 APPROACHES TO A PROBLEM

13

Chapter 2 THE LAW OF UNCLEAN FLESH

26

Chapter 3 A REVIEW OF EXPLANATIONS

68

Chapter 4 THE CONTEXT SURVEYED

124

Chapter 5 THE CONTEXT INTERPRETED

181

Chapter 6 PURITY AND MONOTHEISM

218

Chapter 7 MONOTHEISM WITHOUT PURITY

259

Bibliography Index of References Index of Authors

283 304 311

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PREFACE

The origins of this book go back a number of years. Some of its ideas were developed in a sabbatical term in 1984 and tried out in papers read to the Cambridge Old Testament Seminar and to the Society for Old Testament Study at its summer meeting that year in Birmingham. But the present work is essentially a new one. Much of the work was done on sabbatical leave from Westminster College in the summer of 1989, and it was completed over the following two years. I must record here my gratitude first of all to Westminster College and the United Reformed Church for granting me the two terms of study leave to which I have referred, without which the book would never have been begun, and also for providing assistance in my administrative duties in the college, without which it is doubtful whether it would have been completed. Secondly, I wish to thank the many people who contributed in various ways to the progress of the work. Graham Davies stands out among them by virtue of his constant interest over the whole eight-year period in which I have been working on the subject; he has read every chapter in draft form with the greatest care and made very thorough comments; he has also spontaneously directed my attention to various items of relevant literature. John Rogerson has also read drafts of every chapter and I am much indebted to him not only for his valuable comments, but also for his recommendation of the work to David Clines for inclusion in the JSOT Supplement Series. This has considerably speeded its progress. Parts of the work have been read at various stages also by Roger Tomes, Liora Kolska Horwitz and Philip Jenson, and they have all made helpful suggestions. At a stage in the work when I was uncertain how to proceed, Peter Ackroyd advised me to turn to Gillian Clark at the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and she introduced me to the field of archaeozoology which was at that time completely unknown to me. Without this I could never have written Chapter 4, which is of central

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importance in the work. Many of the practitioners in that field whom I then approached in my ignorance were kind enough to reply to me, and some of them supplied offprints of their own work; I should mention here Simon Davis, Richard Meadow, Giinter Nobis, Robin Thomas and Paula Wapnish; Liora Kolska Horwitz deserves particular mention in that she gave me work which was at that time unpublished, and, as I have mentioned, she was also good enough to read a first draft of what is now Chapter 4. I wish particularly to thank David Clines as a director of Sheffield Academic Press for accepting the work into the JSOT Supplement Series, and for the care with which his staff have processed it for publication. Technical difficulties in the late stages of production unfortionately made the inclusion of a subject index impracticable. Mention of one's spouse is a customary element in the genre 'preface to learned work', but I have more than customary obligations to my wife. She has encouraged me throughout, including some rather barren periods, with her genuine interest, and has also helped me in various practical ways: she typed the earliest version of the work and later generously gave part of a legacy to her to pay for the word-processing equipment on which I have composed the present book, and she has helped to compile the indexes and to check the proofs. The work is dedicated to the memory of my parents, in whose house I first learnt both to love the Bible and to read it critically. They have no other memorial. Walter Houston Westminster College, Cambridge 28 July, 1992

ABBREVIATIONS AASOR

AES AUSS AV BA BARev BASOR BOB BH BHS BKAT Byz. BZ

CB CBQ Chalcol.

CIS CNRS

CTA De Abst. De Spec. Leg. EB(A) EncJud Ep. Arist. EvQ ET

EvT EVV

HAT Hist. Nat.

HR IEJ Int.B

J JAAR

Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research Archives Europe'ennes de Sociologie Andrews University Seminary Studies Authorized (King James) Version Biblical Archaeology Biblical Archaeology Review Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research F. Brown, S.R. Driver and C.A. Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament Biblical Hebrew Biblia hebraica stuttgartensia Biblischer Kommentar, Altes Testament Byzantine period Biblische Zeitschrift Century Bible Catholic Biblical Quarterly Chalcolithic Corpus inscriptionum semiticarum Centre national pour la recherche scientifique A. Herdner (ed.), Corpus des tablettes en cuntiformes alphabltiques De Abstinentia (Porphyry) De Specialibus Legibus (Philo) Early Bronze (Age) Encyclopaedia Judaica Epistle of (Pseudo-)Aristeas Evangelical Quarterly English translation Evangelische Theologie English versions Handbuch zum Alten Testament Historia Naturalis (Pliny) History of Religions Israel Exploration Journal Intermediate Bronze Yahwistic writing Journal of the American Academy of Religion

10 JArchSci JANESCU JBL JCS JESHO JNES JPSA JQR JSOT KA1 KTU LA LB(A) LCL MB(A) MNI NEB NRSV

OTS Or P PEQ PG PPN Praep. Ev. Proc. Prehist. Soc. RB REB

RivStudFen Rom. RSV RV

SJOT StudOr TDOT UT VT VTSup WBC ZA ZDPV

Purity and Monotheism Journal of Archaeological Science Journal of the Ancient Near East Society of Columbia University Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Cuneiform Studies Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jewish Publication Society of America Jewish Quarterly Review Journal for the Study of the Old Testament H. Donner and W. Rollig, Kanandische und aramdische Inschriften M. Dietrich, O. Loretz and J. Sanmartin (eds.), Die keilalphabetische Texte aus Ugarit Lexikonfiir Agyptologie Late Bronze (Age) Loeb Classical Library Middle Bronze (Age) minimum number of individuals New English Bible New Revised Standard Version Oudtestamentische Studien Orientalia Priestly Code Palestine Exploration Quarterly J. Migne (ed.), Patrologia graeca Pre-Pottery Neolithic Praeparatio Evangelica (Eusebius) Proceedings of the Prehistorical Society Revue Biblique Revised English Bible Rivista di studifenid Roman period Revised Standard Version Revised Version Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament Studia orientalia G.J. Botterweck and H. Ringgren (eds.), Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament C.H. Gordon, Ugaritic Textbook Vetus Testamentum Vetus Testamentum, Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Zeitschriftfur Assyriologie Zeitsc.hrift des deutschen Palastina-Vereins

A NOTE ON HEBREW

Although this is primarily a work of Old Testament scholarship, I hope that it will be read by anthropologists and archaeologists and others interested in the subject. For their sake, I have not used foreign scripts in the main text, as distinct from the footnotes, except in the table on pp. 45-46. But I have used a technical scholarly system of transliteration for Hebrew and other Semitic languages, and readers unfamiliar with them may need a little help with how words are supposed to be pronounced. The vowels should be pronounced in the 'Continental' way; there is, for example, no difference between a and a. A raised vowel is a light unstressed sound. Most of the consonants are as in English, but the following should be noted: '

' h h q s § S t

a glottal stop similar, but voiced, like the cawing of a crow a throatier version of h like ch in loch a k pronounced as far back in the mouth as possible now usually pronounced ts now the same as s sh an emphatic t

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Chapter 1 APPROACHES TO A PROBLEM

1. The Problem Our theme is no mere siding on the main line of Old Testament research. The dietary laws have taken a central place in the selfunderstanding of Judaism throughout its history. While Jews have expressed their faithfulness to their God by the observance of all the laws, it is these, along with those of circumcision and the Sabbath, that have most conspicuously enabled them to express their identity as Jews over against their neighbours, to resist assimilation, and thereby to be faithful to the God who has called them to be 'his special possession among all the nations that are on the earth'. This power of the dietary laws arises not least from the fact that Jews draw attention to themselves among their neighbours by their observance, often indeed incurring ridicule for it. Central to these dietary laws is the law on forbidden flesh in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14. It is specifically this law that is chosen by the author of the code of Leviticus 20 (or the editor of the Holiness Code as a whole) to symbolize the 'separation' of Israel as God's holy people 'from the peoples' (Lev. 20.24). You are to make a clear separation between clean beasts and unclean beasts and between unclean and clean birds. You must not contaminate yourselves (Id' f$aqeldhim (the bread of God), and to Haran's characterisation (1985: 205ff.) of the ritual acts performed inside the temple as the provision of the needs of a deity conceived anthropomorphically. It was necessary that the diet of Israel should be clean, just as that of the deity was. Now the domestic flocks and herds of cattle, sheep and goats (and among birds doves or pigeons) had from time immemorial provided both the bulk of the human meat diet and virtually all sacrifices to deities.1 The cleanness of animals would be determined by their resemblance to a model provided by these recognized sacrificial species. 'The handful of species fit for God's altartable, universally accepted as such from the beginning, provided the required definition of cleanness for the rest of the animal world' (p. 186). However, since the same degree of holiness was not demanded of Israel as of what was offered to God, other species could be eaten. The question was which. In most cases there would be no difficulty; lions, wolves and bears would be obviously unlike the sacrificial animals, but to ensure there could never be any doubt a set of simple criteria was provided for land animals2 enabling the lay person to make a firm distinction in every case. 'They are those features which the priests judged to be both comprehensive and easily applicable' (p. 186). Firmage describes the 'temple paradigm' as 'the mainspring of the dietary law' (p. 187). But how does this explanation fare in regard to the creatures of water and air? Firmage is clearly in some difficulty with the water creatures, for there is no paradigm derivable from sacrificial species: none such appeared upon the altar. He suggests that 'certain species were excluded because in lacking fins and scales they were thought to resemble land species that were prohibited by the criteria of v. 3' (p. 189); for example, eels were compared with snakes (a very widespread idea [p. 200])—Firmage does not recognize the distinction 1. Firmage refers specifically to the evidence from Ugarit (cf. Chapter 4,§3.b.2). My far more extensive survey will confirm this picture, though it requires a modification particularly in regard to pigs. 2. Firmage fails to recognize the distinction between bPhemQ. and Seres.

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between beasts and swarming things. This may seem rather inadequate in view of the vast variety of marine life excluded by the criteria, but he adds two further points in an appendix: (1) that the priests were probably only concerned with animals commonly encountered by Israelites, which meant principally freshwater species such as eels and catfish (but do catfish resemble snakes?), and (2) that crustaceans, which are frequently compared to locusts in the onomastica of Akkadian and Arabic, could have been linked to the Seres of the land (p. 202). He also points out that very little knowledge of fish and other water life is displayed in the Bible, and that fish were largely marketed by nonIsraelites (Job 40.30; Neh. 13.16) and in forms that would make morphological investigation difficult. Firmage explains the lack of criteria for birds on the following lines (190-91). Assuming that the general opinion that the unclean birds are predators is correct, the selection must have been deliberately made on the basis of diet and behaviour; this would be the feature that would most clearly distinguish birds on the basis of a paradigm provided by the dove. But although it would be generally known that vultures, eagles and owls ate carrion and carried off small live animals, the diet of less well-known birds would not be a matter of common knowledge. It was therefore better to provide a list, and not add criteria that would only create confusion. This was practicable because of the relatively small number of unclean species. Firmage argues (202-203) that the number of species either named or suggested by the four occurrences of 'after its kind' (leminehu, etc.) is approximately what one would expect for a list of predatory birds in Israel's immediate environment. He has not apparently noticed the numerical symmetry of the lists in this chapter, nor is he aware of the growth of the text (Chapter 2, §l.c.5), nor does he even refer to the anomalous position of the bat, an insectivore like many clean birds. Flying insects, viewed as a subset of the 'dp, the flying creatures, obviously do not conform to the temple paradigm provided by the dove. Why then is an exception made in the case of locusts? It can hardly be as Douglas suggests, because they jump, as land animals should, because they are classed as air creatures (p. 192). Nor can this criterion be connected with any temple paradigm. In this case Firmage is forced, as we have seen, to concede that the criteria are probably secondary (in the logical, not the literary sense), providing a means of identification of the species allowed and not a reason for allowing

3. A Review of Explanations

111

them (p. 192). The reason is likely to be simply, as I have suggested, that they were a popular food, and indeed a necessary one when they were themselves devouring all the crops (p. 192 n. 22). If this is one point where the provisions of the text can only be explained by existing custom, even by Firmage, another, surprisingly enough, is the criterion of chewing the cud and the prohibition of the pig. Firmage argues that since the pig is the only animal excluded by this criterion that would not also have been excluded by that of cloven hooves, the criterion must have been added for the specific purpose of excluding the pig. Hence it is very probable that alone among the prohibited animals of Lev. xi, the pig was already an unfavored species, for reasons that likely had nothing to do with the motivation of our present dietary law. This is the only demonstrable instance in the dietary law where the priests would seem to have accepted an ancient tabu (193-94 [so also Milgrom 1990: 189]).

2. Critique. There is a substantial plausibility in Firmage's theory, at any rate as regards the beasts. I had myself, long before the appearance of his essay, come to the conclusion that the definition of beasts here as edible was governed by their cultic acceptability, and not the other way round, though my own position is supported (see Chapter 4, §3) by concrete evidence of cultic and dietary practice over a broad geographical and temporal range. Indeed as regards the beasts Firmage has the edge over Mary Douglas, who defines the permitted beasts as those kept for food by a pastoral people. They are so, but since the law is a religious law promulgated by a literate class of priests in an urban community, it is more plausible and relevant to derive it from religious practice, while recognizing that there is likely to be a connection between the two facts. The great strength of the theory is that it makes a clear link between the framework of the code, with its emphasis on holiness, and its content. But it has clear weaknesses in relation to the other classes of animals. Firmage's account of the water-creatures section fails to carry conviction. Though his account of the birds is more plausible, the three points overlooked by him that I mentioned above seriously damage his case, especially the history of the text, which shows that originally it was mainly the better-known birds that were listed, precisely the ones that would not need to have been, according to his argument, if the supposed dietary criterion had been stated. Yet it is equally damaging that the raven was the very last bird to be added to the list, though its

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diet must have been as well known as that of any of them. Moreover, it does not seem that the supposed difficulty of being certain about birds' diet is a sufficient reason for omitting a general criterion. The case of the locusts may be compared, where a criterion is stated, despite the fact that it could not be accurately applied, and had to be supplemented by a list. If there is a general rationality in the list, it is hard to see why the consciously rational authors should not put it on display. As regards the pig, the logic is faulty. As we have noted (Chapter 2, §l.c.3), there are not two but three criteria for the beasts in Lev. 11.3, though the second is subordinate to the first;1 and there are only two more beasts known to Israel excluded by the criterion of cloven hooves (and also by that of cud-chewing) that would not have been excluded by the requirement of hooves: the ass and the horse. It would therefore be just as reasonable to argue that these were subject to ancient taboos, and that therefore the pig is not the only 'already unfavored species'. The only other common domestic animals are the camel and the dog, and these are supposedly excluded by the first criterion, the requirement of hooves; but we have already seen the problematic position of the camel in this regard, which suggests that it too was rejected for reasons other than the stated criteria. One must assume that the criteria were arrived at from observation of wellknown and particularly domestic animals; and they cannot simply have been derived positively from the known sacrificial animals, for then there would have been no clear indication which of their many common features should be selected, but also by comparison with known non-sacrificial animals, such as the dog, ass and pig; these three common domestic animals are excluded successively by the three criteria. But the other part of Firmage's conclusion, that the exclusion of the pig was for reasons that 'had nothing to do with the motivation of our present dietary law', is equally dubious. After all, the fact that it was thought necessary to exclude the pig indicates, in Firmage's view of the law, only that the pig was not a sacrificial animal (which we knew already), and therefore any set of criteria derived from the sacrificial animals must not be allowed to include it. It does not show that the pig was not eaten. That might be so, but it could be shown to be so only by direct evidence. True, since the pig, unlike the ass and the camel, is

1.

Firmage appears to accept this translation, at least for v. 26 (p. 205).

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bred solely in order to be eaten, one would expect it to be sacrificed if it were eaten; Firmage reasonably suggests (p. 199) that the repertory of sacrificial animals consists of those upon whose fertility the community depended. One would expect it, which only goes to show the danger of a priori argument. As I shall show in the next chapter (Chapter 4, §3.b), pigs in the ancient Near East were not normally sacrificed even where they were eaten. The position of the other unclean domestic animals is more straightforward, being generally neither eaten nor sacrificed, but the evidence is overwhelming that the custom of not eating them long preceded any possible date for the present law. Firmage's argument thus loses much of its explanatory power. A more general problem of the theory is that he bases it upon the idea of imitatio dei, and that this involves a thoroughly anthropomorphic conception of God and the cult offered to him. But despite their use of antiquated phraseology which implies such a conception, the priestly writers have surely left such ideas far behind. No block of material in the Old Testament has a more sophisticated theology and a more transcendent idea of the divine being, or displays more reserve towards divine immanence and anthropomorphic conceptions. It therefore seems very doubtful that they could have developed a conception in which the food of the deity was compared to human food. No doubt the core of the chapter is more ancient than the mainstream of P; but in Firmage's account it is closely connected with the theology of the Holiness Code, and is therefore not very ancient (though Firmage himself does not offer any date). This problem might be avoided by arguing that it is not so much a direct comparison between divine and human diets that is the motivation as the indirect effect of the sacrificial rules in defining meat as clean and unclean. But this simply raises the most basic question of all. Why, after all, should diet be a field for the exercise of holiness? What is it about the discrimination of animals for the altar that should render them fit or unfit for human consumption? The authors of Leviticus 11 are unlikely to have come to such an idea unless there had always been a close connection between table and altar, and, as I have already remarked, we still need some precise idea of the nature of this connection before the emergence of this law. If pigs or camels or hares or foxes are not to be eaten, and it is because they or animals like them are not sacrificed, why are they not sacrificed? In most cases (not in that of the pig, a problem in itself) it is because they are not

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eaten. But what is the explanation of that? Firmage's explanation takes us some of the way along the road, but in the end we simply find ourselves faced with the same problem one stage further back. It has become clear that we need a more comprehensive idea of the context in which the priestly rules were developed, that is, how they took up current practice and modified and interpreted it. 3. Fir mage, Douglas and Cultural Pluralism. This is then the appropriate point at which to return to Leach's second criticism of Douglas, which also applies to Firmage: that she fails to take account of ritual attitudes towards animals in the culture of the whole region. Douglas, of course, had her answer ready before the criticism was made. In commenting on theories that make the ritual prohibitions of the Torah a fence against foreign influence, she says with a side-glance at the Myth and Ritual school, who see Israel's ritual as an example of a pattern widespread in the ancient Near East, It is no explanation to represent Israel as a sponge at one moment and as a repellent the next, without explaining why it soaked up this foreign element but repelled that one. What is the value of saying that seething kids in milk and copulating with cows are forbidden in Leviticus because they are the fertility rites of foreign neighbours, since Israel took over other foreign rites?... The Israelites absorbed freely from their neighbours, but not quite freely. Some elements of foreign culture were incompatible with the principles of patterning on which they were constructing their universe; others were compatible (1966: 49).

All that really matters for the interpreter is the 'principles of patterning' of the given cultural universe; the rituals of the neighbours can tell her nothing, since only the pattern determines whether a given feature is accepted or rejected. This approach may do very well for the Bongo-Bongo (though recent anthropology has begun to take seriously the extent to which tribal societies are influenced by state societies in their neighbourhood), and it may do very well for Israel as imagined by biblicistic scholars swallowing whole the Bible's own account of their origin; but hardly for the complex plural society that many scholars have begun to accept as the historical reality. It is not possible any longer to speak of 'Canaanite' culture as something foreign to Israel. On the one hand, Israel only slowly developed into a distinct society able to pick and choose from the culture of its neighbours. For much of its history in

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the biblical period, it is more accurate to see Israel as simply a part of a wider area, including the cities of Syria, Phoenicia and Philistia and the developing tribal societies of Transjordan, sharing very similar cultural norms as well as having some distinctive patterns. (See for a useful summary Nicholson 1986b, and now from a different point of view M.S. Smith 1990, as well as the more polemical Lang 1983 and Lemche 1988.) On the other hand, the religious and cultural tradition that is most distinctive of the Israelite-Jewish heritage as we know it from the Bible is often in intimate and mutually enriching conflict, within the same society, with others that we know as pagan or Canaanite. One may sympathize with the irritation expressed by Douglas with the seemingly mutually contradictory arguments about Israel's relationship with Canaanite and foreign culture; but they are explained once one realizes that 'Israel' means quite different things in the two approaches. For the Myth and Ritual school, the Israelite cult means the royal cult of Jerusalem that supported the central institutions of a state that disappeared in 587 BC, supposed to be partially reconstructible from fragments of evidence in the Psalms and elsewhere, as well as by comparison with the cults of similar neighbouring states. But the argument that the rules of the Torah react against pagan cults concerns the faith and practice of those in Israel whose devotion centred not on the state and its institutions but on the covenant between Yahweh and his people, and in their present form these rules come from a time after the fall of the state. There is no single 'pattern' that explains the variety of responses (so Rogerson 1989b: 25). Conceivably the original core of Israel, the tribal society developing in the highlands of Ephraim and Manasseh in the early Iron Age, was a simple homogeneous society to which the arguments quoted above would be applicable; and of course we must take into account the possibility that the essentials of the dietary code go back to it. But the creator of the code that we have is a consciously intellectual priesthood operating in a society divided by class, ethnic origin and religious conviction. Here is the real justification of Douglas's and Firmage's position. For to all appearance the priestly system is a self-contained and self-consistent system, and has been effectively described as such in studies such as Haran 1985 or Gorman 1990. So Douglas supports her case that the code's own internal consistency is sufficient to explain it (1975c: 308): 'We are asked to believe that the people of Israel have

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been saddled with an irrational, undecipherable set of food-rules imposed on them by the most rigorously logical law-givers imaginable'. But it grossly overestimates the power and intellectual independence of the priesthood to suppose that they could 'impose' laws in food, of all things, without any reference to current custom. What they could do would be to support one tradition in their society against others. In a society marked by such cultural conflict two things are likely to be true. On the one hand, the adversaries share more cultural assumptions than they themselves realize, and it is not possible a priori to decide which parts of the 'patterning' represent the common heritage and which are distinctive. On the other, a process takes place that Douglas herself has recognized. In the passage about the Antiochian persecution from which I have already quoted, she remarks: If two symbolic systems are confronted, they begin to form, even by their opposition, a single whole. In this totality each half may be represented to the other by a single element which is made to jump out of context to perform this role (Douglas 1973a: 63).

By extension, if two symbolic systems develop in confrontation, one may expect them to form a whole that derives its logic from a shared symbolism with particular elements in opposition to each other. For an instructive example of this the immortal lines of the Didache may serve: 'Let not your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Mondays and Thursdays, but do you fast on Wednesdays and Fridays' (Did. 8.1). While fasting on Fridays may be said to derive from the 'pattern' of Christian culture, fasting on two days a week is as surely, if implicitly, owed to the influence of the Pharisaic adversaries as the choice of the days is to opposition to them. Whether a similar (if not similarly trivial) opposition within a shared system developed between 'Canaanite' paganism and Yahwism in the field of dietary observance is one thing we shall have try to establish. 3. Conclusion From this survey of significant work on the dietary code several points of importance emerge. Although no one theory has proved completely satisfactory, all have suggested aspects that need to be taken into account. No full explanation is possible that does not take account of both the material and the social contexts of the code. The limits of variation in diet are set by the ecological substrate of

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Israelite society, even if Harris can hardly be correct in claiming that ecological constraints are transformed into religious taboos. The practice of the surrounding peoples and of Israel's own ancestors, if we can discover them, must not be ignored, especially if it turns out that in some, or indeed most, respects they are closely similar to that laid upon Israel in the code. It is true that the code as we have it is a symbolic system that created and creates meaning, ethical and aesthetic as well as theological, for those who observe it. The question remains how its elements originally acquired the meaning that they have. Douglas's abstract structural approach fails to convince because of its lack of real basis in the text, as well as the general fact that symbols in symbolic systems tend to be individually motivated (Hallpike 1979: 151-52); but her insistence that the code as it stands must be taken seriously and meaning sought in it marks a turning point in the discussion. Firmage's proposal carries forward this insight and is itself rather better grounded: it succeeds in showing that the distinction between clean and unclean animals need not be understood as arbitrary but can be justified by a paradigm drawn from ritual practice. The hypothesis that will be tested in the following pages attempts to take all these points into account. It will be shown that the dietary repertoire suggested by the code is general among Israel, its immediate neighbours and predecessors in the land, except that in some places there is some limited use of the pig; moreover, as regards sacrifice at official sanctuaries, the correspondence is even closer: nowhere are pigs sacrificed. My hypothesis is that the systematic classification of animals as clean and unclean for food developed at the sanctuaries (Jerusalem is not the only example) as a measure to ensure the purity of the worshippers, and was therefore naturally based on those animals that were acceptable for sacrifice. The deeper roots of the distinction will be seen to lie in the common custom of an economy with strong pastoral aspects, where pigs played a subordinate role, and where mammalian game was mainly confined to deer and gazelle; in these circumstances the associations and perceived characteristics of animals could have served, as some modern parallels show, as a means for the encoding of social dichotomies. Only at the stage of the development of monolatrous Yahwism as exemplified in our present texts was the distinction absolutized into a demand for total abstinence from 'unclean' food as a mark of dedication. Purity became the guardian of monotheism.

Chapter 4 THE CONTEXT SURVEYED In this chapter I shall survey the evidence for the way in which animals were used, chiefly for food and sacrifice, in the Levantine region in a period of three or four millennia including that in which the Old Testament was formed. In the second part of the chapter, after an introductory consideration of methods, I set out what we know from direct evidence about the use of animals for food, and test the limits of a purely material explanation of the facts in terms of environmental factors. In the third part I look at the evidence for cultural factors governing the use of animals, focusing principally but not exclusively on those concerned with the prescription and restriction of species for sacrifice; and part four tests certain partial explanations—mainly concerned with the pig—for the facts in the two previous parts. The following chapter attempts a full explanation in 'emic' terms through the associations of animals in the Old Testament and other contemporary literature and through ethnographic parallels. 1. Methods What kinds of evidence are available to us for the use of animals in an ancient culture? Two kinds, broadly conceived: written and material evidence. I choose these terms (rather than 'literary' and 'archaeological') advisedly, in order to make the clearest possible distinction in the way the different kinds of evidence operate. 'Written' evidence includes not only the literary works that have come down to us from antiquity by continuous transmission, but the tablets, inscriptions and so forth that have been unearthed in recent times by the archaeologist's spade. Evidence of this kind might be compared to the human witness standing in court to be examined by counsel, while by 'material' evidence I mean what the lawyer understands by circumstantial

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evidence: bones, shells and other remnants of meals and sacrifices discovered in the course of excavation. At one time little systematic attention was paid to remains of this kind: they were referrred to in excavation reports if the excavator thought they were interesting for some special reason, otherwise they were thrown onto the spoil heap. The modern school of archaeology allows nothing that is discovered to go unrecorded or to fail to yield whatever it has to yield of information about the lives or activities of the inhabitants of the site; and over the last thirty or forty years a flourishing specialism of archaeozoology (or osteoarchaeology) has developed based upon the analysis of faunal remains from scientifically conducted excavations. (For textbooks of the methodology of this science, see Chaplin 1971, Hesse and Wapnish 1985; for critical reflections on these methods, see Urpmann 1973.) Each of these kinds of evidence has, along with its strengths, its own severe limitations. The written evidence falls into two main kinds: societies' witness to themselves, such as the Old Testament or the Ugaritic texts, and the witness of outsiders, such as Lucian's De Dea Syria.1 The first kind has the weakness that, in general, people do not comment on what seems to them self-evident; thus although the Bible refers to unclean food in a number of places, only the two short passages we are dealing with explain what animals were considered unclean, and the Ugaritic texts, a more fragmentary corpus, apparently make no explicit reference to what animals the people of Ugarit refused to eat. It would be surprising if there were none, and indeed it is possible to cross-examine the texts to discover their indirect witness on this question. The second kind has the opposite defect that globetrotters and armchair ethnographers tend to comment only on what seems to them to be surprising or quaint, on what they think will interest their readers, or on what interests them for reasons of their own (like Porphyry with his aim of commending vegetarianism); and they very easily misunderstand alien customs. Greek writers will comment if a people refuse pork, but not usually if they abstain from horsemeat, for example. Thus this kind of evidence suffers from a selectivity that is 1. It may seem odd to describe Lucian (assuming he really wrote this work) as an 'outsider' to Hierapolis, originating as he did from Samosata, only about 100 miles away as the crow flies. But the work reads, and is deliberately written to read, like an ethnographic tract: the Herodotean style is intended to reinforce this impression. If Lucian was not an outsider, his readers certainly were.

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difficult to control and that is compounded by the accidents of preservation. Further, much of it is later than we would like: Lucian (if authentic [cf. Oden 1977: Iff.]) in the second century AD, Porphyry in the third, and a number of other classical writers of the Roman period. One particularly interesting account, and the only one that can be set beside De Dea Syria as an attempt to describe a complete religious system, is very much later; this is the account by the tenthcentury Arab encyclopedist al-Nadim in his Fihrist of the pagans of Harran who called themselves Sabi'ah. How much does this matter? How much are customs likely to have changed in a thousand years or so? The answer seems to be that they could have changed quite a lot, especially in a period marked by massive foreign influence; and if our evidence is of a number of varying local customs, there is no way of effectively allowing for this change. But if it shows a broad similarity over a wide area, and one that could not be traceable to Hellenistic influence, then there may be some safety in concluding that we are looking at a deeply rooted and therefore ancient set of customs. The evidence, in other words, must recommend itself. The material or archaeozoological evidence has the immense advantage that it is steadily growing, and increasing in range as excavations of smaller and less prominent sites are undertaken, so that it is no longer confined to large urban centres. But even today many excavations fail to produce any adequate record or analysis of faunal remains, despite their importance for understanding the subsistence of the inhabitants (cf. Hiibner 1989:225-26). It is now possible to give a reasonably full general picture of animal use in antiquity in the region with which we are concerned, but finer detail often eludes us as long as the recording of the evidence remains so patchy. It may be that the conclusions I intend to draw will be criticized on the grounds that fuller evidence is still required. But not being an archaeozoologist, I cannot go out and get the evidence myself. I rely on the experts, and must make do with what they provide; I am grateful to some of them for guiding me to the appropriate sources and even generously presenting me with work unpublished at the present time. It would have been better had I been able to refer to a work written by an expert giving such a general survey, but as far as I have been able to determine no such work exists. I have no alternative but to make the attempt to draw my inexpert conclusions from what is available to me. As further evidence accumulates, no doubt these conclusions will be refined

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and corrected; and may I hope that the work I would have welcomed will be written? This evidence does not speak for itself; it requires interpretation, and a perusal of the literature will show how manifold are the pitfalls that beset this process. Carefully interpreted, it can yield an amazing amount of information about a community's mode of subsistence and methods of animal husbandry, and in certain situations also about their religion. But it is subject to certain unavoidable distortions and uncertainties. Practitioners do not agree on the best way of recording results in order to calculate the proportions of the various species in the diet. The three main methods that are in use are (1) a count of the number of fragments identifiable as belonging to particular species, (2) the calculation of the respective total weights of such fragments, and (3) the calculation of the minimum number of animals represented by the fragments (generally referred to as MNI). All three have their drawbacks (Chaplin 1971: 64ff.; Hesse 1971). The results that I quote are all given of necessity according to the number of fragments (expressed as a percentage of the total number of identified fragments), since this is the only information given by all the studies cited, whatever other means of presentation may be adopted by some of them. But it should not be assumed that the figures are directly comparable from site to site. Indeed, Chaplin (1971: 67) considers that results calculated on this basis are completely useless for comparative purposes, since butchering methods, which generally result in the bones of larger animals being cut into more pieces than the corresponding bones of smaller ones, differ in ways that cannot be known or allowed for. He favours, for this reason, the MNI method. However, as I shall show, within very broad statistical limits the method of counting fragments does yield differences between sites in different areas, differences which, taken overall, correspond as one might expect to environmental factors. This suggests that the differences cannot be large enough to make the comparison as useless as Chaplin believes. It is in any case hard to see that the MNI method is any less subject to uncertainties that vitiate comparability. However, for our purposes the precise figures are not important; it is the general picture that counts, and I do not believe this is fundamentally flawed. There are other problems. Since a particular series of excavations generally only uncovers a small part of any settlement, its evidence may be badly skewed by differential use or preservation of material at

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different places in the settlement, though statistically this weakness may be overcome by grouping the results from many different sites to give a picture of animal use over a region or period, as I attempt to do. Further, though it is generally possible to show the kinds of large animals that were used for food, the bones of fish and fowl are relatively seldom recorded in any number, and even more rarely identified as to species. (There are, however, beginning to be a number of impressive exceptions to this rule.)1 Observation at the village of Hesban in Jordan in the course of the excavation of the nearby tell of Heshbon showed that the dogs, when offered chicken bones, 'would consume every one of them completely' (LaBianca 1978: 239); this seems likely to have been a common fate of remains of fowl, while fishbones are rarely recorded unless the earth is sieved, an extremely time-consuming process which excavators are often unwilling to undertake. Again, while with careful interpretation we may gain an impression of the relative balance of the usual domestic animals in the people's diet, we cannot tell how important meat in general was in it, since even if we can estimate the population of the site we generally have no idea what factor to apply to convert the recovered remains into a figure for the number of animals originally slaughtered over the relevant period (Urpmann 1973: 318ff.; but see Rosen 1986). And most important for our purpose, although we may cautiously posit that the inhabitants of a site at a given period did not eat certain animals, or only ate negligible quantities of them, the material evidence in itself cannot tell us why; was it only because the environment was unsuitable? or was it because they deliberately avoided them? and if so, why? Conversely, the kind of written evidence I shall cite does not tell us what people actually ate, only what restrictions they set, or claimed to set, on their diet. It is therefore rather difficult to compare or integrate the two kinds of evidence, yet it must be attempted. We have to impose some geographical limit on the testimony, and it is clear that the further we go from the Land of Israel, the less likely the evidence is to be relevant (hence I have reservations about the very wide net thrown by de Vaux in his article on the sacrifice of pigs [1972], which brings in Greece, Babylonia and Egypt). In so far as we can describe the people of Israel as sharing in a common culture with their neighbours, we may draw the bounds of that culture differently 1. See above all Boessneck and von den Driesch 1981, or on a smaller scale Horwitz and Tchernov 1989.

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as we look at different manifestations. Certain aspects of the high culture of the elite, such as the royal ritual and ideology, or the wisdom literature, were of course common to the whole Near East. But when we look at more popular culture, and certainly at something as basic to everyday life as diet, then we need to draw the boundaries more tightly. There seems to be sufficient in common between the cultures and religion of the various peoples speaking Canaanite and Aramaic dialects in Palestine, Phoenicia (with its colonies in Cyprus and the Western Mediterranean), Syria and Northern Mesopotamia to take that as our normal boundary, yet striking parallels from Egypt or Akkadian culture should not be ignored. As for a limit in time, that is more difficult. I have discussed the problem raised by literary evidence from a time substantially later than the time of the Bible. Equally, it will probably be thought that the archaeological evidence from the Early Bronze Age that I quote below is not likely to be of great relevance. Certainly it is not by itself, but it is sufficiently of a piece with that from the Middle Bronze Age to be worth quoting alongside it. I have not gone further back, except by way of putting things in an environmental context. 2. Diet: The Material Evidence a. Introduction The picture I shall draw in this section is drawn entirely from the material evidence. This needs to be evaluated in the light of a general understanding of the environmental conditions in Palestine, whence most of our evidence comes. (I have included material from Syria and Jordan where it is available, but the land of Israel has been far more intensively excavated, for religious and political reasons.) Rainfall increases generally from south to north, and from the Jordan valley rapidly westwards to the hill country of Judah, Ephraim and Manasseh, and eastwards to the Transjordanian highlands; beyond the spine of the western hill-country it falls off more gradually to the coast. Thus the total annual rainfall at Beersheba is 8.9 in, and at Jericho 6.4 in, whereas at Jerusalem (east of the area of heaviest precipitation) it is 23.5 in; at Natanya on the coast north of Tel-Aviv it is 18.4 in, and at Safad in Upper Galilee it is 29.1 in (May 1984: 51). The hill-country and the northern coastal plain are capable of supporting forest, and would have done so in prehistoric times (cf. Rowton 1967, Gophna,

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Lipschitz and Lev-Yadun 1986-87); but the southern Negev and the Arabah, and the Jordan valley as far north as the Jabbok, are desert, except for oases (Gophna et al. 1986-87: 50). Cereals can be grown throughout most of the country, but obviously there is a wide swathe of territory in the south, and on the slopes descending to the Jordan and the Dead Sea, where the only practical use of the land is for the pasturage of sheep and goats. The limits set by these constraints must be borne in mind as we study the archaeological record. It is generally agreed that animals were domesticated earlier in the Near East than anywhere else in the world, perhaps as early as 8000 BC for sheep and goats (Glutton-Brock 1981: 59-60; Cauvin 1978: 78-79), 7000 BC for pigs (Glutton-Brock 1981: 72; cf. idem 1979; Reed 1969: 371), and 6400 BC for cattle (Glutton-Brock 1981: 66). Some would regard these dates as too early for genuine full domestication by perhaps a thousand years (cf. Ducos and Helmer 1981), but there would be no dispute that by 5000 BC all four species were fully domesticated in the Near East. These results are derived from the examination of remains of these species from such early sites as Jarmo, Catal Hiiyiik or Jericho. Slight differences can be detected between wild and domestic animals after only a few generations, especially a reduction in size. But the progress of domestication at Jericho (and elsewhere in Palestine; cf. Davis 1982: 13-14) is marked especially by a sharp change in the source of flesh-meat. In the PrePottery Neolithic A (roughly the eighth millennium) the greater part of the faunal remains are derived from gazelles (over 50 per cent) and foxes; sheep and goats are negligible. Clearly these early villagers were still above all hunters. Neither gazelle nor fox has ever been, or ever could be, domesticated, because of their territorial behaviour (Glutton-Brock 1981; cf. Garrard 1984). In PPNB (the seventh millennium) gazelles provide about 15 per cent and foxes less than 10 per cent of the remains. Sheep and goats, which show signs of domestication, rise to 55 per cent, with cattle at 13 per cent. Pigs, which are still wild, are at 17 per cent (chart in Clutton-Brock 1981: 60, and 1979: 155 [table]). There is a lack of animal remains from the Pottery Neolithic at Jericho, but by the Bronze Age the four main domestic food animals are well established as almost the sole source of meat, apart from a small quantity of gazelle (Clutton-Brock 1979: 155). The gap can be filled in from other sites (cf. Ducos 1969), but different sites differ widely. Animals are kept at all sites in the Pottery

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Neolithic, but proportions of the different species differ widely (p. 267). It is worth noting, however, that there is no site at which the pig is the leading food animal, and at many (e.g. Beisamun, where unusually a quarter of the remains are of pigs [p. 267]), there is still no sign that these are domesticated (p. 270). Our more detailed attention must be given to the Bronze and Iron Ages. In order to give a full picture of the material evidence in a compendious form I have tabulated the information on some 40 sites in Table B at the end of this chapter (pp. 178-80). This is not a selection, but includes every site for which I have useful information. They are mainly in Palestine, though there are a clutch in the Euphrates Valley in Syria, with one just over the border in Turkey, and a couple in Jordan. The table is arranged for convenience of reference in alphabetical order according to the name of the site. The name is usually that used by my authority, or if not, that by which the site is commonly known. The next three columns enable the table to be used for analysis of the results on various lines. The area where the site is located is given according to the following code: cp ev g he jo jv n nfh nv sh

coastal plain Euphrates valley Galilee hill country Jordan (highlands) Jordan valley Negev (except for Timna, this means the Negev in ancient usage, i.e. the Beersheba area) northern foothills northern valleys Shephelah

The period is given following the source and according to the standard abbreviations used by Palestinian archaeologists. However, there are traps for the unwary, for the terminology is not used in exactly the same way by different archaeologists, for example American archaeologists end Iron I at c. 900 BC and Israelis at c. 1000 BC; more important, the same period is referred to by different authorities as EBIV, Intermediate Bronze and MBI; and this divergent terminology may appear in studies written by the same author, since the faunal analyst normally simply follows the terminology of the excavator.1 1.

As a guide for the uninitiated it may be useful to append here a table of the

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Under 'type' I have indicated whether the site, or that part of it from which the sample was taken, was domestic (dom), tombs (tomb), or a temple or other cultic structure (cult). The figures indicate the percentage of the total number of identifiable fragments assigned to the species in question. I have already spoken of the problems besetting every method of setting out and comparing results. It may be of interest to have a table comparing numbers of fragments with weight of bone for several species; this may give some indication of the balance of the species in the diet suggested by various ratios of fragments. In particular, obviously, beef will be of greater importance than suggested simply by the number of fragments, since the bones are heavier and carry a greater weight of meat. The table that I give here (Table A, p. 178) is derived from figures given by Buitenhuis for Hayaz Hoyiik (1985: 70); however, I have calculated the percentages over the identified portion of the remains rather than the total as he does. These figures refer to domestic animals only, plus deer, therefore they are slightly different from those in the main table, which include wild boar in the percentages for pigs. The discrepancies between the two levels indicate the degree of variability to be expected statistically in small samples; the pig fragments that happened to be preserved from the EB level were on average larger than those from the Chalcolithic, but this does not mean that pigs had grown 50 per cent bigger! In this, as in the main table, percentages are only given to two significant figures. In Table B I have only given figures for the major animals—the domestic food animals invariably, and deer and gazelles only if the proportion exceeded 3 per cent. There were very few places where hunting of mammals contributed anything significant to the diet. main archaeological periods of Palestine, abbreviated from A. Mazar 1990: 30, with the caution that absolute chronology is constantly subject to amendment: Pre-Pottery Neolithic A Prc-Poucry Neolithic B Pottery Neolithic Chalcolithic Early Bronze I-HI Early Bronze FV/Middle Bronze I Middle Bronze H Late Bronze Iron I Iron II After S86 BC historical terms such as

c. 8500-7500 BC c. 7500-6000 BC c. 6000-4300 BC c. 4300-3300 BC c. 3300-2300 BC c. 2300-2000 BC c. 2000-1550 BC c. 1550-1200 BC c. 1200-1000 BC c. 1000- 586 BC 'Persian period' are employed.

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Almost always there is also a wide variety of other 'unclean' wild animals, but always in very small quantity, far too small to base any serious argument on, in view of the propensity of archaeological samples for contamination by various means. Most sites also yielded remains of equids—presumably usually asses—and dogs, sometimes in surprising quantity. I have occasionally mentioned this for some special reason in the last column, since there is hardly ever any question of these animals having been eaten. Where it was specifically stated that no remains of a particular species were identified, I have inserted a dash '—'. Where remains were present but the quantity was not specified, I have put 'X'. In a few cases where the source was not directly available to me, this sign does not necessarily mean that the original source did not give quantities. b. Discussion 1. Cattle, Sheep and Goats. In interpreting these results, geography and ecology are the first factors that we must consider. The most obvious feature in the results taken as a whole is the dominance of sheep and goats almost everywhere, not necessarily in the proportions of the diet, but always in numbers. Everywhere there were large numbers of people engaged in pastoralism. This may mean either that many members of the settled community were so engaged, or that they were in close commercial contact with nomad stockbreeders. At different times and places these two types of relationship will have had different degrees of importance (cf. Wapnish and Hesse 1988: 83). But if we then look at those sites in the driest locations, those marginal for agriculture unassisted by irrigation, we find that they almost invariably have still higher proportions of sheep and goats, with cattle generally well under 20 per cent. These include the sites in the Negev, and the nearby and almost equally dry Tell es-Sharia, Tell Jemmeh and 'Araq el-Emir, and the sites in the mid-Euphrates Valley, where the rainfall is also low, and Jericho, where there is little rainfall, though proper use of the spring water makes agriculture possible. Of these, only Tel Masos and MB Jericho have more than 20 per cent of cattle. Other sites where the proportion of cattle in the remains falls below 20 per cent include most of the cultic and funerary sites, which require separate discussion, the Ophel, which is exceptional in any case, and Tell Qiri and Tell Qasile. These exceptions may not be easy to explain, but in general the key

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to these facts has been given by Baruch Rosen (1986), who points out in a most illuminating study of the bases of subsistence at Izbet Sartah that the number of cattle kept at any settlement depends in general on the extent to which it relies on agriculture for its subsistence and therefore requires oxen for draught; Izbet Sartah's 34 per cent indicates a community based solidly on agriculture, as the number of grain silos also shows, but wherever the proportion of cattle exceeds something like 20 per cent, subject to the problems of bias in the results, it is likely that the community taken as a whole is supported primarily by agriculture. But records from different periods of Palestine's history—Assyrian tribute lists, Turkish tax rolls and British censuses—uniformly reveal a ratio of sheep and goats to cattle for the country as a whole far higher than this, about 9:1 (Baruch Rosen 1986: 60-67). This shows the great importance that pastoralism and pastoralists have had in the economy of the country at all times, for the proportion of cattle in their flocks and herds tends not to exceed 5 per cent. It will be obvious that the corresponding ratio over the sites listed in the table taken together is much lower than 9:1. But this is to be expected; for archaeologists have tended to home in on substantial sites, while communities of pastoralists tend to live in small settlements, or indeed, especially in this region, to be nomadic, and thus to leave virtually no domestic remains detectable by present methods. The sites we have identified as marginal for agriculture, however, clearly relied very heavily on pastoralism. At Tel Masos and MB Jericho, where agriculture flourished, irrigation must have been used, but in the midEuphrates valley in early times, unlike lower Mesopotamia, or the same area today, the flood-plain had not been utilized by clearing and irrigation, and one must suppose that at Jericho in the Early Bronze period limited use was being made of these techniques. One must also suppose that at Tell Qiri and Tell Qasile, where there is no such problem for agriculture, there was nevertheless an exceptionally wide hinterland exploited by pastoralists. There is however probably some direct evidence in Table B of the presence and activity of pastoral nomads, since although they have no permanent settlements they do worship at permanent cult sites, and their wanderings must come to an end in the grave. Finkelstein (1988: 343ff.; cf. 1985: 164) points to these two types of remains as likely to have been used by nomad pastoralists: isolated sanctuaries, either away

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from any settlement or outside the walls of important centres; and cemeteries not apparently associated with any settlement. The first group includes the LB cult place at Shiloh and the Fosse Temple at Lachish. As Finkelstein points out (1988: 344 and 1985: 164), it is the analysis of the faunal remains at Shiloh that suggests its use by pastoral people: the proportion of cattle in the remains is very low and well on a par with such steppe settlements as Arad and Tell es-Sharia, and it contrasts sharply with the figures in the following period at Shiloh when it lay at the centre of a developing network of agricultural settlements. Unfortunately Olga Tufnell's report on the remains found in the Fosse Temple does not give quantities. Neither there nor at Shiloh were there any pig remains to speak of, nor apparently at Lachish; regrettably Hellwing and Sadeh give no figures for the minor categories at Shiloh. Among isolated cemeteries we may mention from our table Jebel Qa'aqir, a group of sixteen tombs west of Hebron, nine of them containing animal bones, every one of which came from a sheep or goat. The tombs do not seem to be associated with any settlement, and one might well expect to find nomadic pastoralists in that area, especially in EB IV/MB I. The story of Abraham's negotiations with Ephron suggests, however, that often nomads found their last resting place within the territory of the settled people with whom they were in contact. Perhaps this may explain the results from the tombs at Jericho and in the Refa'im valley, where the grave-offerings are likewise overwhelmingly caprovine, apart from the frequent offerings of donkeys in the Jericho tombs, the only other animal associated with pastoral nomads at this period. On the Jericho tombs Nobis suggests (1968: 417) that part of the population of Jericho itself could have led a seminomadic life to secure sufficient pasture for their flocks. 2. Pigs. In general, where the proportion of cattle is low, one may expect the proportion of pigs to be still lower. This is not because the raising of pigs has any close relation to crop-farming as it has in the modern world (as we have seen, pigs in traditional peasant societies may be pastured in woods or kept in the settlement and fed on waste), but for two other reasons: because ample surface water is an essential, and because pigs cannot be part of the mixed holdings of a pastoral family, since they cannot be herded in the same way and do not thrive on grass. Nomadic pastoralists cannot keep pigs at all, though a settled

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family reliant on flocks for its livelihood might keep a few pigs at home provided they could supply them with sufficient water. This expectation is borne out by the above figures: among those sites where cattle remains fall below 20 per cent, most, even excluding the temples and tombs, have less than 2 per cent of pig bones and only three have more than 6 per cent: EB Hayaz Hoyiik, MB Tell Jemmeh, and most remarkably the Refa'im valley in the so-called EB IV, where only 3 per cent of bones were of cattle, yet 15 per cent were of pigs. It is really the low proportion of cattle here that is surprising, since the community certainly practised agriculture successfully in the following MB II period (Horwitz 1989b: 49). Do we then find that at the sites we can regard as primarily agricultural, those where the proportion of cattle exceeds 20 per cent, pigs are raised in greater numbers? At some, yes, but by no means at all. Out of the 17 domestic sites or strata where cattle exceed 20 per cent there are only three (EB En Shadud, Iron I Tel Miqne, and EB-MB Tell el-Hayyat) where pig exceeds 10 per cent, and only a further four where it exceeds 6 per cent. At the majority, therefore, it is in the same range as in the strongly pastoral settlements, and there is a notable group where the porportion of pig bone is less than one per cent: Ashdod, Izbet Sartah, Tel Masos and Tel Michal. Iron Age Lachish, which is only partly cultic, could well be added to this group, and the urban community on the Ophel, where probably nobody produced their own food and so the low proportion of cattle has nothing to do with local conditions. These sites all have one thing in common: they belong to the Iron Age. Even if we go up to the verge of the 6 per cent mark, we bring in only one Bronze Age site: EB Tel Dalit;1 and LB Lachish (according to Drori) stands at 6 per cent. On the other hand, there are only two Iron Age sites where the use of pig is above this level, Ekron being one and Pella (at 15 per cent) the other. The Bronze Age therefore fulfils our expectation, if generally on a rather modest scale, while the Iron Age for the most part notably frustrates it.2 1. In Hell wing and Gophna's statistically illegitimate 1984 study of two sites combined, most of the EB material comes from Tel Dalit, and all the MB material from Aphek. 2. Averages are probably not of much value in this discussion, but for what it is worth the average of the percentage of pig-bones in all the Bronze Age sites in the table is 7.6, and in all the Iron Age ones 3.9, or about half. Without Ekron and Pella the Iron Age average falls to 1.5.

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Ulrich Hiibner (1989) has argued that the archaeological evidence shows the keeping and eating of pigs to have gone on, admittedly on a fairly small scale, without a break from the Bronze Age into Iron Age Israel, thus that the prohibition of swine's flesh in Leviticus and Deuteronomy was not the reflection of ancient custom, but an innovation. However, his citation of the evidence is by no means as systematic or comprehensive as in our table. It can be seen from our figures that pig production and consumption, already quite low, suffered a marked downturn at the beginning of the Iron Age, and remained high (or got higher) only in a few places that are certainly not Israelite. At no identifiably Israelite site is the proportion of pig remains higher than 2 per cent (Kinneret and Tell Qiri). It is not enough simply to quote instances of a given type of find occurring; for genuine understanding one must be able to answer the questions: 'in what quantity?' and 'with what associations?' The associations I will come to later; the quantities are enough to make it clear that pigkeeping did not in any significant sense 'obviously proceed without a break' (Hiibner 1989: 227). However, not all the sites where pig remains are scanty are Israelite, however precisely one wishes to define a word that it is difficult to link in a simple way with particular archaeological remains. Certainly Ashdod is not.1 We ought to allow for the possibility of accounting for this pattern in purely environmental terms. John Rogerson has suggested to me possible ways of doing this. The most obvious factor to be invoked is the availability of water. All animals require water to drink, but pigs also need to bathe in it in warm weather, since, as we have seen, they have no physiological means of maintaining their body temperature. Hence agriculture could be successfully carried on in many places where it would be difficult to keep pigs. In a general sense the modest values for pig remains are explained by the general lack of adequate water supplies in most parts of the country, and we might expect a reasonably high frequency of pig bones only where water was easily available in quantity throughout the year. This might include parts of the coastal plain between the second and third kurkar ridges, where

1. Ahlstrom (1984a) and Finkelstein (1988: 45) in their sharply different ways unite in denying that Tel Masos was an Israelite settlement, though in doing so they go against the view of the excavators (Fritz and Kempinski 1983; cf. Dever 1990: 93).

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marshy areas can be found even now (Rogerson 1989a: 76, 80). It would also of course include the Jezreel valley and the Jordan valley close to the river; but certainly not the hill country, where the rock is predominantly limestone which almost immediately absorbs the winter rains, and where spring water and rainwater conserved in cisterns would be difficult to apply to pig-keeping, being too valuable for other purposes; this would also apply in a place like Tel Masos. Since the hill country became a zone of heavy settlement in the Iron Age, and the balance of population in the country swung towards the highlands, this might account for the fall in pig frequencies then. It does not however account for the figures that we find in Table B, for this includes relatively few domestic sites in the hill-country. True, most of those that there are have, as expected, few or no pigs, though the Refa'im Valley in the Bronze Age is, as we have noted, an exception; and the only places where we find the pig a major food animal in quantities similar to those of sheep, goats and cattle are Tell el-Hayyat, in the Jordan valley, and En Shadud, in the Jezreel valley. But we should note at the same time that these findings date back to the Early Bronze Age and to some extent the Middle Bronze; at no later time anywhere do we find a figure above 18 per cent for pig remains. The higher values appear at first sight to be found in the expected areas: Ma'abarat on the coast; Pella immediately above the Jordan valley, near enough, perhaps, for it to have pig farms serving it in the valley and using river water; Ekron and Tell Jemmeh on the coastal plain. But doubt must creep in when we look more closely at the position of these two sites. Ekron is nearly in the foothills, a good twelve miles from the coast, and Tell Jemmeh is virtually in the Negev. Moreover, the hypothesis does not work conversely; it does not help us to understand the low pig frequencies found in some places where water would probably have been easily available: Ashdod, Tell Qasile and Tel Michal on the coast, Jericho in the Jordan valley (in the EB) and Dan near its source. It cannot therefore account for the decline of pig use in the Iron Age. We may then ask, mindful of Harris's attention to the woodland habitat usually required for the free-range keeping of pigs, whether the low use of pigs and especially the decline in pig-keeping in the Iron Age are to be associated with the deforestation of the land, which would be an inevitable accompaniment both of (1) the demand for fuel for the smelting of metals since the beginning of the Bronze Age, and

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of (2) the heavy exploitation of the land for grazing as well as for agriculture. In fact it is very doubtful whether this process had proceeded either so far or so fast by the beginning of the Iron Age as to make pig-keeping impossible or even anti-social in the sense understood by Harris. Rogerson in his Atlas of the Bible gives detailed attention to the question of deforestation, and indicates on his maps the likely extent of forest around 1200 BC, always very much greater than today (Rogerson 1989a: 60, 62-63 and passim). The question has also beeen discussed by Rowton (1967) over the broad scene of Western Asia as a whole, and by Gophna et al. (1986-87) on the small scale of a regional survey. 'Man's impact on the arboreal vegetation in the Central Coastal Plain was not extensive', conclude Gophna and his colleagues (1986-87: 81); 'For the severe degradation of the forest in this area, we should look to later periods [than the Middle Bronze Age]'. And these later periods should certainly not include the Late Bronze Age, when there was a sharp decline in the settled population in Palestine (Finkelstein 1988: 340). Finkelstein argues (1988: 342-43) that much of the former settled population will have become nomadic rather than simply disappearing; but Rowton shows that it is not nomads so much as the resettlement of nomads that furthers the degradation of forest (1967: 275-76). Should we then look to the extensive settlement that took place in the Iron Age, especially in the previously wooded hill country, as achieving the deforestation we are looking for? Certainly the Iron Age resumed the process of degradation, but hardly so fast as to be a convincing explanation of the decline of the pig. The fall in the proportions of pig remains takes place at the beginning of the Iron Age, rather than during it, as shown by an exclusively Iron I site such as Izbet Sartah. And Finkelstein shows that in the country of Ephraim settlement was slowest on the western slopes of the hill country, where the thickest woodland survived (1988: 187-88). The truth of the matter is that, as I have already pointed out, woodland is not necessary for pig-keeping; pigs can be kept at home and fed on waste, as in modern China. I have already suggested that this was the normal way in which they were kept in the ancient Near East (Chapter 3, §2.c.3). The practice of fattening them on grain must have been exceptional, given the normal conditions of scarcity, and the highland forests in any case usually lacked suitable water supplies. Deforestation, then, may be entirely irrelevant to the question, or rather, it may be the result rather than the cause of the decline of the

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pig, as I have already suggested (Chapter 3, §2.c.3). In that case both the decline of the forests and the decline of the pig may be due to the settlement, or resettlement, of people traditionally reliant upon sheep and goats and their political dominance in the subsequent period—the theory of Simoons (Chapter 3, §2.b), combined with that of Finkelstein (1988: 336-51) about the emergence of Israel. But I defer consideration of this hypothesis until later in this chapter (§4.b). 3. Other Domestic Animals. The other common domestic animals were the donkey and the dog. As I have already observed, these turn up in nearly every dig; the dog is perhaps the earliest domesticated animal of all (Clutton-Brock 1981), while the donkey appears regularly from the beginning of the Bronze Age onwards. Normally they appear in relatively small numbers which are much subject to statistical variation: the 25 per cent of donkeys at En Shadud is presumably a statistical fluke. No evidence that I am aware of suggests that either of them was ever eaten in the period with which we are concerned, except in emergency (cf. 2 Kgs 6.25). Some early peoples hunted the onager or wild ass (Equus hemionus) for meat, but there is little evidence of this in Bronze and Iron Age Palestine, and the domestic donkey is a different matter altogether. One further domestic animal remains to be discussed: the camel. There has been a great deal of controversy over the date at which it was introduced as a domestic animal in the Near East, but the archaeological evidence is beginning to settle it. At the sites listed in the table, which are broadly representative of the settled areas of Palestine during the Bronze Age and Iron I and II (i.e. down to about 500 BC), the camel can practically be ignored. It is only in Hellenistic and Roman times that it begins to turn up with any frequency (Wapnish 1984: 171). The camels of 'Izbet Sartah, mentioned in the table, are a pretty little problem. They are obviously wildly out of context at an Early Iron Age agricultural village in the foothills of Ephraim. They had apparently not been slaughtered, but their bodies had been stuffed into two disused grain silos of the second of the site's three levels of occupation. They could easily belong to a later period (Hellwing and Adjeman 1986: 146). More relevantly, we find camel bones in some quantity in Israelite territory first at the desert fortresses and way stations of the Negeb in

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the tenth century (Hakker-Orion 1984): Har Saad, Kadesh Barnea and Aroer. The frequent reference to them in the patriarchal narratives (especially Gen. 24) suggests that by the time of the final redaction of the latter, at latest, it was natural to assume that pastoralists would use them—and more than pastoralists, if we are to believe one of the Assyrian reliefs in the British Museum which portrays a family setting into exile from Lachish with a camel to carry their water (R.D. Barnett [1985] has drawn attention to this). They had been domesticated first, unquestionably, in Arabia (Compagnoni and Tosi 1978) and it continued to be primarily the Arab tribes who used them (Hakker-Orion 1984), giving themselves immensely greater freedom to traverse relatively waterless and thinly grassed regions, though true Beduin reliant on the camel seem only to have emerged about 2000 years ago. Their use was above all for transport and commerce; their slaughter for meat can only be a sideline, because of their slow rate of reproduction (Kohler 1984; Wapnish 1984: 175). Nevertheless, Paula Wapnish reports on the discovery of a centre of camel eating at Tell Jemmeh, 10 km south of Gaza, and therefore in the area where camel trains would be used and pastoralists using camels will have been present. Although camel bones are present in small numbers from the fourteenth century onwards, they appear frequently only from the seventh century to the third (1984: 172-73); historically this seems to have been a time when the Babylonian and Persian empires were attempting to control the incense trade carried on by the Arabs, which will have led to a large increase in the use of camel caravans (1984: 179). Wapnish's careful discussion of the age balance of the camels slaughtered leads to the conclusion that they are likely to have been unwanted stock from trading caravans, sold to the townspeople by the traders (1984:175-78). Now if there was one such centre where camel meat was eaten on the desert trade routes, there will have been others, and of course the traders themselves, and still more camel-using pastoralists, are likely to have used their stock for meat on occasion, as today. The combined evidence of Tell Jemmeh and the modern Beduin shows that the factors that restrained peasant populations from using their donkeys for meat (below, §3.c; Chapter 5, §l.a) do not seem to have applied to camels. But the people who ate camel meat lived outside the main areas of settlement in the land of Israel, and ethnically would in the main have been non-Israelites. It should also be noted that the custom

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of eating camel meat will only have come to the attention of Israelites generally about the time of the exile, when the caravan trade was increasing, and Arab tribes were pressing into Edom and the southern parts of Judah. 4. Wild Mammals. We now need to turn our attention to the use made of wild animals. As will be seen from the table, it is rare for hunting of large animals to contribute very much to the diet; most of the assemblages of which this is true come from the Early Bronze period, though the remarkable quantity of fallow-deer remains found at Mt Ebal is worth noting; it proves that large areas of forest still existed in this part of the hill-country in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries (Horwitz 1986-87: 182). For the most part, however, it is clear that the assiduous hunting of the gazelle in earlier times had too severely depleted its numbers for it to remain a significant source of food, and the fallow deer had been reduced by the clearance of forest as well as by over-hunting. No wild mammals other than the various species of gazelle and deer, and wild boar, which is frequently indistinguishable from domestic pig, contribute anything significant to the diet at the great majority of sites. There is surprisingly little evidence at any period later than the Neolithic of the eating of wild beasts that did not closely resemble the domestic stock, despite the great depletion of the stock of wild ruminants by the Early or at least the Middle Bronze Age; there is very little evidence of the eating of hares, to take the obvious example, anywhere near the biblical period. Indeed according to Db'ller (1917: 189) they were still avoided in Syria at the beginning of the present century. There are perhaps one or two exceptions. At Ashdod, for example, the remains of quite a number of medium-sized animals such as hare and porcupine were found, amounting to as much as 5 per cent of the whole assemblage, and it is possible that some of these were eaten. However, my earlier caution about the contamination of samples should be borne in mind. At Ebal 4 per cent of the identifiable sample consisted of bones of small animals and birds, many of them 'unclean': a polecat, a lizard, 'a reptile, probably snake', hare, mole rat, a bird of prey, a small carnivore, tortoise, and hedgehog. But all the mammals except the polecat are pronounced 'of recent origin and probably intrusive' (Horwitz 1986-87: 176). There is therefore next to no reputable evidence that the people of the Levant were in the habit of

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hunting and eating wild species called unclean in the Old Testament, with the important exception of the wild boar. What Boessneck and von den Driesch say about Heshbon (1978: 285) could be said with variations about every site: 'Only gazelles and partridges were hunted on a scale worthy of mention, though during the earlier periods fallow deer may also have been hunted to some extent'. 5. Birds. The reference to partridges reminds us that, as I have already observed, a great deal of evidence for the consumption of fowl has been lost even at sites where careful study of the mammalian remains has been undertaken. However, there is sufficient evidence to make it clear that one widely canvassed idea is false—the idea, I mean, that the domestic fowl was not introduced to the Near East until comparatively late times. At Tell Sweyhat it was there in the Early Bronze age, before 2000 BC; at Lachish remains were found deriving from Level V or VI in the Late Bronze (Ussishkin 1978: 88-89); and at Jerusalem there are several Iron Age (monarchical period) remains (Horwitz and Tchernov 1989). Domestic birds also included geese and ducks (ibid.); whether particular examples of pigeons are domestic birds or not is a difficult question to decide, even in the case of living birds; certainly pigeons formed part of the ancient diet; and the bird-trapper's art, so frequently referred to in the literature of the Old Testament, seems to have been largely directed towards partridges (Horwitz and Tchernov 1989, and Boessneck and von den Driesch 1978: 285). Once again, we can find very little evidence of the eating of unclean species in Israel's immediate environment. 6. Water Creatures. The case is rather different, but even more obscure, when it comes to fish. As I have already observed, fishbones are infrequently preserved from excavations. They are however sufficiently often reported to make one confident that the widely reported Syrian and Palestinian abstinence from fish is either no early development or remained confined to certain groups. One recent excavation where it was obviously important to study the marine remains as far as possible was that at Tel Kinrot (Tell el-'Oreme), Kinneret, on the shore of the sea of Galilee. The report (Fritz forthcoming) is not yet published, but Hiibner treats us to the titbit of information from it that the bones of catfish, a scaleless fish, were 'relatively numerous' (1989: 228) among the faunal remains of Iron II. He does not tell us what

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'relatively' means: it is all very well to draw attention to the perishability and easily overlooked character of fishbones, but since this applies to all fishbones, a relevant and useful comparison could have been made between quantities of bones of 'clean' and 'unclean' fish. Catfish were also found in the MB tombs at Sasa (Horwitz 1987), not very far away and no doubt from the same source. Molluscs are a different matter: their shells are durable and hard to overlook, and are found in nearly all excavations. However, it is not always easy to say whether they had been eaten on site; they were popular for decoration, and the great majority of Palestinian sites are too far from any likely source to make it probable that they had been brought to the site alive. In most places they occur in ones and twos; only if there are substantial dumps of local species does it become probable that they were eaten by the local inhabitants. This is the case at Bronze Age Jericho, where we find over 300 shells of a local water-snail, Melanopsis praecorsa buccinoidea Oliv. (Nobis 1968: 420-21). Hellwing (1988-89) says of Bronze Age Tel Kinrot that 'it is difficult to assess at this stage the economic significance of the [much smaller] mollusk shell concentrations at the excavation site'. In the nature of things the eating of molluscs would be very much a local peculiarity, except for land-snails, and of that there is little evidence that I know of after the Neolithic (it is attested for that era at Jericho [Hellwing 1988-89]). 7. Summary. To summarize the evidence for people's dietary preference over such a large space and time is very difficult. There are, however, a remarkable number of constants. Almost everywhere sheep and goats provide a high proportion of the meat eaten, attesting the importance of pastoralism (whether nomadic or not) in the economy and society of the region; beef is of correspondingly less importance, and pork usually less important still, often much less so than environmental considerations alone would lead one to expect. Where, exceptionally, we find substantial numbers of pig remains in communities that were largely pastoral, we must suppose that they had access to good water supplies and fed the pigs in the settlement on waste. But much more commonly we found that pigs were eaten in relatively small quantity even where environmental conditions would have been favourable, and whereas this is often true in the Bronze Age, it is very marked and virtually normal in the Iron Age; we often find very low

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or negligible pig frequencies in the Iron Age, but nothing quite as low in the Bronze Age. We did not find any consistently predictive environmental or technical explanation for this. On this point it is clearly necessary to appeal to cultural factors, something that in any case is necessary to account for the failure to utilize the flesh of the universal scavenger, or the principal beast of burden. 3. Evidence of Cultural Factors a. 'Clean and Unclean' Animals in Israel (Non-Priestly Sources) The principal Old Testament sources for the dietary restrictions found in Israel, so far as the distinction of kinds is concerned, are our texts Leviticus 11 and Deut. 14.3-20. Outside these contexts, references to a distinction between clean and unclean animals are surprisingly sparse. The most obvious is in the story of the Flood, in those passages that are generally referred to as the J version. In Gen. 7.2-3 Yahweh instructs Noah to bring into the ark 'of each clean beast(behema) seven pairs, and of beasts that are not clean one pair; and also of the birds of the air seven pairs...' 1 The difference in the numbers is clearly explained by the sacrifice that Noah will offer after the Flood (8.20): 'And Noah built an altar to Yahweh and took of every clean beast and of every clean bird and offered whole-offerings on the altar'. It is not clear whether Noah and his family are also expected to use the clean animals for food in this version; in P their food is clearly to be vegetarian (6.21—a distinct command from that concerning the animals, as in 1.29-30; cf. Chapter 6, §2.e). Probably they are, as one extra male would suffice for the sacrifice. Westermann says very generally that the higher number of clean animals 'indicates their greater significance for humans' (1984: 427). It is very doubtful whether this gives sufficient weight to the particularities of the story. The question arises whether Gen. 7.3 really does not envisage the existence of unclean birds (it does not say 'of all the birds'); if so it would be in conflict with 8.20 as well as with Leviticus 11. Westermann (1984: 428) regards 7.3a as a later elaboration, arising from the 1. There is no certainty that this is the correct translation (it is effectively that of RSV and REB and most EVV; the AV is ambiguous); although it seems most likely, it involves an inconsistency, since D^IO a'Kf (probably the correct reading: cf. the Ancient Versions) is taken to mean 'two of each' and motf runtf 'seven pairs of each'. It might well mean seven individuals (cf. the JB).

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misunderstanding of behemd in v. 2, which he considers to be in this place a comprehensive term referring to all land animals, including birds; the elaboration ignores the distinction important to J between clean and unclean. If so, it must come from a redactor who was not only indifferent to the distinction, but also lacking in literary perception. Moreover, there is no other case known to me, and certainly Westermann cites none, in which behema includes birds. It would surely be better to suppose that either the author or the supplementer considered all birds to be clean, and in the former case that it is 8.20 that has been supplemented. The priestly tradition regards the distinction between clean and unclean animals, like other ritual institutions, as having been given only at Sinai and only to Israel, being exclusive to Israel and indeed distinctive of it (Lev. 20.24ff.). Westermann notes the existence of two traditions of interpretation, one that sees J as reading back into primaeval time the distinction as it existed in Israel (presumed to be that in Lev. 11); the first is represented by Cassuto and Dillmann, to whom Wenham should now be added; and the second regards J as deducing the antiquity of such institutions from their prevalence in his own time (Gunkel, Skinner and Westermann himself). In either case it is clear that a distinction of the same kind as is given to Israel in Leviticus 11 is taken for granted. The definitions assumed are not necessarily exactly the same as those specified in Leviticus 11 and other priestly passages. Quite apart from the question about the birds, there is nothing to indicate that Noah only sacrifices domestic animals; indeed the implication is that the sacrifice includes wild clean animals as well.1 In truth, this passage does not tell us a great deal—perhaps only that the distinction of clean and unclean in Israel was not dependent solely on priestly teaching. Other passages assuming the possibility of unclean food are even less informative. Judg. 13.7 implies that the distinction would be of particular importance to a person associated with the cult or under a religious vow; because her child is to be a lifelong nazir, Samson's mother is neither to drink alcohol nor to eat koltum'a, 'anything unclean'. This may point to the original area within which the distinction was significant as regards diet. Hos. 9.3, 'they shall eat unclean food in Assyria', perhaps betrays a different assumption from the J narrative of the flood. Different peoples have 1. Thus his sacrificial practice would be similar to that at Mt Ebal (Horwitz 1986-87: see below, §3.b.l)

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different dietary customs, and someone living abroad may be compelled to eat things that are unclean according to Israelite understanding.1 It cannot be assumed from this that Hosea already understands things according to the formula of Lev. 20.24ff., that the dietary rules have the function of marking Israel out as distinct from all other peoples. In any case, neither of these passages necessarily refers to distinction of species at all. But it is a reasonable, if not a necessary deduction from the three passages taken together that the distinction of clean and unclean flesh is one with a wide base in Israelite society, not a priestly peculiarity. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Firmage (1990: 183) reinforces his methodological objections to going outside Leviticus 11 with a round historical assertion that with the possible exception of the pig, there is no evidence prior to the appearance of the present dietary law [Firmage gives no indication when he thinks that was] that the Israelites regarded any of the animals prohibited by Leviticus 11 as unclean. Therefore, while Israel's dietary tabus often overlap with those of contemporary cultures, one cannot assume that its aversion to these animals originated from the same long-standing, popular source.

Be it said first that the 'possible exception' is a very substantial one, since the pig is the only creature commonly eaten in the ancient Near East that is declared unclean in Leviticus. But has Firmage simply overlooked Gen. 7.2, or does he not see it as 'evidence'? True, the unclean beasts alluded to in Gen. 7.2 are not named, and consequently it is technically correct that there is no evidence that any particular animal prohibited in Leviticus 11 is seen as unclean in Gen. 7.2. True also, the distinction in Genesis 7 may have nothing to do with food and be related only to sacrifice; but as we have seen this is rather doubtful. And true again, the Levitical law may have changed or reinterpreted (and certainly may have extended) food avoidances already existing in its culture. But since there is no evidence worth speaking of from any period of Israel's history for the consumption of any of the land animals mentioned as unclean in Leviticus 11 other than the pig, it is straining the argument to claim that it is probable, or even plausible, that Gen. 7.2 has an entirely different list in mind. 1. The usual interpretation of the commentators, however, is that the uncleanness of the food arises from the uncleanness of the foreign land 'which belongs to foreign gods, not to Yahweh (Am. 7:17)' (Wolff 1974: 155).

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It is not as if Firmage's position could be supported by questioning the orthodoxy on the relative dates of J and P, for he emphasizes the character of the dietary law as a rule of holiness unique to Israel; it would be odd for any subsequent writer to make it Noachic. b. The Selection of Animals for Sacrifice I have organized this sub-section according to the type of evidence used. Both material and written evidence from within and without Israel tends to confirm the impression gained from the Flood story and other texts, that a common distinction between animals acceptable and unacceptable in cultic situations was widespread and generally understood. 1. Material Evidence. At most of the sites from which we have material, the analyses have not been comprehensive. We can say that cattle and sheep and/or goats were sacrificed, and pigs probably were not, but no more. At many of them, the proportion of cattle appears to be lower than one would expect for the area where they are set. The following consideration could account for this. Among sheep and goats only a small number of male animals as they reach maturity need to be kept for breeding; the rest are available for food or sacrifice (or both). Among cattle the primary use of male animals is for draught, so that fewer young animals would be available for food or sacrifice. But animals required for labour are generally castrated, which would not prevent them from being slaughtered for food at the end of their useful lives, but would prevent them from being sacrificed. In the biblical prescriptions only intact and perfect animals could be offered in sacrifice (Lev. 1.3, etc.), and it does not seem too incautious a supposition that this would be true fairly generally. Also, the bias noted by Chaplin, whereby butchered beef results in a larger number of bone fragments than butchered mutton, may not be operative to the same extent at cultic sites, where some animals will have formed holocausts and others will have been food for large gatherings. The one site where a comprehensive analysis has been undertaken is Mt Ebal (Horwitz 1986-87). Some doubt has been cast on the identification of this site (by Zertal, first in 1985) as an altar and temenos (cf. Finkelstein 1988: 85). But Zertal has now (1986-87 [actually published 1989]) comprehensively answered his critics. We need not follow the arguments on either side, except to discuss the evidence of

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the faunal remains. Horwitz notes the absence of species that are normally found at domestic sites: equids, pigs, gazelles and dogs; and that 'the comparative data on burnt bones suggests a slightly higher (though not significant [sic])frequency at Ebal than that expected from a bone sample of this size' (1986-87: 181). But though the higher frequency of burnt bones may be statistically insignificant, it cannot be insignificant that they include fallow deer antlers (ibid.), since no one would leave the antlers on while cooking roast venison; the only possible explanation is that the deer had been burnt as whole offerings. It is true, as Horwitz notes, that the Mosaic prescriptions do not allow for the sacrifice of wild animals. There is no explicit prohibition, but we may compare the sacrificial prescriptions, Leviticus 1-7, which only mention cattle, sheep, goats and doves; Lev. 17.13, which presumes that an animal caught by a hunter will not be presented in sacrifice; and Deut. 12.15, 22, which assume that gazelle and deer will be eaten 'by the clean and the unclean'. This is true, but the evidence of the bones is incontrovertible. Whatever may have been the case at Jerusalem, at Ebal, deer (but not gazelle) were sacrificed! The animals sacrificed there were goats, sheep, cattle and fallow deer, in that order of frequency (though there is not sufficient difference in numbers between the identifiable remains of sheep and goats to be able to say for certain which were more frequent). Remains of partridge and rock dove were also found, but Horwitz does not suggest there is any evidence that they were sacrificed. The most significant fact to be gleaned from the results taken together is the exclusion of the pig from the altar. It is clear from Table B that not one of the cultic sites where we have some analysis of the faunal material offers any evidence for the sacrifice of pigs. In this respect there is no difference between Bronze Age sites (Lachish VI, Lachish Fosse Temple, Nahariyah, Shiloh) and Iron Age ones (Ebal, Lachish, Shiloh); between sanctuaries possibly used by nomads (Fosse Temple, LB Shiloh: above, §2.b.l) and ones used by settled people; between presumptively 'Canaanite' sanctuaries (Lachish VI, Nahariyah) and presumptively Israelite ones (Ebal, Iron Age Lachish, Iron Age Shiloh); between metropolitan sites (Lachish) and country ones (Ebal) (cf. below, §4.a). This is one of the facts overlooked by Hiibner in his 1989 article—it is a question of the associations of the material. If pigs were not sacrificed even by people who raised them, if in limited numbers, that is clear prima facie evidence that they were conceived

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to be what we may call 'unclean', even if that has not quite the same meaning as in Leviticus 11. It might be argued that the accidents of selection have given us evidence mainly from sites where people worshipped who did not in any case raise or eat pigs, and so were not likely to sacrifice them. Among Bronze Age sites, this would apply to the Shiloh sanctuary and the Fosse Temple at Lachish. The suggestion could conceivably be true also of Nahariyah, a sanctuary within the Phoenician orbit (according to the excavator, Dothan 1956), if the probable fact that pigs were not kept at Ugarit, or later in Phoenicia (§3.c) could suggest a longstanding avoidance of pig-meat on that coast. But it is at least untrue of the temple in Lachish level VI at the end of the Late Bronze, given the contemporary evidence from domestic sites in the same town. Thus there is strong confirmation from archaeological evidence, most of which was unknown to de Vaux at the time he wrote his article on the sacrifice of pigs in 1958 (1972: 255-56), that his conclusion to the rarity of this custom was correct. It can also be confirmed from the written evidence, much of which was known to him. 2. Internal Written Evidence. There are two main sources of internal written evidence, apart from the Old Testament, whose evidence I have just summarized: the Ugaritic liturgical texts, which include many lists of prescribed sacrifices and sacrificial calendars (all available texts are edited by Paolo Xella [1981], and they are analysed by Jean-Michel de Tarragon [1980]; pp. 32-39 deal with our subject, but are dependent on Levine 1963); and the so-called Marseilles tariff (CIS, I, 165; edited with commentary KAI 69), which lays down the fees chargeable at the temple of Baal-Saphon for different types of sacrifice with different animals; it was discovered in the harbour at Marseilles, but the likelihood is that it originates from Carthage (KAI, p. 83); certainly the language is Punic, and the vocabulary and ideas can be parallelled in other Punic and Phoenician inscriptions; its date is the end of the third century BC (KAI, p. 83), more than a thousand years later than the Ugaritic texts. The most frequent terms for animals used in the Ugaritic liturgical texts have been elucidated by Baruch Levine (1963). In these specialized documents terms that are used broadly in literary and other texts take on a very precise meaning, and others that do not occur elsewhere at all are brought in: s means a sheep or goat of the male sex;

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dqt, literally a small animal, a female sheep or goat; 'alp a bull; gdlt, literally a large animal, a heifer or cow; s'in small cattle collectively. The remainder have been dealt with by de Tarragon (1980: 32-33): 'imr a lamb, 'srm birds (not specified); ynt a dove (generally specified as ynt qrt a town pigeon). The frequency with which the different species and sexes are mentioned in the text (not of course the same thing as the frequency with which they were sacrificed, but indicative) is entirely in line with expectation: s 87 times, dqt 23 times, 'alp 20 times, gdlt 42 times, ynt qrt 1 times (1963: 34). The ratio of sheep and goats to cattle is 110: 62 or 64:36; lower than the observed ratio at other cultic sites, but it must be remembered that these texts are for a royal, public ritual; the same fact will explain the relatively low frequency with which the inexpensive sacrifice of a pigeon is prescribed: in the Old Testament this is for the poor (Lev. 5.7, etc.). That the majority of specifications of a sheep or goat call for a male animal, while the situation is reversed for cattle, offers a degree of confirmation for my hypothesis about the proportions of the species above. These are the animals commonly sacrificed. But once the sacrifice of a goose ('uz) is prescribed to the gods of the underworld ('Urn 'ars: KTU 1.106: 30, Xella 1981: 82-83); and two texts speak of the sacrifice of an ass (V): KTU 1.40: 26, 34, 43 (Xella 1981: 257ff.), where probably the ritual calls for the sacrifice of three sheep/goats and three asses (de Tarragon 1980: 36), and KTU 1.119: 16 (1980: 25ff.). All three examples are unusual in some way, the first in that the ritual is addressed to the chthonian deities; the second in that the text is not a ritual prescription but a liturgical text for what is clearly an unusual rite of expiation (discussion in de Tarragon 1980: 92ff.), in which the victims are offered to the whole assembly of the gods; the third, which is the prescription for one particular day of the year, in that of the whole series of prescriptions for particular days (of course we do not have them anything like complete) this is the only occasion on which an ass is offered—to Baal according to Xella's reconstructed text; but the tablet breaks at this point, and the text is quite uncertain. De Tarragon comments (1980: 37-38): The list of animals offered to the divinities makes absolutely no distinction between clean animals and unclean ones. The distinction which was to exist in precise fashion in the Palestinian Iron Age is not found at the end of the Middle Bronze Age on the coast of Syria.

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This could, I think, have been expressed more cautiously. The ritual texts make no such distinction explicit, true; but neither do the prescriptive ritual texts of the Old Testament. The texts do call very occasionally for the sacrifice of an animal (the ass) that is unclean in the Old Testament system, again true; but this is no evidence that the Ugaritic priests made no comparable distinction. Positive evidence, though circumstantial, that they did is the entire absence of any mention of the pig as a sacrificial animal from the texts available to us (84 of them in Xella). We have, it is true, no warrant to say categorically that a pig (or any other animal) would be unacceptable in sacrifice; but the repertory of animals actually prescribed is limited to sheep/ goats, cattle and birds, with the very occasional exception of an ass. It is possible that geese could only be sacrificed to the infernal powers, and if so this would also suggest some kind of discrimination between animals (cf. below, §3.d). But this is hypothetical. The repertory is similar to the Old Testament in that it includes only domestic animals, and that the bird normally offered in sacrifice is the domestic pigeon. (Of course, when we find in a mythological text [UT 62] talk of the sacrifice of harts, ibexes and [possibly] roebuck [70 of each!], this is not to be confused with practice in the real world.) We may add here that at Ugarit, if not elsewhere in the Bronze Age, the pig seems to have been avoided also as food. In all the Ugaritic texts there is no reference to pigs as an article of diet, indeed no real reference to pigs at all. h(ri)zr appears as an obscure term for some kind of trade (UT 1024: rev. 4; 1091: 6) and as the title of certain servitors of Baal in the myth (67.V: 9), otherwise only as a personal name.1 Arguments from silence are notoriously risky, but to me it seems provisionally possible to conclude that at least the city population did not normally eat pork. The Marseilles tariff has caused rather more difficulty in the identification of the names of animals. The following terms are used for them: 'lp, a bull, which is assessed at the highest value of ten shekels; '#/, a (male) calf; and at the same value (five shekels, half that of a bull) 'v/, which I discuss below; then at a considerably lower value (one shekel and two zr) ybl, which is likewise discussed below,

1. It is surprising that Hiibner (1989: 235 n. 55) should cite three Ugaritic texts as evidence for the keeping and consumption of pigs at Ugarit. One of these is the Baal text, and in the others it is a question of a personal name.

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and 'z, a goat; then three terms all at the lowest value, one-quarter of a shekel less: emr, a lamb; gd', a kid; and the unique srb 'yl\ finally two terms for birds: spr 'gnn and ss. The argument turns on whether 'yl is to be vocalized (for convenience using the Masoretic Hebrew vocalization) 'ayil, a ram, or 'ayyal, a hart. Dormer and Rollig (£47) go for the former alternative, and Dussaud (1921) and Fevrier (195859) for the latter. Surely it is the French scholars who are correct. Consider the consequences of Donner and Rollig's decision. If 'yl is a ram, then what is ybll They say rightly that it must indicate another kind of sheep, but having nothing more appropriate to suggest, conjecturally translate 'Hammel', which means a castrated ram. This is improbable for the reason I mentioned above (§3.b.l). Further, srb 'yl clearly has to have something to do with 'yl, and they duly translate it 'young ram' ('Jungwidder'). But what is the difference between a young ram and a lamb? This tariff clearly does not recognize the offering of female animals, and this accords with the statement of Porphyry (De Abst. 2.11) that the Phoenicians did not sacrifice or eat females. Moreover, why should the text use four different terms for sheep when two each are enough for cattle and goats? Such an accumulation of improbabilities ought to lead us to adopt the alternative suggestion, which makes clear and logical sense, even in the absence of the evidence from Mt Ebal that demonstrates that the sacrifice of deer was practised among West Semitic peoples, 'yl then means a (fallow deer) hart, ybl a ram, and srb 'yl a young hart; there are two terms for each species, one for the adult and one for the young, and the values make reasonable sense: a hart is valued equally with a calf—they are about the same size—a ram with a buck, and a lamb, kid and fawn equally. The terms for birds offer further difficulties: to translate them, as is often done, as referring to domestic and wild birds respectively, is conjectural, but plausible. The repertory of species here is identical to that found at Ebal, give or take a bird or two, though there is no reason to suppose that sacrifice at Ebal was restricted to male animals. No species is mentioned that is unclean in the Old Testament. It is true that the text has reference to the cult of one god only. But we may generalize the information by reference to the external written evidence, which gives a remarkably similar picture, with some variations.

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3. External Written Evidence. Our latest evidence is also the most impressive. According to al-Nadim, quoting al-Kindi (Fihrist, ix.1.57; Dodge 1970: 748), the 'Sabians', the pagans of Harran, sacrificed the males of cattle, sheep and goats and other four-legged beasts which do not have teeth in both of the two jaws, with the exception of the camel. They [also sacrificed] birds which do not have talons, with the exception of the pigeon...

They restricted the eating of flesh to the same species; the camel, pig, dog and ass are specifically mentioned as avoided, but also the pigeon. 'With the exception of the pigeon', not only is this precisely the same set of dietary restrictions as are observed by the Jews, but they are defined by the same criteria as are used in the Talmud (above, Chapter 2). Inevitably this must arouse suspicion. Had these Mesopotamians, idolaters though they were, been influenced in some way by Judaism? They had indeed made a remarkably successful attempt to survive as pagans under Muslim rule by taking on the superficial features of a 'people of the book', adopting, it would appear, in AD 833,1 the name of a Gnostic sect of southern Mesopotamia mentioned in the Qur'an (cf. Chwolsohn 1856: II, 2ff.). Did they perhaps adopt along with the name some of the ritual prescriptions of the sect, which could have been derived from Judaism? This cannot be excluded. But considering the centrality of the dietary rule to their daily life as well as their religion, it seems unlikely that it could have been a superficial addition to their way of life. At most, the defining criteria used could have been borrowings, or they could have been derived by the Muslim observers, or else could be a feature of learned Mesopotamian classification adopted from that environment by both the Babylonian Talmud and the Haranians. The Sabian religion, confined in al-Nadim's time to Harran, was at one time more widespread; J.B. Segal (1953) reports the presence of many shrines dedicated to the Sabian astral deities in the vicinity of Edessa, and dating from about the second or third century AD, before the Christianization of that city. It seems likely, therefore, that we have to reckon with an Aramaean culture in Northern Mesopotamia in late antiquity that restricted animal food on much the same lines as the Old Testament, except that it added the pigeon to the list of forbidden 1. A new study of the religion of Harran, Green 1992, has appeared too late to take account of it.

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creatures. In this, as we shall see, it was not unique. Lucian's evidence tends to extend the range of our evidence for this system in both space (to the right bank of the Euphrates) and time (to the second century). His subject in De Dea Syria is the cult of Atargatis at Hierapolis. Here, he tells us (ch. 54), 'they consider pigs polluted (enageas) and neither sacrifice nor eat them. But others regard them not as polluted, but as holy.' This clearly does not mean that some avoided pigs and others ate them, but that all avoided them, but differed in how they explained it. To some, pigs could be like pigeons (cf. below, §3.c, and Chapter 5, §3). 4. Conclusions. Thus we find a core of practice very similar among all the peoples of Syria and Canaan: everywhere the principal sacrificial animals are the sheep, the goat and the ox; everywhere the dog and the pig are excluded. But there are fuzzy edges which enable the different traditions to express their individuality, including or excluding asses, deer or pigeons. Generally speaking, of course, the species sacrificed correspond with those that are eaten, but the people of Ugarit occasionally sacrificed asses although they probably did not eat them; at most sanctuaries wild animals were not sacrificed, although deer and gazelles were hunted and eaten on a modest scale; and at Jerusalem—if we may take the Levitical rules as representing the tradition of that sanctuary—although most birds could be eaten, only pigeons or doves were prescribed for sacrifice. This last point should not be taken as simply reflecting the general impermissibility of wild animals for sacrifice, for we have been able to establish that a number of other domestic birds, including chickens, were kept at least as far back as the time of the monarchy. One might expect that metropolitan sanctuaries like those of Jerusalem and Ugarit would be unlikely to allow wild animals, whether beast or bird, to be offered, while the offering of fallow deer at Mt Ebal reflects the fact that this altar (there is no temple) served a rural and partly nomadic population organized only on a tribal level. However, the evidence of the Marseilles tariff, if it does come from Carthage, appears to contradict or at least qualify this idea. As regards the pig, the priests of the Syria-Palestine area were in agreement with their counterparts in southern Mesopotamia and Egypt. In Babylonia there was no hesitation about eating pigs as there was further west (Saggs 1988: 166-67). Assertions to the contrary are

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sometimes made, but these seem to depend on references to restrictions in connection with particular cults. There are 24 words in Akkadian for pigs in different varieties and connections (Salonen 1974: 8), a sure sign of a culture that raised and made use of them in large numbers. But the pig was not a sacrificial animal, except for certain apotropaic rites directed at demons (Blome 1934: 121; cf. Frank 1908: 56-60, 73-91; Myhrman 1902). In Egypt the position is complex (see LA, V, s.v. Schwein, Seth, Speisege- und Verbote). Swine were certainly raised in Egypt from the earliest times to the latest, and at various periods formed part of the royal and temple possessions (LA, V, s.v. Schwein [W. Helck]). They were used in agriculture for treading in seed. But their cultic role was extremely limited, though it seems that they were offered in sacrifice in certain festivals in Lower Egypt (cf. Herodotus 2.47, Plutarch De hide et Ostride 8). For further discussion, see Chapters, §l.b. c. Dietary Restrictions In the reports from Harran and Hierapolis, as apparently at Ugarit and in the biblical rules, the rule for sacrifice is closely paralleled in the restrictions on diet: if pigs were not sacrificed, they were not eaten either, and the Sabians would eat only those animals that were also clean for sacrifice. A similar restriction of diet, though without specific reference to the cult, is reported by Porphyry for 'Egyptian priests': 'they abstained from all fish and such quadrupeds as have single hooves or several toes (poluskhide), or do not have horns; and all flesh-eating birds' (De Abst. 4.7). What priests precisely he is talking about is not clear; food avoidances in Egypt itself varied so much that the report is unlikely to refer to all Egyptian priests, and there is a distinct possibility that he is speaking of a group of Semitic origin. It will be noted that the rules for quadrupeds define the same taxon as Lev. 11.3 or the Sabian rule, but in a different way again. The item additional to the Levitical rule here is fish, and here again we frequently meet with the same avoidance elsewhere in the region. These are the only accounts that have survived of complete systems of food avoidance in the region, or near it. But reports of avoidance of many of the individual species or groups of animals whose avoidance is implied in these systems are common, and the pig is naturally the most frequently mentioned. Greek writers often refer to the Jewish prohibition of pork, and the Phoenicians are also mentioned as

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abstainers from pork, though without the mention of any cultic setting (Porphyry De Abst. 1.14;1 Herodian 1.6.22; both third century AD). De Vaux's assertion (1972: 266) that 'abstinence from the meat of the pig was a widespread custom known...among all the Semitic peoples, with the exception of the Babylonians' is a bold deduction from perilously slim evidence, though he is by no means alone in making it. What I have just quoted is almost all the evidence there is. De Vaux's related conclusion that the sacrifice of pigs was everywhere rare is, as we have seen, much better supported, and it does seem possible to assert that wherever cultic practice had a significant influence on diet, pig meat was avoided. There will usually be a high degree of connection between dietary and sacrificial practice, between altar and table. There are two reasons for this. In the first place, most sacrifices are eaten, and most people are likely to assume that their gods have the same dietary preferences as they have themselves. Secondly, and conversely, most people in the ancient world were poor, and did not eat meat regularly; when they did, it would normally be on a special occasion, which would tend to be a cultic one. The implication of Deut. 12.15-16, 20-25 is that the normal practice, even among the well-off, was not to slaughter domestic animals without cultic consecration. This would tend to imply that animals could not be eaten that were unacceptable to those gods to whom sacrifice was offered. It has generally been assumed that those animals will be sacrificed that are significant in the diet; but it is beginning to become clear from our investigations that the contrary influence asserted for Israel by Firmage is true for a much wider area, at least as far as the pig is concerned. And since there is no significant evidence of the eating of other 'unclean' animals, it would follow that wherever the cultic norms of the official sanctuaries were influential enough, the dietary repertoire was confined to the 'clean'. This does not necessarily mean that where pigs were eaten profane slaughter must have been practised. Ulrich Hiibner (1989: 228, 234 n. 44), it is true, argues that the archaeological evidence, which shows 1. involves an inconsistency, since D^IO a'Kf (probably the correct reading: cf. the (De Abst. 1.14); I am uncertain of the precise force of the aorist tense here, perhaps gnomic. This explanation, that the pig used not to exist in that part of the world, is of course not true, yet Porphyry goes on to suggest that the pig is not offered in sacrifice in Cyprus or Phoenicia or in Egypt for the same reason, ignoring the well-known comments about swine in Egypt in Herodotus (2.47).

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masses of animal remains in secular contexts, tells against the assumption that has reigned since Robertson Smith that profane slaughter was a latecomer to the scene. The Deuteronomic permission for secular slaughter was an assimilation of theory to the reality, which was that large parts of the population had long since been practising profane slaughter in everday life.

This may indeed be true to some extent, but the evidence Hiibner relies on does not prove his case, for neither temple nor altar is required for the invocation of a deity. The issue as regards Israel will be discussed further below (Chapter 5, §l.a; Chapter 6, §l.d). All that needs to be said here is that if deities were invoked when pigs were slaughtered they are likely to have been other than the official gods of the public cult. We shall consider some direct evidence for this possibility at §3.d. The other domestic animals, as we have seen, were not normally eaten anywhere. The donkey was bred for transport and labour generally, and when it was old and worn out, its flesh cannot have been appealing, even if the scruples expressed by Porphyry (see Chapter 5, §l.a) failed to restrain one. The dog was subject to more variation in function than the donkey. Dogs probably acted as scavengers everywhere and at all times, but what else did they do? They were useful to the hunter and the shepherd, less so to the farmer. The Old Testament refers once to sheepdogs (Job 30.1), and once to watchdogs (Isa. 56.10). Dogs as pets do not figure in the Hebrew books of the Old Testament; but in the book of Tobit (5.16), Tobias has a faithful dog who accompanies him to Media. There is evidence from some places in the region of the treatment of dogs as family members, when skeletons of dogs are found in articulation, suggesting deliberate burial (e.g. at Jericho from PPNA to MB, Glutton-Brock 1979: 137-38; at Ashdod in the Persian period, Dothan and Porath 1982: 42). It is perhaps significant that, so far as I am aware, no such finds have been made in Iron Age Israel. Certainly the attitudes expressed towards dogs in the Old Testament are almost uniformly negative (Chapter 5, §l.b). Juliet Clutton-Brock comments thus on the relative absence of canine remains from Bronze Age Jericho: It does not mean that the people did not keep dogs at this period, only that they did not eat them. It is very probable that the carcasses of dogs were disposed of in some separate place, perhaps outside the city walls, and they may already have been considered as 'unclean' animals (1979: 141).

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The Ophel is another site where no dog bones were found (Horwitz and Tchernov 1989), and the same conclusion should no doubt be drawn. Perhaps one should add the clarification that it does not follow, where remains of dogs are found, that there they were eaten. As I have already said, there is no evidence for this in the period with which we are concerned. One should also add that there is no way of attaching precise meaning to the term 'unclean' in relation to a culture that is unable to speak to us with its own voice. All we can say for certain is that people in general did not eat dogs, but that we may draw a distinction between the people of Neolithic Jericho and Persian period Ashdod, who buried their dogs within the walls, and those of Bronze Age Jericho and Iron Age Jerusalem, who may have thrown their dogs outside the walls without ceremony, but may on the other hand have sometimes buried them like their own dead outside the walls. The point will be discussed further in the next chapter (§l.b).! Little can be added to this from written sources. Hellenistic writers generally say nothing about Semites eating dogs,2 but there is a curious report in Justinus's second century AD epitome of Pompeius Trogus's history (composed around the turn of the eras), that in the early fifth century Darius sent a message to the Carthaginians calling on them to stop practising human sacrifice and eating dog-meat (canina vesci), and to start cremating their dead; these demands the Carthaginians obeyed eagerly ('cupide paruere') (Justinus 19.1.10). There can hardly be much historical value in this; but just as it is true that the Carthaginians practised human sacrifice and buried their dead, it may also be true that they ate dog meat. This might have been part of a special rite (Movers 1841: I, 404; Doller 1917: 191), but it seems more likely to be connected with the fact that dog-eating is widespread

1. The recent discovery at Ashkelon of a dog cemetery containing more than 700 skeletons casts new light on the issue. The excavator, L.E. Stager, suggests that they may have been sacred animals in the cult of the Phoenician god of healing, Resheph Mukol (Stager 1991). This would mean their function was similar to that of the pigeons and fish I discuss next. 2. Which may be less significant than it seems: dog-eating, despite Porphyry's confident assertion to the contrary (De Abst. 1.14), was at one time not unknown among the Greeks (Simoons 1961: 101-102; Bouffartigue and Patillon 1977: 93, who quote Hippocrates: Regimen 2.46 [an incorrect reference]; Sextus Empiricus: Hypotyposes 3.225; Pliny: Hist. Nat. 29.14).

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among the Berbers to this day (Simoons 1961: 102; de Planhol 1957: 62-63); thus it should probably be put to the account of the native element in the population rather than the Phoenician. I have already referred to the taboos on fish and pigeons found at Harran and Hierapolis and among Porphyry's Egyptian priests. They are in fact much more widespread than this, being frequently mentioned by Greek writers in connection with the cults of the major Syrian-Canaanite goddesses in the later period. The evidence is as follows. Lucian tells us that fish were sacred to Atargatis (De Dea Syria 45), and several authorities say that most Syrians would not eat them; indeed as early as 400 BC Xenophon discovers that the Syrians regard fish as gods (Anabasis 1.4.9; cf. Porphyry: De Abst. 4.15; Artemidorus: Oneirocr. 1.8 [second century AD]; Diodorus Siculus 2.4.3 [first century BC]; Hyginus: Fabulae 197 [c. AD 10]). Atargartis, as Oden has shown (1977: 55ff.), was an amalgam of the three principal Canaanite female deities, Asherah, Astarte and Anat, and of these Asherah was associated with the sea (88ff.; 'Atrt-ym in the Ugaritic texts); so it seems probable that the fish taboo was associated with her before she was merged with the other two (99-100). However, it is not attested in the Ugaritic texts, an important source for the early cult of Asherah; indeed there is a fishing scene in the Baal myth (CTA 4.2.29ff.; Gibson 1978: 57). Somehow Asherah has become transformed from a patroness of fishing into a goddess in whose honour one abstains from fish. Doves, on the other hand, were sacred to Astarte (Philo apud Eusebius: Praep. Ev. 8.14.64) before Atargatis (Lucian De Dea Syria 54; cf. Oden 1977:102), and according to several writers were avoided by Syrians and Palestinians generally (Sextus Empiricus: Hypotyposes 3.223 [second century AD]; Hyginus: Fabulae 197 [c. AD 10]). Once again there is no sign of this taboo in the Ugaritic texts, where pigeons, as we have seen, are frequently prescribed for sacrifice, as in Leviticus: e.g. KTU 1.119.10 (Xella 1981: 25). Owing to the loss of bird and fish remains it is difficult to confirm or refine this information by means of material evidence. But we can consider its significance on its own. It would seem that these prohibitions were fairly widespread, and are likely to have emerged already by the fifth century BC; but they had not existed, at least at Ugarit, at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. Thus their development seems likely to have been virtually contemporary with the formation of the

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Levitical dietary code. I shall attempt to evaluate the significance of this at a later stage (see Chapter 5, §3 and Chapter 6, §2.a.3). d. Exceptional Cases: The Sacrifice of Pigs 1. Outside the Bible. The rules I have established in §b above govern, so far as we can see, the normal cults of public sanctuaries throughout the West Semitic cultural area. What then of the exceptions to the general rule that pigs are not sacrificed, detailed by de Vaux in the article to which I have already referred (1972; cf. von Rohr Sauer 1968 and Stendebach 1974)? His conclusion is that 'the custom was... restricted to certain pults or to lesser forms of religion such as magic and exorcisms. The pig was a demoniacal animal' (p. 265); it was therefore appropriately offered to demons or deities of the underworld. His article arose out of his own discovery at Tell el-Farah (North) of a subterranean chamber of MB date, containing a bench along one wall and a large half-buried jar in one corner; little else apart from some pig bones, and in the jar the bones of a pig embryo (detailed description and drawings in de Vaux 1957: 559ff.). He argued that this chamber could only be interpreted as a sanctuary of some kind, and the bones as the remains of offerings. He also seized on certain slight indications on the contemporary surface (p. 564) as a sign that the chamber had originally been connected with a sanctuary above ground, and he compared the so-called cella discovered underneath the late MB temple at Alalakhby Woolley (Woolley 1955: 66ff.). He goes on in both articles to point out that the only other discovery of pig bones in a cultic situation in Palestine, at Gezer, was also in a subterranean situation (Macalister 1912: 378-79); he points to certain iconographic evidence from excavations in Palestine; then he draws in a chain of examples from literary sources of the offering of pigs in countries round a wide arc of the Eastern Mediterranean: Babylonia, Greece, Egypt; only Palestine-Syria itself offering no evidence worth speaking of, other than Isa. 65.4-5; 66.3, 17, which are far more difficult to interpret than one might suppose from reading de Vaux. Methodologically this approach seems very dubious. Only what might reasonably be connected with Canaanite or Syrian peoples should be considered relevant to establish an otherwise dubious thesis. This point also vitiates Milgrom's briefer survey (1991: 650ff.), with its heavy reliance on Hittite evidence. That leaves us with the bones from Gezer and Tell el-Farah, some

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obscure information from Cyprus and about the Sabians, and the Isaiah passages. There are problems of interpretation with all of these pieces of evidence. The archaeological evidence is solid enough if it has been interpreted correctly; but in both cases we rely on the inevitably subjective opinion of the excavator, for neither locus obviously proclaims itself as cultic: neither contains an altar, an impossibility underground in any case; so the interpretation of the bones as the remains of sacrifices creates an obvious difficulty. Even if they are correctly interpreted as cultic, there is no direct evidence about the object of the cult, nor is de Vaux's understanding of the meaning of the underground location the only possible one. However, as I have no alternative to offer, it seems reasonable to accept this interpretation provisionally, and to regard these sites as possible evidence of a subterranean cult offering slaughtered pigs to the gods of the dead, or to the dead themselves. Of course, this would be accepted more easily if it could be supported by other evidence. There was always heavy Phoenician influence in Cyprus; we have already seen Porphyry's testimony that the Cypriots did not sacrifice pigs. But the Byzantine writer Joannes Lydus (John of Lydia) asserts that on one day every year, April 2, wild boars were sacrificed to Aphrodite (De Mensibus 4.65). John preserved tradition about the Roman festival calendar, along with information like this from elsewhere. Obviously it is very difficult to say how far back his information goes; his dating of a Cypriot festival by the Roman calendar scarcely inspires confidence. Another rather interesting passage is quoted by Athenaeus (Deipnosophistae 3.95f-96a) from the fourthcentury BC comic dramatist Antiphanes, to the effect that in Cyprus pigs were sacred to Aphrodite, and (presumably only at certain times) the people prevented them from eating dung and made the cattle eat it instead. If this piece of third-hand evidence is reliable, we might interpret it on the lines that the pig, normally an unclean animal, became regarded as clean for the purposes of the cult, and that this involves a clean animal in taking up the role of the bearer of pollution, symbolized by the exchange of diets. A rite possibly involving a similar symbolism appears to have been celebrated once a year by the Sabians at Harran: from the 4th to the 10th of the month Kanun al-Awwal (Chislev) a dome stood in the sanctuary of Baltha, that is the planet Venus, and 'in front of this dome they slaughter sacrificial beasts chosen from as many kinds of

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animals as possible, four-footed beasts and birds' (al-Nadim, Fihrist 9.5.9 [p. 762]). An alternative translation (Chwolsohn 1856) refers to the quantity rather than the range of kinds. Even on Dodge's translation it cannot be certain that the writer is saying that the normal restrictions on animals acceptable for sacrifice are lifted. The rite quoted as Sabian by de Vaux (1972: 260-61; cf. Smith 1894: 290), in which on one day a year a pig was sacrificed and eaten, belongs to the group called Rufusiyun (Fihrist 9.7 [p. 768]), and Chwolsohn (ad loc.} rightly points out that this is unlikely to be a group at Harran; 'Sabian' came to be used by Arab writers as a general term for pagan. But though we cannot locate them, they are no doubt West Semitic, for the implication is that otherwise they did not eat or sacrifice pigs. The evidence so far cited does not seem to be a very sound framework within which to interpret the Isaiah passages that themselves offer so many difficulties. We have excluded much of de Vaux's evidence on geographical grounds, and the iconographic examples he quotes from Palestine (cf. also von Rohr Sauer 1968; Brentjes 1962; Hiibner 1989) do nothing to show that pigs were sacrificed. It is not legitimate to conclude from the representation of an animal in a supposedly cultic context that it must be a sacred animal or likely to have been sacrificed. But there is a broader framework that may help to bolster these weak indications by making it in general more likely that West Semites did on occasion sacrifice animals normally unacceptable (cf. W.R. Smith 1894: 290-94). We have already seen that at Ugarit the royal rituals required the offering of an ass, not as part of the ordinary cult, but once a year, and also for an extraordinary ritual, which lacks a rubric owing to the fragmentary state of the tablet, but which cannot have been held frequently. Also at Ugarit a goose, not ordinarily called for, was sacrificed, again once a year, to the infernal powers. But it is especially significant that human sacrifice was practised among these peoples, the best evidence being (archaeological) from Carthage and its colonies, and (literary) from the Old Testament. George Heider (1985; cf. now also Day 1989) gives detailed examination to all the evidence, and concludes that 'Molech' was an underworld deity, and that the traditional interpretation of the Old Testament passages speaking of the 'passing of children through the fire to Molech' as of human sacrifice is correct; it would be better to translate 'offer by fire'. The latter of these conclusions seems safe enough; the former may be rather

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shakier: it is rejected most recently by M.S. Smith (1990: 136). At Carthage and at other places in the West the calcined bones of children have been found buried in jars in special cemeteries, called 'tophets' by the excavators after the Hebrew term. In apparent association with these interments are stelae, in later centuries usually inscribed and recording vows to Baal Hammon and to Tanit, the principal city gods, usually identified with El and Asherah (Warmington 1960: 129), and not regarded as chthonic deities. It is these inscriptions that use the word mlk, which, as Eissfeldt has shown (1935) and Heider admits, is an expression for a type of sacrifice, and not the name of a god. There can be no reasonable doubt that the children had been sacrificed by fire, and this can be linked with the classical reports of child sacrifice at Carthage (e.g. Diodorus 20.14.4-7: to 'Kronos') (Stager 1982, Heider 1985: 196ff.). Now this cult is neither to extraordinary deities nor is it an annual event; though the classical sources speak of mass sacrifices at times of crisis, the archaeological evidence is quite clearly of a cult kept going entirely by private vows, presumably by the parents of the children. It is thus not a public cult in the sense of one funded by the state or celebrated by its officers; thus we can speak of a private practice of human sacrifice at Carthage. Recently, however, evidence has turned up that may link a cult of this kind with the cult of the dead, and also, perhaps, with the sacrifice of pigs. At Pozo Moro in southeast Spain, within the area of Punic influence, a tower has been discovered which was plainly used as a crematorium; and on the sides of the tower there were reliefs, one of which depicts a two-headed monster sitting on a throne in front of a table receiving a child in a bowl in his right hand, while a person over the table from him prepares to slaughter a second child. What is particularly significant for our purpose is that the monster's left hand is laid on a pig lying on its back on the table (Heider 1985: 189ff.; Almagro-Gordea 1980). Charles Kennedy (unpublished, quoted by Heider, 1985: 190) interprets the monster as Death, especially as the other reliefs connect the tower with the cult of the dead. The relief might have been considered as the depiction merely of some myth if it were not on the side of a building plainly used for the burning of human bodies, and if the style of the reliefs did not lead us plainly to a culture where the sacrifice of children was customary.1 The pig seems 1. Shelby Brown (1991: 70-72) is more cautious, commenting that the meaning of this one out of many mythological scenes 'cannot yet be known'.

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to suggest that pigs as well as children were offered, though the animal bones found in the tophets alongside the human ones (normally in separate jars and evidently as substitutes for children) appear usually to be of lambs or goats with the occasional bird (Stager 1982: 7; cf. Fedele 1979: 84 [Tharros in Sardinia]). It will be recalled, however, that the bones of a pig embryo found at Tell el-Farah were in a half-buried jar, a situation that offers something of a parallel. It is clear that we can say that in cults on extraordinary occasions, to extraordinary deities, or outside the public cult, extraordinary victims may be offered. It is more difficult to show, if we leave out of consideration the biblical evidence and confine ourselves to the Canaanite-Aramaic world, that the pig was distinctively the representative of the infernal world, and used specifically in sacrifices to its powers. It remains to be seen whether that is a natural interpretation that can be laid upon the biblical texts. 2. The Isaiah Texts. Discussion of the Isaianic texts that appear to refer to the sacrifice or cultic consumption of pigs and other unclean animals (Isa. 65.3-5; 66.3; 66.17) is bedevilled by disagreement about the date and provenance of these passages and of Trito-Isaiah' generally, and recently even about their meaning. Although Hiibner (1989: 229) has laid stress on the supposed late date of these passages1 as indicating their dependence on the law in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the evidence we have accumulated should make clear the irrelevance of the premise to the conclusion. While the Pentateuchal laws may have reached their final form relatively late in the postexilic period, pork was unclean, in the sense of being unacceptable for cultic use, long before then and probably even before the priestly law was formulated at all. Hence although the author, and the practitioners of the practices condemned, if they are a reality, may be thinking of the priestly law, that does not disqualify the passages as supporting evidence for attitudes and practices of earlier times, especially if it is possible to trace in them the outlines of a coherent practice that is more than simply defiance thumbed at the priestly law or a satirical inversion of it. More problematic for us is the case mounted by Paul Hanson (1979: 1. Vermeylen 1978: 500-501: fourth century; Steck 1985: 76-77: third century; cf. earlier Volz 1932: 200, 280-81; against, most recently, e.g. Hanson 1979: 32208; Achtemeier 1982:16: late fifth century.

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146-47,179-80, 197ff.) that all the apparent attacks on pagan practices in Trito-Isaiah are intended ironically as satirical attacks on the obsessively orthodox priestly establishment, and are not meant to be taken any more literally than the charge in 59.5-6 that they hatch adders' eggs and spin spider's webs, or the indictment in 57.5-8 that they sacrifice their children or build a harlot's bed on a hilltop (p. 147).

Hanson's reading is a persuasive one, but, as Theodore Lewis notes (1989: 160), it does not necessarily put the passages out of court as evidence for the real existence of the practices listed (such as the sacrifice of children!). The issue is this. If the passages are nothing more than rhetorical accumulations of imagined activities designed to make the most repulsive impression possible, then of course they are no evidence for the reality of the activities. But if they are references, however satirically intended, to cults that really existed in the cultural environment, then of course they are such evidence. If it is possible to show that the latter is the case, then we need not embark on the difficult task of deciding whether Hanson's reading is in general correct— difficult because the presence of irony, almost by definition, is undetectable by literary means; a knowledge of the situation is required, and this is just what we do not have a priori. How are we to choose between the alternatives? My suggestion is that we should examine 65.3-5 and 66.17 in particular to see whether they may be seen as coherent allusions to one particular cult. It is unlikely that we could include 66.3 here, since it seems to be a rather systematic recitation of unacceptable offerings. But 65.3 and 66.17 both speak of cultic activities in 'the gardens', hagganndr, the proposed emendation to haggaggot, 'the roofs' is made less probable by the double attestation. Where and what were these gardens? They might be interpreted with reference to 1.29 (Whybray 1975: 269; Achtemeier 1982: 124 [but hardly as 'high places']), but another interpretation lies to hand in the phrase in 65.4 'sitting in (or among) the graves'. Gardens were sometimes used for burials (2 Kgs 21.18; Jn 19.41), so that it seems at least possible that conversely sometimes cemeteries may be referred to as 'gardens'. The following phrase ubannesurim ydlinu has occasioned difficulty by its vagueness: the usual translation is 'they spend the night in secret places', and it has been held to refer to the practice of incubation at sanctuaries to obtain a dream or vision (as Solomon does in 1 Kgs 3)—note the LXX

4. The Context Surveyed

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addition of dia enupnia 'through dreams'; but 'secret' is not a very accurate translation of a word that should mean 'guarded', and it is not at all clear what the latter would mean. But LXX has 'in the caves', and Dahood (1960: 408-409) has proposed to read ben sunm 'within the rocks (or mountains)', that is, in caves, on this basis.1 Caves, natural and artificial, were of course also frequently used for burials. There seems then at least some possibility that these two passages are a consistent description of a cult of the dead, and that the consumption of pig's flesh, and in 66.17 of the flesh of other unclean animals, is connected with this. I am confirmed in this view by Lewis's convincing presentation of the case that a cult of the dead existed in ancient Israel (Lewis 1989: 99ff.; cf. also Heider 1985: 389-90; M.S. Smith 1990: 126ff.). Lewis gives consideration to Isa. 65.4 (158-60), but first and at especial length to Isa. 56.9-57.13 (143-58). He sees references to the cult of the dead and to necromancy throughout this passage, for example in 57.6, where he follows Irwin (1967) in connecting the puzzling MT hlqy nhl with the Ugaritic hlq 'perish' (cf. Dahood 1965: 35, 73, 99, 207), so that the sentence reads 'among the departed of the wady2 is your portion'. The significance of this from our point of view is that the previous verse refers to the sacrifice of children, and uses the phrase 'under the clefts of the crags',3 which is a close parallel to Dahood's emendation in 65.4. In other words, the acceptance of such an interpretation of the passage increases the coherence of the evidence. Yet when Lewis comes to 65.4 he says merely (1989: 159) that 'the narrator...mixes the metaphor of defilement through death with that of defilement through the violation of dietary practices', and that, while a diet might have been expected that fitted better with the death imagery (i.e. excrement and urine as in 2 Kgs 18.27 [Xella 1980]), 'it seems that our author preferred swine flesh to describe defiling food (cf. Isaiah 66.3, 17)' (n. 108). He has evidently not considered the possibility canvassed here, that the eating of swine flesh 1. This reading is not really dependent on a dubious restoration by Avigad (1955: 163-66) of an inscription from the Kidron valley (cf. Ussishkin 1969), but will stand on its own merits. Lewis (1989: 160) rejects it in the light of Isa. 45.1819, where he finds a parallel in inon. I do not find this convincing. 2. Kennedy (1989) goes further by translating *7m as 'grave' (cf. Job 21.33, 28.4).

3. inon*7m

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was an actual part of the ritual referred to. The fact that it is twice referred to in this connection increases this possibility, and so does the other evidence reviewed above, fragmentary as it is. The evidence for the use of other unclean animals than the pig in the cult of the dead is certainly more fragmentary still. The mouse is mentioned in Isa. 66.17, along with a vague reference to 'the seqes' for which the Syriac text reads 'the Seres'. Kennedy (1989: 50) refers to the discovery of two camels in partial articulation in a tomb of the late fourth to early third century at Tell Mikhmoret (North), and suggests that this may be the earliest evidence for the beduin dahiyyeh sacrifice on the anniversary of death.1 As far as I have been able to discover, we have no evidence of any similar custom involving the dog (but compare Isa. 66.3 for what it is worth). My tentative conclusion is that although the evidence is scattered and difficult to interpret there is some indication that in SyriaPalestine, as well as in neighbouring countries, the pig, and possibly other animals, while not normally used in the public cults, was employed as a victim, and eaten, in obscure and perhaps often secret cults offered to the dead or the deities of the underworld, or both— sometimes perhaps also to goddesses of fertility. At Ugarit in the public cult this seems to have been true of the goose, whereas there the ass was employed in certain unusual sacrifices, but not otherwise. It does seem to be possible, however, that the pig in particular, if not also other 'unclean' animals, was the focus of degrading associations that made it unacceptable for the normal public cult of city and tribal gods, and for eating by self-respecting bourgeois (see immediately below), but appropriate for the worship of powers who had themselves to bear the odium of being the enemies of the human race. 4. The Pig: Some Interpretations a. Politics and the Pig The virtual absence of the pig from remains associated with public cult places is quite plain in the material set out in Table B. But the same virtually total absence of pig remains is shared by some large or important urban centres: monarchic Jerusalem (the Ophel), Iron II Lachish, which was a regional centre of government under the 1. But the report to which he refers (Paley and Porath 1983) makes no mention of camels and dates the tombs a century earlier.

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monarchy (in both these places no identifiable pig remains appeared whatsoever) and Ashdod, where the very small quantity of pig bones is attributed to wild pig by Haas. Ashdod was by far the largest of the Philistine cities, and one of the largest cities in Palestine (A. Mazar 1990: 308). We also surmised (above, §3.b.2) that pork was not eaten at Ugarit, and it may well be that the abstinence from pork by the Phoenicians is to be categorized in the same way, since the ethnic term 'Phoenicians' refers usually to the people of a small number of urban commercial centres on the Levantine coast. The extremely high proportion of beef in the diet at Lachish is notable. The best explanation is probably that the area excavated ('the Sanctuary and the Residency') contained the homes of the dominant elite in the city, and they would naturally have had the most expensive and prestigious diet. In spite of this they had no pork, a clear sign that pork was the very opposite of prestigious. In contrast, the people who lived on the Ophel in Jerusalem in the later monarchy had as little beef as the average steppe-dweller, and a good deal of fowl in their diet. Is this the sign of a lower-class residential area? Yet these people also ate no pork. These two sites are among the very few that could be described as urban in the modern sense of the word; that is, that their inhabitants depended for their living not on primary production but on industry or services. Their diet was governed not by the constraints of the productive system in which they were involved but by choice and their purse. The Lachish elite, whose purse was long, chose not to eat pork; the Jerusalem artisans must either have refused to eat it or found it unavailable. In either case one may deduce that there was no demand for it, and very likely the habits of the poor were, as so often happens, determined by the habits of the rich with their greater power to determine the operation of the laws of supply and demand. These places are Jewish, but the phenomenon is equally striking at Ugarit, in Phoenicia at a later time, and at Ashdod. In all these cases we are dealing with metropolitan centres where cultural factors may have had a greater power to determine practice; and apparently, despite the distance in time and space, and despite ethnic differences, similar attitudes existed. It may well be that the meat that was available at these places came generally from the city temple. On the other hand, at more rural sites suitable for the keeping of pigs, we generally find at least some, though quantities in the Iron Age are, as we have noted, often very small. Of course we should add that there

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are in the Bronze Age several urban sites and still in the Iron Age a few where there are reasonable quantities of pig remains. In an unpublished study of Middle Bronze Age sites referred to by Horwitz (1989b: 50), Hesse et al (1986)1 have attempted to argue that the smaller and more rural a site is, and hence the more independence it is likely to have of the economic power of the large urban centres, the higher the frequency of pig remains it will have. This is a prediction derived from Diener and Robkin's theory that the prohibition of pork was a means of political and economic control. This theory is developed in reference to the Islamic prohibition of pork, but if there is anything in it it will apply also to the earlier period. Essentially it is a political explanation: the prohibition is explained as part of the processes of appropriation by which local communities are linked to the metropolis (Diener and Robkin 1978: 501). In the right conditions the keeping of pigs is a very effective means of exploiting local resources, which might otherwise have been available for the centre. One of the goals of early Islamic political policy was the destruction of local autonomy and the appropriation of local surpluses (Diener and Robkin 1978: 503) to maintain the loyalty of the regime's urban and nomadic supporters. 'In such a context, farmers who fed their grain to the pigs rather than delivering up badly needed surpluses to the fledgling state, were indeed engaging in defiling behaviour'. The eating of pork was therefore forbidden so that agricultural surpluses could be appropriated by the state. Diener and Robkin note that in remote rural areas in the Islamic world even today (for example in the Atlas mountains— Coon 1951) pigs may be kept secretly, while of course the rule is kept strictly in urban areas. Hesse et al. generalize this into the hypothesis that frequencies of pig remains will be related to the ranking of the community on an urban-rural scale, assuming that the centre's control over rural communities that were economically largely independent would have been loose. As we have seen there is some evidence to support this hypothesis. Horwitz (1989b: 50) notes that the degree of control would depend on the strength of market relationships. It has to be said, and was, by Raphael Patai in the same issue of Current Anthropology in which Diener and Robkin's article appeared, that their theory ignores the most basic fact about the process of appropriation: that tax and tithe are the first call on peasant incomes; 1.

I have unfortunately not seen this paper.

4. The Context Surveyed

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the tax-collector is not interested in the way the peasants use the crops that he leaves them with, so long as he gets his cut, which is based on total crop yields, or some more arbitrary measure. The village did not have the choice of diminishing the amount it paid to those in authority; had the villager wanted to feed grain to his animals, he would have to take it from the small heap left to him and not from the big one which went to the city (Patai 1978: 520).

Christians were allowed to continue to raise pigs, and paid higher taxes!—conclusive disproof of the theory in itself. A prohibition of pork would not therefore serve the purpose Diener and Robkin have in mind; indeed, the effect of such a process of appropriation in itself on the use of pork would be the precise opposite of that postulated by Hesse et al.\ the village would be deprived of the surplus from which it might raise pigs, and the city would be enabled to use it for that purpose among others. The observed facts must be explained differently; but of course in the nature of the case the explanation must have a political aspect. Horwitz remarks that 'regardless of the...origin of this food taboo...the enforcement of this prohibition could have offered a means of political and economic control over the population' (1989b: 50). More accurately, its enforcement would demonstrate such control. Hence, supposing it was related to the beliefs or interests of political and religious elites in some way—as is certainly suggested by the absence of pigs from the remains of sacrifices at temples presumably controlled by such elites—if they attempted to enforce it, their attempt would have most success in the city and least in the remote villages; and this is suggested by our figures, and may be what Hesse et al. demonstrate. Horwitz herself speculatively relates the decline in pig frequency in the Refa'im valley from EB IV to MB II to the rise of a market enabling urban consumers to influence rural production. This observation does not therefore in itself explain the attitudes towards the pig that we find in the evidence, but it places them in an important social context. And its place in this context may be of significance for other aspects of the complex of attitudes that we find both in the Old Testament and outside it. The priestly system of dietary prohibitions is not unique; it is one example of a set of very similar systems of restrictions that we can associate with city-based elites throughout the area, especially in the first millennia BC and AD, and perhaps also earlier. And we might well speculate that some

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aspects of those restrictions were reinforced by urban contempt for the village. b. Pastoralists and the Pig These considerations do not explain why the beginning of the Iron Age marks a serious decline in the use of the pig, and why attitudes condemning it as unclean are most conspicuous in the Iron Age and subsequently. So far from being a time of greater urbanization and political control, the early Iron Age is a time of the decline or destruction of many urban centres, of the dispersal of settlements and of the extension of tribal rather than urban control over many parts of the country. Only with the foundation of the Israelite monarchy in Iron II does the urban control of the country begin slowly to advance from its state in the Late Bronze Age. Here we take up again the suggestion, arising from a combination of Simoons and Finkelstein, that the decline of the pig at this point may have been caused by the resettlement and increase in political power of formerly nomadic groups. We touch here on the most contentious issue in the study of Israelite history today. Besides Finkelstein 1988, which I am here referring to, we may compare among others Gottwald 1979, Lemche 1985, Callaway 1985, Coote and Whitelam 1987, London 1989.1 Most of these views give some prominence to the rapid spread of settlements in the hill country in the early Iron Age, though Finkelstein's is by far the most thorough study of them. And if we had the relevant studies, there would be no surprise for any of these views if the highland settlements mostly lacked pigs, as Izbet Sartah does, for as we have already seen water problems make the area generally unsuitable for the keeping of pigs. What needs explaining is the sharp fall in pig production nearly everywhere in the country from this time on. Whereas some other recent views of the origin of Israel have peasant populations moving from the lowlands to the highlands and becoming 'retribalized', Finkelstein believes (1988: 338) that 'most of the people who settled in the hill country in the Iron I period came from a background of pastoralism, and not directly [Finkelstein's italics] from the urban Canaanite polity of the Late Bronze period'. And by pastoralism Finkelstein means in this connection pastoral nomadism: the 1. There is a useful collection of articles surveying the present state of the question in SJOT 1991, 2.1-116.

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way of life of people spending at least part of their lives on the move with their flocks. In his view such people formed a very large part of the population throughout the Late Bronze Age, following a severe contraction of the urban system at the end of the Middle Bronze (p. 340). He shows that the process of settlement was slow, beginning with the eastern slope of the central hill-country, which was the easiest part for mixed cereal growing and pastoralism, and proceeding westward and into Galilee and Judah over the next two hundred years. The creation of a monarchy based on the hill-country settlements would, in Finkelstein's view, have led to the political power of people who had a not very distant nomadic past, and the political conditions must have led to their infiltration into the lowlands. These people would have lost any skill in or desire for pig-breeding that their ancestors may have had, and it is not improbable that they would also have had attitudes of contempt for the pig (cf. Simoons 1961: 41; above, Chapter 3, §2.b), though this is not absolutely necessary to explain the results. If so, their attitudes, as the Israelite monarchy became consolidated and began to rely on older-established urban elites, would have smoothly fitted in with the latter's cultic and civic rejection of the pig. It seems likely also that the settlement of nomadic people was not a once-for-all event in Israel, but that there was a continuous flow of people reinforcing such attitudes at the centre. Jehu's alliance with Jonadab ben Rechab (2Kgs 10.15-16; cf. Jer. 35.6-10) is only the most remarkable example of a trend that is likely to have existed throughout the nation's history in the land.1 It also suggests that it was among the pastoral nomads that the strongest support for the exclusive cult of Yahweh often lay, and the coincident strength of these attitudes must be a key to the history that we shall have to try to tell. It is also likely to be important that geography made Judah far more dominated by nomadic, or lately nomadic elements than Israel proper (Thompson 1992). It is of course in Judah that the dietary law took its present form. It is not possible here to discuss the evidence for Finkelstein's view and its rivals in general. All that I can do is to suggest the bearing that the evidence of animal use may have on the discussion. There are two main elements to Finkelstein's theory: the predominance of pastoral 1. Frick (1971), however (followed by Gottwald 1979: 294, etc.), argues that the Rechabites are likely to have been travelling metal-workers like the Kenites rather than pastoralists.

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nomads in the Late Bronze Age, and the source of the agrarian settlers of the Iron I period in indigenous pastoralists rather than either outsiders or peasants escaping from or rebelling against the Canaanite city-state system. The first element is easier to discuss. As I have mentioned (§2.b.l), Finkelstein (1988: 343-44; cf. 1985: 164) points to isolated sanctuaries and cemeteries, common in the LBA, and also in EB IV/MB I, but not according to him at periods 'characterized by urban activity' (1988: 344), as evidence of the existence of a large population of (nomadic) pastoralists in those periods; and this evidence derives some of its conviction from faunal remains. The virtual lack of pig remains at Shiloh does not prove it, as must now be clear, but the very low proportion of cattle remains is strong evidence for it. It is not of course possible to demonstrate directly the background of a community from its faunal remains, since they bear directly only on their use of animals once they had reached the site. But that may nevertheless be influenced by their background, which would be one factor, alongside the environmental constraints, in the formation of the characteristic elements in their culture. No one result by itself may be said to conflict with any of the rival views to Finkelstein's, but the balance of the Iron Age results in general may surely be regarded as surprising if a view like Gottwald's were correct. He explicitly rejects the view that pastoral nomadism was a dominant element in early Israel; it was simply a 'subsidiary sub-specialization within the dominant economic mode of production, namely, intensive agriculture' (1979: 460), and was involved in the same way in opposition to domination by the city. But if we are correct in seeing contempt for the pig as being characteristic of the city over against the village, we should certainly not on that hypothesis expect pig use to decline after the victory of the peasants in their supposed revolt against the cities. Coote and Whitelam's view might, however, be reconciled somewhat better with the results, since they allow for the participation of pastoral nomads as such in the creation of new settlements (1987: 12728), and do not think in terms of a direct revolt against the cities. I am far from accepting the naive view of pastoralism, amply disproved in recent studies, as one undifferentiated form of life that can be set over against settled agriculture as simply opposed. The close interaction between them—the mutual dependence of pastoralists and farmers, and the spectrum of possibilities in pastoralism from its practice as an important adjunct to farming (very important in the hill-

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country; see Hopkins 1985: 246ff.) through seasonal transhumance by specialists from a settled community to full nomadism—is now well recognized (cf. Gottwald 1979: 435ff.; Lemche 1985: 84ff.). Their close interdependence within one community may be demonstrated by some of the results in our table, especially in some Middle Bronze Age communities such as Tell Jemmeh or the Refa'im valley, which combine high values for sheep and goats with moderately high ones for pigs. But it is just this kind of situation that could have led to the selection of the pig as a focus of contempt by pastoralists involved with settled communities yet anxious not to be identified with them. I discuss some parallel examples in the next chapter of the selection of animals as identifying marks within dichotomized communities. The decline of settlement in the LBA, followed by a revival led by many of the people who had withdrawn into nomadism, repeated a process that, it is generally recognized, had occurred, perhaps in a more severe form, eight hundred years earlier in EB IV/MB I. It is possible that that episode also had resulted in the coming to power of people inheriting the pastoralist attitude towards the pig, and this may explain why the city elites already held attitudes that chimed in with the views of more recently settled people. The example of Egypt (Chapter 5, §l.b) may be an analogy or a connected development. Naturally the nomads in process of settlement in the early Iron Age will not have been the only element in the population, and this may account for the fact that the Iron Age evidence is not uniform; most places had a few pigs, and some have modest numbers. The most important incoming element in the population was the Philistines. But the results from their settlements are divergent and impossible to interpret consistently. At Ashdod and Tell Qasile (a new settlement) there are virtually no pig remains. But at Tel Miqne (Ekron) their incidence actually rises with the beginning of the Iron Age, along with those of cattle. As Hesse points out (1986: 23), this points to 'an intensification and centralization of the animal production effort'. What social or political developments lie behind this process we are unable to say; but clearly it is an entirely different sort of development from the establishment of generally small new agricultural settlements, which was going on in the hill country at the same time, though one effect that it has in common with that is the intensification of agricultural production.

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c. Conclusions The evidence taken as a whole rules out Hiibner's conclusion (1989: 229) that the Jewish conception of the pig as unclean originated relatively late, in the outlook of exilic and postexilic times. On the contrary, it seems in various forms to have been universal in the whole broader ancient Near Eastern cultural area. It does seem to have become more strongly expressed as time went on, but certainly not only among Jews. There may be a concurrence of ecological and cultural factors in it. The environmental conditions meant that wherever the pig was found it was a consumer of human wastes. Evidence we shall be looking at in the next chapter suggests that this would mean it would be likely to be abominated by those who could afford to express delicacy, and that it would always be excluded from the table of the gods, which represented the dignity of society and state. We can, on the other hand, distinguish between Egypt and Babylonia, where the pig was widely used as food although excluded from the altar, and Syria and Palestine, where it was a less common article of diet, declining still further as time went on and becoming formally abominated as food among many peoples, especially in religious connections. There are obvious underlying environmental factors here; there was no problem about water in the flood plains of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates, whereas in the intervening area only certain restricted zones were suitable. But this, though it is probably a necessary condition, does not sufficiently explain why pig meat should have fallen under a general ban among Jews, Phoenicians and others. Rather, the animal seems to have become the symbolic focus of social tensions between shepherd and peasant and city and village, and was rejected as food wherever priestly elites were strong enough to bring a cultic community under the rule of the altar. This was true in a pre-eminent degree of the postexilic Jewish community, but not of them alone. 5. General Conclusions As I have taken care to emphasize, the fundamental constraints on the diet of human communities derive from their natural environment and the equipment available to them for exploiting it. This is as true of the ancient Levant as of any other region and period; hence the dominance of the flocks in their economy, at least in numbers, and the correspondingly lesser place taken by the herd; and hence the relatively small place taken by pigs in the diet in most places during the Bronze

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and Iron Ages. The conditions that would enable the keeping of pigs on a large scale were generally absent. But this did not prohibit the keeping of pigs altogether, as the remains show. Nor can it account for the other restrictions on diet that both written and material evidence attest. Cultural factors enter here, and their significance is shown most obviously by the restrictions on the use of particular species as sacrificial victims, again attested by both kinds of evidence. Throughout the period sacrifice in the regular public cult is virtually confined, among mammals, to ruminants, mainly, of course, the three normal domestic species used for food. Pigs are not merely rare in this character but entirely excluded, except in obscure rites associated with the cult of the dead. Animals commonly kept for other purposes than food are virtually never eaten and are sacrificed very rarely. This avoidance of the donkey and the dog is widespread far beyond our region, and is easily explicable. Other restrictions, and particularly that of the pig, have a more complex background. Finally we have to say that the evidence is insufficient to say very much about wild beasts and birds, except to observe (1) that they formed in most places a very small proportion of the diet, (2) that where they appear it is overwhelmingly the 'clean' gazelle and fallow deer that figure, with wild boar in some places, and (3) that there is direct evidence in late times that at least in some places the same rule that we find in the Old Testament was applied: that of only eating ruminants among mammals (that is, animals following the model of sacrificial animals). The position is, then, that the biblical system of rules arose in a setting that was eminently compatible with it: it required no sharp changes in habitual dietary and cultic practices general in the land and its environs at least since the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age. This is especially true of the accepted dietary and sacrificial customs in Israel—in evidence from the beginning of the nation's existence, or at least settlement, in the land, established by its nomadic forebears and encouraged by its priests in line with very ancient practice in the Near East—can be shown to correspond closely to the rules formulated, presumably at a relatively late stage, in the Old Testament. However, we have not yet come to understand these customs or rules from the inside, as it were, in terms of the associations evoked in the members of Israelite society by the animals in question and their relation to society itself. This is what we shall attempt to do in the next chapter.

Table A Sheep/Goats

Cattle

Pigs

50

24 6.3 440 12

49 13 595 17

226 70 923 50

28 9.2 458 25

29 7.4 264

0.33

14

0.44

280 74

Chalcolithic: number (percentage) weight (gm) (percentage)

1800

Early Bronze: number (percentage) weight (gm) (percentage)

Deer (Total)

10 2.5 528 15 1 8

Table B: Proportions of major animal remains at Palestinian and Syrian sites, Bronze and Iron Ages (percentages of total number of identified fragments) Site Arad Araq el-Emir Ashdod Beersheba Ebal Ein-Habsor EnShadud HayazHOyiik 'Izbet Saitah Jebel Qa'aqir

Source Lemau 1978 Toplyn 1983 Haas 1971 Hellwing 1984 Horwitz 1986-87 Gophna 19722 Horwitz 1985 Buitenhuis 1985 Hellwing et al. 1986 Horwitz 1987

1. No equids or dogs. 2. Apttd Hakker-Orion 197S.

Area

n jo cp n he n nv ev nfh he

Period

Type

EB

dom dom dom dom

Iron I—Rom. Iron Iron Iron I

EB EBI EB Irani IntB

cult

dom dom dom dom tomb

Sheep/Goats

87 76 49 83 65 66 29 70 53 100

Cattle

7.4

9 37 13 21

Pigs

Others

__

6 0.3(wild) large rodents 5 0.5 __

fallow deer 101

__

__

22 8.2 34

24 10 0.4

gazelles 33 equids 25

__

__

camels 8

Site Jericho

Source Clutton-Brock 19791

Period

Type

jv

Area

EB MB

dom

Jericho tombs Jerusalem Ophel Lachish Lachish LachishVI Lachish, Fosse temple Ma'abarat Megiddo Nahariyah Pella Refa'im valley

Grosvenor et al. 1965 Horwitz et al, 1989 Drori 19792 Lernau 19753 Drori 19764 Tufnell 1940 Hakker-Orion 1975 Bate 1938 Ducos 1968 McNicoll 19826 Horwitz 1989a/b

jv he sh sh sh sh cp nv cp jv he

EB—MB Iron II

tomb

LB Iron

LB MB—LB Bronze Chalcol.—LB

MB5

Iron EBIV MB II

dom dom dom/cult cult cult

dom tomb cult

dom dom tomb

dom Horwitz 1987 Hellwing et al. 1985

g he

Hakker-Orion 1975 Taanach Tel Aphek and Tel Dalit Hellwing et al. 1984

nv nfh

Sasa Shiloh

Tel Dan Area B Tel Gat

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Wapnish et al. 1977 Ducos 1968

jv sh

MB II

LB Iron I Bronze

EB MB Iron

EBH

tomb cult cult

dom dom dom dom dom

Sheep/Goats

76 63 91 87 62 48 74 X X X 88 X

81 90 65 79 92 75 X 64 49 58 51

Cattle

12 23 1 5 21 47 11 X

Pigs

1.8 7.7 0.5 __

6

Others gazelles 5.5 equids 7.5 birds 7 dogs 9

__ __ __

birds and fish

many

X 12 X 3.1 __ 18.5

8 6.6 23 X 21 33 35 20

X negl.

horse, dog no deer or gazelle

15 15 __

8.3 11 few few few 1.8 7.7 1.5 9

equids 10 equids 7.5 catfish 2

gazelle 5.3 gazelle 5.6 deer 3 gazelle 8 antelope 4.5

Results for the Iron Age have not been entered because the remains are very few. Apud Tchemov and Drori 1983. Lemau's results for LB have not been entered because they were based on a small sample of 53 and seem to have been superseded by Drori's more credible figures. Apud Hellwing and Adjeman 1986. Ducos gives the date as 15th century, but the excavation report (Dothan 1956) shows that this is a mistake: the sanctuary had been abandoned by the end of the 16th century. Apud Hflbner 1989: 234 n. 43.

Table B (continued) Site Tel Kinrot

Source Hellwing 1988-89 ZieglerefcA1

g

Tel Masos Tel Michal Tel Miqne-Ekron

Tchemo'v etal. 1983 Hellwing and Feig2 Hesse 1986

n cp cp

Tel Nagila Tell el-Hayyat

Ducos 1%S Metzger 1984

n jv

Tell es-Sharia TeUHadidi

sh Davis 1982 ClasonandBuitenhuis 1978 ev

Tell Hesban

LaBianca 1973; Boessneck etal. 1978; Weiler 19813 Wapnish and Hesse 1988 Davis 1985 Davis 1982 Buitenhuis 1983 Rothenberg 19724

Tell Jemmeh Tell Qasile Tell Qiri ha-Zorea Tell Sweyhat Timna

1. 2. 3. 4.

(Forthcoming.) Apud Htibner 1989: 234 n.43. Apud Hellwing and Adjeman 19J6. Apud HUbner 1989: 234 n. 43. /Iporf Hakker-Orion 1975.

Area

jo cp cp nv ev n

Period

Type

EB LB

dom dom dom dom dom dom

Sheep/Goats

Cattle

41

26 29 X 23 30 21 37 29 X 25

dom

95 61

3 17

dom

71

EB

dom dom dom dom

Bronze

industrial

77 84 86 68 90

Iron II Irani Iron! Bronze Irani Iron II

MB EBMB LB

dom dom

Bronze -Rom. IronlByz.

MB Iron I Iron

55 61 X 66 59 71 45 61 X no sheep

Pigs

7.6 1.7 2 0.2 0.7 8 18 10

Others molluscs 8.7 molluscs 1.9 catfish

wild animals not included in calculation

__

31 negl.

4.5

equids 10 (Chicken [Bronze])

X

4

Chicken (c. 7th-6th cent. BC)

10 14 11 8.9

12 1.6 2

__

0.37 __

fish/waterbirds, very few ostrich eggs

Chapter 5 THE CONTEXT INTERPRETED In this chapter we are still concerned with the broader cultural context within which the priestly definitions took shape. But if the last chapter was an 'etic' investigation, attempting to determine objectively the dietary preferences and other cultural uses of animals of the people of ancient Canaan and Syria, we turn here to try to understand, if possible, the subjective attitudes of the people towards animals as possible items of diet for human beings or gods: an 'emic' study. Attitudes of this kind may be illuminated by the network of associations built up round animals in a particular culture. Illumination, however, does not necessarily amount to explanation. We need to beware of the danger of circular argument, in which the rejection of a species for food is 'explained' by the attitudes towards it in the culture—attitudes that of course include the dietary rejection itself. While cultural materialists such as Harris escape from the circle by excluding any consideration of subjective attitudes at all from the discussion, structuralists like Douglas attempt to do so by looking not at the attitudes to individual species in isolation, but at the pattern that they make as a whole, as a way of looking at the world, linking them with the way in which other aspects of life are viewed. In this chapter we shall try to form a picture of the associations of animals among the peoples of the area that will enable such a pattern to be developed. It would of course be vain to pretend that we could examine the evidence in a totally unprejudiced way and then produce from it a pattern, especially since an obvious pattern already exists in the priestly torah on the subject. I should say, then, that I shall be looking particularly for the evidence that Israelite or indeed West Semitic society in general was tending towards the kind of binary opposition that we find in that torah. The field anthropologist questions the people to elicit their attitudes, and certainly does not depend on personal impressions of the characters

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or functions of the animals in question, which are influenced by the associations of the researcher's own culture. Thus the fact that we 'know' that pigs are dirty is of no relevance to discovering the reasons for the pig taboos in Canaanite-Israelite culture. What we 'know' is dependent on the way in which pigs are kept in our society, which accounts for, or may in part be accounted for by, the way in which we view them. But, of course, we are in no position to question informants in an ancient society. We can only rely on what happens to have been transmitted to us: literary works, overwhelmingly those of the Old Testament, with all the traps that they conceal for the interpreter, with a few scraps of epigraphy. There are many ways in which this material may be misleading. The Bible does not represent the culture of the area as a whole, but only one tradition within it. We cannot be sure that it represents popular attitudes with any accuracy. It is a literary corpus, created by an elite, not a repository of the attitudes of the people. But it is virtually all that we have. However, there are some field studies and essays in the anthropological literature that may suggest analogies to help us to understand the possible cultural context of the Levitical rules, and these we shall look at in the second part of this chapter. In the third part I try to sketch a brief history of the way in which the patterns of meaning elucidated in the first two parts may have been used. 1. The Associations of Animals in the Old Testament and its World We have already seen that Gen. 7.2 suggests that the distinction between clean and unclean animals was an inherited feature of the culture of the people of Israel, and the unusual position of the pig that we have documented in the last chapter tends to confirm this. In order to open up something of the background of this, we need to look at texts that mention particular animals. This could be a vast and largely unrewarding survey, but I would suggest various ways in which it might be curtailed. It does not seem necessary to search for examples of the mention of every individual species, both because rules and customs tend to be applied to wide groups of creatures and because there could be no question in practice of the use of most species for food, and it is natural to concentrate on those most in contact with human life. Although it may be said (e.g. Levine 1989: 247) that disproportionate attention tends to be given to the pig, which has no

5. The Context Interpreted

183

special position in the Bible, in fact it is quite natural to concentrate on it, because it is the only commonly eaten species that is declared unclean. And as we have seen, this was already so in early times, not first in the Hellenistic period. Leach (1964: 31) suggests that in all societies edible substances might be divided into three categories: 1. 2.

3.

Edible substances that are recognized as food and consumed as part of the normal diet. Edible substances that are recognized as possible food, but are prohibited or else allowed to be eaten only under special (ritual) conditions; [which are] consciously tabooed. Edible substances that by culture and language are not recognized as food at all; [which are] unconsciously tabooed.

Thus the Old Testament prohibition of pork is an explicit, conscious taboo, but the English objection to eating dogs 'depends on the category assumption: "dog is not food"'. This, Leach asserts, depends on verbal categories: eating man is disgusting and 'there are contexts in colloquial English in which man and dog may be thought of as beings of the same kind (1964: 32)'. Now it is clear that this categorization, even if adequate for attitudes in our culture (for a severe critique of Leach's article, see Halverson 1976), cannot be applied to the rules of Leviticus 11, for these rules have the specific object, at least in their final form, of defining every member of the animal kingdom as either fit or unfit for food: everything that is not defined as fit for food is ipso facto unclean. It may well, however, be argued that the omission in an earlier form, and in Deuteronomy 14, of the seres of the ground, is traceable precisely to the category assumption 'swarming things are not food', even in the sense in which pig is: nobody (before the crisis reflected in Isa. 66) eats them. This in itself is an important result. But it also demonstrates that we do not need specific attitudes to particular animals to account for the fact that they are not treated as food. What I will be able to show in this chapter is, on the one hand, that similar attitudes of contempt tend to embrace carnivorous animals and birds, dogs and pigs, and on the other that the domestic animals of the Israelites have a special position that makes them in a certain sense members of the community.

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Purity and Monotheism

a. Domestic Animals as Members of the Community This point is one that Mary Douglas makes in her earliest treatment of the subject (1966: 54): To some extent men covenanted with their cattle in the same way as God covenanted with them. Men respected the first born of their cattle, obliged them to keep the Sabbath... The difference between cattle and the wild beasts is that the wild beasts have no covenant to protect them.

The analogy between human beings and beasts is developed in some detail by Wenham (1981; cf. Levine 1989: 245-46; Milgrom 1990: 179-80; Eilberg-Schwartz 1990: 122-23). He cites the Sabbath law in the decalogue (Exod. 20.10; Deut. 5.14) and the law requiring the dedication of the first-born, both of human mothers and of beasts (Exod. 13.2; 22.28-29 [Eng. 29-30]; 34.19). But in the latter connection he shows that the analogy is quite extensive: Exod. 13.13 and Num. 8.16-17 call for the redemption of non-sacrificial animals and of human infants (but there is clearly a difference: it is permitted to refuse to redeem the first-born of an ass, and break its neck instead, but not so with your own child); and the period allowed between birth and offering is the same as that between birth and circumcision for a human male child, in each case eight days inclusive: Exod. 22.29 (Eng. 30) and Lev. 22.27; Gen. 17.12 and Lev. 12.3. Another analogy may be drawn between the requirement for physical perfection in sacrificial victims (Lev. 1.3; 22.17-25, etc.; Deut. 17.1) and in priests (Lev. 21.16-23).1 And finally in the blessings and curses that are attached to the proclamation of the Law, the animals of the Israelites are included (Deut. 28.4, 18, 50-57; Lev. 26.22). Levine (1989: 245) also draws attention to the law of the goring ox (Exod. 21.29-32), which requires the ox not simply to be destroyed as a danger, but to be stoned like a human criminal, and its flesh left uneaten. Wenham does not argue like Douglas and Levine that the animals are in some sense 'within the covenant', part of the community, but simply that a practical analogy is drawn between human beings and animals, which indeed may cover wild animals also, as in the analogous commands given to human beings and animals in Gen. 1.29, 30; and Levine (1989: 246) notes that even wild animals may be held 1. Milgrom (1990:181) draws attention to the close correspondence between the lists of disqualifying blemishes in priests and sacrificial animals in Lev. 21.18-20 and 22.22-24: there are twelve items in each.

5. The Context Interpreted

185

responsible for their actions. He refers to the priestly introduction to the Flood story, which states that 'all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth' (6.12), and to the conclusion, which hands over the animals into the power of humanity and requires that anyone, whether human or animal, who kills a human being will have to answer for it to God (9.5). But it is notable that most of the cases cited by Wenham do refer to domestic animals, and the law of the first-bom in particular is very striking for the similar way in which it treats human and animal. Moreover, it is easy to substantiate Douglas's assertion that human beings felt an obligation to protect their animals, even if it is hardly accurate to refer to this as a covenant. The repeated use of the metaphor of the shepherd both for the king and governing officials (e.g. Ezek. 34) and for God (e.g. Ps. 23) strongly suggests this. If the use of a metaphor shows us something of the way in which its vehicle is viewed, we shall have no difficulty in concluding that it was a moral obligation for a shepherd to protect his sheep, and of course to protect them in the first place from wild animals (1 Sam. 17.34-35; Isa. 31.4; Ezek. 34.5, 8; etc.). It is also clear that the metaphor involves human beings in thinking of themselves as sheep, and so identifying themselves in a sense with their own animals (e.g. Ps. 95.7; Isa. 40.11). We thus gain a picture of a broad human and animal community set over against the creatures of the wild, specifically the large and dangerous carnivores. Characteristically, and obviously, domestic animals, particularly sheep, are docile—'like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before her shearers is dumb...' (Isa. 53.7)—and wild animals are out of the control of human beings; that is what makes them wild; one might think of the brilliantly portrayed gallery of animals of the wild offered by Yahweh to Job in his answer from the whirlwind (Job 38.39-39.30), the repeated point of which is that Job cannot control them. Admittedly they include the warhorse, which is domesticated and which one might presume to be under the control of its rider, but it is not so portrayed. Characteristically also they serve as metaphors for the enemies of human society (cf. §l.c below).1 1. Eilberg-Schwartz (1990: 120-21) draws attention to a very much wider range of animal (and vegetable) metaphor for human relations and activities, not all of them directly relevant here, but suggestive. He puts it (p. 125) that the animals that serve as metaphors for Israelite society are seen as clean, while the predators that symbolize the enemies of Israel are unclean. But while this is true, the national aspect is not essential to the metaphor.

186

Purity and Monotheism

So far this picture is imprecise. There are distinctions to be made within the body of domestic animals, even as they are all bound within the same community. Some of them are providers of nourishment, milk and meat. Others, principally the ass, are solely labourers. It is hardly necessary to offer substantiation of so obvious a fact; but it is worth referring to Porphyry's comment, 'we do not slaughter asses or elephants or any of those animals that share our labours but do not enjoy their benefits'.1 This was the wisdom of a humane (and vegetarian) philosopher, but one who was born in Tyre and likely to have been as familiar with the Semitic cultural world as with the Greek; it probably reflects a more inarticulate general opinion among ancient people, Greek or Oriental. At all events the ass invariably appears in the Old Testament as a beast of burden, sharing its master's toil and also his rest (Exod. 20.10). It appears as food only in a situation of desperate famine (2 Kgs 6.25). Eilberg-Schwartz (1990: 126-27) compares the relation of the ass to the flocks and herds to that of the ger, the alien, in Israelite human society, who usually works as a labourer, and shares in many, but not all, of their privileges and restrictions. In view of my definition below (§l.b) of the other unclean domestic animals as 'ambiguous', this idea could be helpful. It seems most natural to include the camel under the same rubric. We have noted that it is of limited importance in the cultivated land during the biblical period, but where it was used it was clearly a beast of burden existing alongside other domestic animals that continued to be the only source of meat. It was not, as it is among the Beduin, the main domestic animal that provides both transport and nourishment. It was probably not until about two thousand years ago that such true Beduin began to emerge, and it is almost certain that such camel-using communities as the Midianites (Judg. 6.5) with whom the Israelites came into contact did not use the camel in that way, but probably only for transport (the same verse refers in a more general way to 'their livestock' [miqnehem}). However, as we have seen, camel meat was eaten in the vicinity of Israel's territory, probably by caravan traders and an urban community to whom they sold the meat of their surplus animals. It seems likely that we have a commercial community here in which restraints characteristic of peasant communities are less significant. If camel-eating became at all well known to Israelites in the later 1.

De Abst. 2.25:

5. The Context Interpreted

187

biblical period, it would be as the custom of ethnic groups to their south with whom they had long-standing enmities, and who were rapidly taking over parts of their land,1 and this could have reinforced the general objection to the use of the flesh of an animal whose function in the human community was as a labourer. If we turn to those animals whose function in the community was to provide nourishment for the human members, it is not surprising in view of the degree of identification between the human and animal sides of the community that the traditional rule was that they could only be eaten under the restraints of the ritual context. This is the rule among many peoples, for example the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1956), and the Kachin (Leach 1964: 56), and it is clearly implied as the existing custom by Deut. 12.15, 20ff., which attempts to abolish it (cf. Chapter 4, §3.c). The simple dedication of the meal to a deity requires no sanctuary or priest (Kaufmann 1961: 180-81). In the Israelite conception it appears to consist essentially in the pouring out of the blood to the deity. That is all that Saul considers necessary to regularize the slaughter in 1 Sam. 14.32-34; and in the two treatments of the issue in the legal literature, Deuteronomy 12 and Leviticus 17, the question of the blood is central (Lev. 17.10-11; Deut. 12.16, 23-25). When the slaughter is secularized in Deuteronomy, though the blood must not be eaten, it is to be poured on the ground 'like water', which probably means that it is not to form the object of a ritual (cf. Weinfeld 1972: 214, who notes [214 n. 2; Kaufmann 1961: 181] that the sin of Saul's soldiers is precisely to slaughter the animals 'on the ground' as required in Deut. 12.16). The popular custom should not be identified with the rule propounded in Lev. 17.3-4, which demands the offering of the beast at a particular sanctuary2 (cf. Levine 1989: 112-13, who however is surely wrong in finding implicit permission for secular slaughter here). For this priestly writer slaughter without presenting the beast at Yahweh's sanctuary is murder (v. 4), and the blood 1. Knauf (1988:168) explains in this way the Deuteronomic interpretation of the 'kid in mother's milk' prohibition as a general dietary prohibition rather than a festal regulation, which he believes it was originally; it was and is still the pastoralist communities of the southern desert fringe who relish meat cooked in milk as a delicacy (1988: 164-65). 2. Originally perhaps at a plurality of Yahweh sanctuaries (S.R. Driver 1902: 138). Failure to make these distinctions vitiates McConville's attempt (1984: 42ff.) to prove the antiquity of profane slaughter as conceived in Deuteronomy.

188

Purity and Monotheism

thrown on the altar serves to atone (v. 11)—very possibly for the very act of slaughter of a community member, the victim itself, though this is unclear and disputed. Although this priestly theory is scarcely likely to represent popular understanding, it may well articulate a widespread sense that the ritual act tends to compensate for and bring within an ordered system the potentially disruptive cutting off of the life of a being that has shared the life of the community. Even in rabbinic Judaism, which accepts the Deuteronomic permission for profane slaughter, a distinction remains between the eating of domestic beasts and of game: in the former case the abdominal fat is prohibited in accord with Lev. 7.23-25 (m. Hul. 8.6). The wording of v. 25, which originated in the setting where no domestic animal was eaten without sacrifice, continues to remind the slaughterer and eater of the special position of domestic animals, as those animals by which God's blessing is transmitted to the community of Israel. As we have seen, domestic birds were kept. Among these the dove has a special position—I think we can reasonably assume that doves were kept as domestic birds, especially since otherwise they would be the only wild victim permitted in the sacrificial codes of Ugarit and Leviticus; the Marseilles tariff, which seems to permit wild birds, also permits deer (Chapter 4, §3.b.2). Although we know from the archaeological record that chickens were kept (Chapter 4, §2.b.5), they are not mentioned once in the Old Testament, and geese and ducks are no better off (unless the obscure barburim of 1 Kgs 5.3 [Eng. 4.23; most English versions 'fowl'] are one of these three species). But the dove is an image of gentleness—indeed imbecility—and love, Hos. 7.11; 11.11; Ps. 74.19; Song 2.14; 5.2; etc. Probably because of this it is the symbol of the goddess of love, Astarte, in Phoenicia and Syria, and becomes at some period prohibited as food to her devotees (Chapter 4, §3.c). b. Ambiguous Animals We turn from the blessed to the reprobate. At all periods human settlements in the Middle East, as in many other parts of the world, have harboured dogs. But their relationship to the human community is much more unclear and ambiguous than that of other animals. Although dogs were kept as pets (Chapter 4, §§2.b.3, 3.c), even if Tobias's dog is the only example in a Jewish context, in general the tone of biblical references to them is decidedly negative. This despite

5. The Context Interpreted

189

the fact that they had their uses for rounding up sheep and as guards (Job 30.1; Isa. 56.10-11). Yet even these two references to the honourable functions of dogs use them as contemptuous figures for people whom the speaker despises, and there is much more of the same kind —cf. 1 Sam. 17.43; 24.15 (Eng. 14); 2 Sam. 3.8; 9.8, 16.9; 2 Kgs 8.13; Ps. 59.7, 15 (Eng. 6, 14); Prov. 26.11; Eccl. 9.4; Matt. 7.6; Mk 7.27 (Matt. 15.26); Phil. 3.2; 2 Pet. 2.22. And there is similar material in non-biblical texts from the region: e.g. in the Lachish letters, where the writer regularly refers to himself by the stereotyped phrase 'your servant a dog' (Torczyner 1938: 2.3-4, 5.3-4, 6.3); in the Amarna tablets, 1.84 (Knudtzon 1915), the writer's enemy is described as a dog (1. 8, cf. 1. 17). Generally in these passages 'dog' is simply a term of vague abuse (or ironical self-deprecation) for someone who is beneath contempt; in the Marcan passage it refers specifically to the Gentiles. However, in Deut. 23.19 (Eng. 18) (to which Rev. 22.15 probably refers), we have a very specific idiom in which the term 'dog' apparently refers to a male prostitute.1 This may account for the fact that in the other biblical passages, despite its frequency, the word is never used directly as a metaphor for a human being. Homosexuality is of course very strongly reprobated in the biblical tradition (cf. Houston 1991); see Lev. 18.22; 20.13, where the act of intercourse between males is described as td'ebd, 'abomination'; it is the only individual offence in those sexual codes to be described with that word, which is otherwise rare in the Holiness Code. It implies, as we have noted, that which every right-thinking person rejects with disgust. The use of the abusive term may imply a very specific obscene reference to the act of anal intercourse, but there is also a more general reason why someone who offers himself for this act that violates the structure and norms of society in so flagrant a way should be described as a dog, and it also accounts for the general abusive use of the word. For the function of the dog to which most frequent reference is made is that of a scavenger. The dogs are those who will eat what human beings refuse to eat, meat that is itself unclean or disgusting (Exod. 22.30 [Eng. 31]). They appear constantly in the prophetic curses in Kings as eating the dead bodies of slaughtered royalty, along with the 'birds of the air' (1 Kgs 14.11; 16.4; 21.19, 23, 24; 22.38; 1. Stager (1991), however, following Peckham 1968, interprets it literally, of dogs taking part in healing rites.

190

Purity and Monotheism

2 Kgs 9.10, 36). There are closely parallel expressions in the Assyrian vassal treaties, as Weinfeld has shown (1972: 131-32; see below). Now, though human corpses were (one hopes) not everyday fare for the dogs of Israel, their position as scavengers that get rid of unclean and uneatable refuse is quite clear. And it puts them into an ideologically ambiguous position. For the eating of bloody corpses is an act that essentially belongs to wild animals (such as the 'birds of the air' and the lions and bears fended off by the shepherd), just as the food itself belongs outside the boundaries of the human community. Human beings are not permitted to eat blood; their animals are herbivorous (supposedly—the habits of goats are overlooked; remember that we are dealing with attitudes, not with facts). Dogs thus, ideally, put themselves outside the community with the wild animals. But they are not outside the community, they have to be in the camp or settlement to do their scavenging, and they are tolerated precisely because they do it and so relieve human beings of the unpleasant task of disposing of their waste. Human beings need dogs, and yet they despise them for doing what they need them for—precisely the position of prostitutes (of either sex)! Dogs are anomalous animals, in Douglas's phrase, but because of their functions, not because of their classification. Now for the pig. It is clear from our previous investigation that its position also is anomalous: a domestic animal bred for the table, that yet cannot appear on the table of the gods (except perhaps for the denizens of Sheol), and that appears to be rejected as food by the urban elites, as well as, less surprisingly, by people with a pastoral background. A full explanation would need to take account of the whole complex picture that we were enabled to draw in the last chapter. It will be convenient to begin just where we left off in considering the dog. For where dogs appear as scavengers, or in contemptuous references to men, swine frequently appear also. This emerges from Weinfeld's discussion (1972: 129ff.), which I referred to above. The reader of the gospels will immediately recall Matt. 7.6. The Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon contain the expressions, 'May dogs and swine eat your flesh' (1. 451), and 'May dogs and swine drag your corpses to and fro in the squares of Ashur; may the earth not receive them' (11. 483-84) (Wiseman 1958 as in Weinfeld 1972: 131). Ashurbanipal asserts that he fed the corpses of rebels to 'dogs, swine, jackals, eagles (or vultures), the birds of heaven and the fish of the deep' (Streck 1916: II, 38, iv: 74-76, in Weinfeld 1972: 132). More remarkably, the

5. The Context Interpreted

191

LXX text of 1 Kgs 21.19; 22.38 (3 Reigns 20.19; 22.38) mentions pigs, which are absent from the MT: 'In every place where the pigs and the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, there the dogs will lick your blood, and the prostitutes will wash in your blood'; 'And the pigs and the dogs licked up the blood, and the prostitutes washed in the blood'. Weinfeld suggests (p. 132 n. 5) that the pigs may be original to the text and have been censored from the MT in order to avoid the implication that pigs could be found in an Israelite town.1 (Not that, if it were the original text, it would necessarily imply that; for Weinfeld argues that we are dealing with a stereotyped form of expression that owes its origin to the international treaty tradition.) The ranging of pigs with dogs in the Assyrian texts is the more surprising in that in the Sumero-Akkadian cultural area pork was, as we have seen, far more freely eaten than further west. And in both cultural areas it seems that pigs have a reputation shared with dogs for living as scavengers and polluting themselves with unclean food. As we have seen, it is likely to have objectively been the case that pigs in the Near East, as in China, lived primarily in or near the settlement on waste food. But they would have been useful as scavengers in the same way as dogs. It may therefore be that pigs fell into the same ideological trap—valuable for a purpose that in itself undermined their value. This obviously would not have disqualified them as food in the eyes of the local people who bred them for that purpose, but it might make a difference to the way in which more delicately brought up people viewed them—urban elites including priests. It would certainly be impossible for them to offer animals raised on unclean or questionable material in sacrifice, since their food might make the animals ritually unfit themselves. The only reference to pigs in the Hebrew text of the Old Testament in any other connection than their unfitness for food is Prov. 11.22: 'As a gold ring in a pig's snout, so is a beautiful woman without discretion'. Perhaps the reference is not quite as contemptuous as those using the dog, but nearly so. Even in a society that had no objection to eating pig meat, as in Mesopotamia, pigs were bound to have a lowly position, and this 1. He further suggests that the reference to the prostitutes in the MT of 1 Kgs 22.38 may be a corruption, intentional or unintentional, of one to pigs: rvurm from D'lTni. There is the same combination of feeding dogs and bathing pigs in 2 Pet. 2.22. The LXX has then preserved a conflation of the two readings which has afterwards been copied in 3 Reigns 20.19.

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Purity and Monotheism

seems to be broadly true also in Egypt (Chapter 4, §3.b.4). Since Egypt was entirely devoid of woodland, pigs must have been fed either on grain (an expensive business, but feasible for the wealthiest; cf. above, Chapter 3, §2.c.3) or, as elsewhere, on waste. Helck comments (LA, V, 5.v. Schwein): 'to judge from its place in lists, the pig was the least esteemed of domestic animals'. This may be the reason for its general rejection as a sacrificial animal. Griffiths, however, has a different explanation: There was perhaps a subconscious ambivalence in the attitude to the pig: on the one hand it was, unlike the rare prizes of the desert hunt, long domesticated and ever within reach—a case of familiarity breeding contempt; on the other hand it was extremely useful and willingly excluded from the menu of the gods (Griffiths 1960: 33).

The uncleanness of swine and swineherds reported by Herodotus (2.47) is, however, rather difficult to fit in with our knowledge from native sources. It may be a late development, and if so seems to be of a piece with developments in Israel and Syria.1 On the other hand, there is an elaborate explanation connecting it with the myth of Seth, who turned into a black pig to damage Horus's eye (see LA, V, s.v. Seth). It is suggested that the original worshippers of Seth, who were pig-raisers, were the native inhabitants of Egypt conquered and suppressed by the Horus people, who were, it is supposed, pastoralists in origin (cf. Emery 1961: 95-96). These demonized Seth, mythologized their conquest of his people in the story of Horus and Seth, and despised his animal, the pig. The difficulty with this explanation is that the supposed consequences, the demonization of Seth and the impurity of the pig, are not evidenced for some two to three thousand years after their supposed cause, the conquest of the Horus people. It is quite correct of te Velde (1967) to query the political interpretation of the Seth myth, and though Griffiths espouses it, he considers the association of the pig with Seth to be a later development. Whether it is correct to see in the development of contemptuous attitudes towards the pig in Egypt the result of the influx of pastorally-based people, or something purely indigenous, in either case we have perhaps a useful analogy to what happened in Israel, perhaps something more in view of the dominance of Egyptians in Canaan for 1. Darby et al. (1977: 198-99) suggest that it is a custom of the early dynastic period (p. 173) revived in the Saite period.

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several hundred years before the rise of Israel. At all events it is clear that throughout the ancient Near East there was a strong tendency not to give equal regard to all domestic animals. 'Shepherd' was an appropriate epithet for kings and gods, 'swineherd' was not; their subjects could compare themselves to sheep, while gods could be called 'bull' or represented as one, or as a ram, but even the Egyptians did not have a pig-headed god, given that the Seth animal cannot really be regarded as a pig (Griffiths 1960: 32, against Newberry 1928). This tension could have led to a formal hierarchy among domestic animals (as among the Kalasha [below, §2.c]), but the more usual result in this region was the anathematization of the pig as unclean, and often also, as in Israel, the eventual cessation of its raising. c. Animals as Enemies Dogs and pigs, then, find themselves, despite their close association with humans, or I should say rather because of it, or because of its particular character, on the wrong side of the line that divides the good herbivorous domestic animals from the scavenging, blood-consuming carnivores: 'evil beasts' (Ezek. 14.15, 21) and 'the fowls of the air' (1 Kgs 14.11, etc.). And we have already established, primarily on the testimony of the Mishnah, that the unclean birds listed individually in Lev. 11.13-19 and Deut. 14.12-18 are overwhelmingly birds of prey and carrion-eaters. This is also true of the majority of the unclean beasts, at least those that are certainly behemd rather than seres. It has to be admitted (so Firmage 1990: 186) that the most prominent of these birds and beasts have good associations also; the lion and the neSer—eagle or vulture—are frequent examples of strength and power and the latter especially of swiftness (e.g. Deut. 28.49; Isa. 40.31 or 2 Sam. 1.23). Both lion and eagle feature here as similes for the strength and swiftness of the warrior. The lion exemplifies courage in 2 Sam. 17.10; but equally often serves as a figure for danger or treachery or implacability, as in Job 10.16, Pss. 7.3 (2), 10.9, 17.12, Isa. 5.29 and Amos 3.8. References to other carnivorous beasts and birds are relatively few. But, for example, the bear, which for some reason figures in our culture's folklore as a friendly beast, invariably stands for danger and ferocity in the Bible, and the she-bear robbed of her whelps is the type of frustrated anger and violence (2 Sam. 17.8; Prov. 17.12; Hos. 13.8). Among the smaller

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carnivores the Su'al, probably the jackal, features as a carrion-eater in Ps. 63.11 (10). There is however a special literary context in which many of the unclean species appear, including many of the birds that do not appear elsewhere outside Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, and it may enable us to use extrabiblical evidence. This is the prophetic curse of destruction, when it extends to descriptions of the deserted ruins of the doomed place, which become the habitation of many wild creatures, including a surprisingly high proportion of those that appear in our chapters as unclean. There are also passages that use the same idea of the ruins as the habitation of wild creatures, though they are not of the same genre. The passages in question include Isa. 13.21-22, Isa. 34.11-15, Jer. 50.39, Mic. 1.8, Zeph. 2.14, Ps. 102.7, Job 30.29, and a number of other Old Testament passages where only one of the creatures appears; the first Sfire inscription (KAI 222), at line A33; and perhaps the Balaam inscription from Tell Deir 'Alia, Combination 1, according to Hoftijzer's interpretation of this very fragmentary and uncertain text (Hoftijzer and van der Kooij 1976: text 173-74, translation 179-80, commentary at 200-201); Garbini 1979 largely dissents, observing that the majority of the birds are 'small and offensive' (p. 178), and McCarter (1980: 51, 58), followed by Hackett (1984: 46-47), has given a possibly more convincing interpretation. But whether or not Hoftijzer's interpretation is accepted, his commentary is useful to us here, since he conveniently lists all the creatures that appear in all these texts, biblical and extrabiblical (Hoftijzer and van der Kooij 1976: 206-207), and the great majority in fact occur in the Bible. It will be understood (cf. Chapter 2, §l.c.5) that many of them are not identifiable, and there is the further complication that the Balaam inscriptions are perhaps, and the Sfire inscriptions certainly, in Aramaic rather than Hebrew (for discussion of the language of the Balaam texts, see, among others, Hoftijzer and van der Kooij 1978: 300-302; McCarter 1980: 50-51; Hackett 1984: 109ff.; and various articles in Hoftijzer and van der Kooij 1991). However, many of the names of creatures are just the same as in the Old Testament, and others (e.g. 'rnb - BH 'arnebet) are not very different. I list the birds first, in alphabetical order, since these have more verbal contacts with Leviticus 11, where the unclean species are listed, then the beasts; however the qippod and the qippoz could well be birds. The names appearing in

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the Bible are given in vocalized transliteration, those in the inscriptions with consonants only, though when they also appear in Leviticus 111 have given the vocalized form as it appears there also. The references to the Deir 'Alia texts are to Hoftijzer's arrangements of the lines; Caquot and Lemaire (1977: 193) have suggested a rearrangement that has been widely accepted, but here I am following Hoftijzer. Balaam I: 10. Cf. Lev. 11.19, >andpd. Isa. 13.21; 34.13; Jer. 50.39; Mic. 1.8; Job 30.29. Garbini finds y'nh in Balaam 1.10. Cf. Lev. 11.16. dayyd Isa. 34.15. Cf. Deut. 14.13, where it appears to be a gloss (Chapter 2, § 1 .c.5). Undoubtedly intended as some kind of bird of prey. drr Balaam I: 10. Probably the swallow (BH derof)\ not unclean in the Bible, but cf. b. Hul. 62a. yanSOp Isa. 34.11. Cf. Lev. 11.17. kos (owl) Ps. 102.7; proposed in BHS as emendation in Zeph. 2.14 (RSV 'owl', REB 'tawny owl'). Cf. Lev. 11.17. lilit Isa. 34.14. Generally regarded as a demon, Lilith or the 'night hag', but REB prosaically 'nightjar'. nSrtywn Balaam 1:10-11 Heb. neSer, Lev. 11.13, is not referred to in these contexts in the Bible, but Hoftijzer takes nSrt as a fern. pi. and as a general designation: 'birds of prey from the marsh'. Caquot and Lemaire (1977) and Garbini (1979: 178) take ywn as another birdname: 'pigeon' (cf. BH yond), and nSrt as a singular, McCarter and Hackett agree on ywn but take nSrt as a verb. '"tallep (bat) Isa. 2.20. Cf. Lev. 11.19. 'qh KAI222.A33. Donner and Rollig 'magpie' referring to Aram, 'aq'aq. This is not among unclean birds in Lev. 11. 'oreb (raven) Isa. 34.11; Zeph. 2.14 LXX. Cf. Lev. 11.15. sdh KAI 222.A33. Donner and Rollig 'owl', referring to Jewish Aram. sacfyd'. Whether this is one of the birds in Leviticus 11 under another name is uncertain, but it is certainly of the same general kind. spr Balaam 1.11. Heb. sippor 'bird'; but here probably specifically 'sparrow' (Hoftijzer et al. 1976: 204). qd'at Isa. 34.11; Zeph. 2.14; Ps. 102.7. Cf. Lev. 11.18. rhm Balaam 1.10. Uncertain; Garbini reads rhpn, a verb. Cf. Lev. 11.18, rahan, probably a vulture of some kind. 'dah Isa. 13.21. Meaning uncertain; RSV 'howling creatures', REB 'porcupines'. 't Isa. 13.22; 34.14; Jer. 50.39. BOB, REB 'jackal'; RSV 'hyena'. But an older tradition takes it as a fabulous beast: LXX onokentauroi; cf. Wildberger(1982: 1325)—'Kobolden'. 'rnb Balaam I.I 1, KAI 222.A33. Cf. Lev. 11.6, 'arnebet, hare. pere' Isa. 32.14. Wild ass. 'nph batya'and

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sby if

KAI 222.A33. Heb. fbt, gazelle. Not unclean; cf. Deut. 14.5. Isa. 13.21; 23.13; 34.14; Jer. 50.39; but Pss. 72.9; 74.14, where the text is uncertain, are not really relevant here. Meaning uncertain; RSV 'wild beasts' (i.e. not translated), REB 'marmots'. But a strong tradition represented by the LXX and Vulgate and followed by Wildberger (1982: 1325) regards them as demons. qippod Isa. 14.23; 34.11; Zeph. 2.14. Meaning uncertain; BDB 'porcupine', RSV 'hedgehog' (both from LXX ekhinoi)', REB 'bustard'; 'bittern' also suggested; cf. BDB (s.v.), Hoftijzer et al. 1976: 207. qippoz Isa. 34.15. Meaning uncertain; LXX assimilates to the previous word. BDB 'arrow-snake', from the Arabic qqffaza, but they admit that this does not incubate its eggs; Wildberger however follows this; RSV 'owl'; REB 'sand-partridge'. Sa'fr Isa. 13.21; 34.14. Much disputed; normally means a he-goat, but in Lev. 17.7 is clearly a deity of some kind, hence the traditional translation 'satyr' (is this what is meant by the Vulg. 'pilosi'?), both there and in these passages. REB gives 'he-goat' here, of course not an unclean animal. Wildberger (1982: 1328, 1347) argues for the traditional understanding of this with '? and si, as well as lllit, as demons or fabulous creatures. Certainly there is no reason in principle why the text should not people these horrid ruins with mythological as well as real creatures. Sa'al Ezek. 13.4; Lam. 5.18. Probably jackal. Srn KAI 222.A33. Donner and Rollig 'wild cat', referring to Akk. Suranu. tan Isa. 13.22; 34.13; 35.7; Jer. 9.10 (11); 10.22; 49.33; 51.37; Mic. 1.8; Job 30.29. Usually 'jackal', but REB 'wolf. Hoftijzer notes that three of the creatures mentioned in the Balaam inscription are unclean in the Bible, and concludes from the listing above that 'in ancient Israel those animals and birds which could be used as "symbols" of destruction and doom, (normally) also were considered unclean'. One has to reckon with a literary tradition. There is probably a literary connection between the two principal Isaiah passages in chs. 13 and 34, and possibly some of the other biblical passages as well. There may also be some connection with the Deir 'Alia prophecies (if that is how they should be described) and the Sfire treaty, but there is not much overlap in the creatures mentioned. It is nevertheless remarkable that of all the animals and birds that could be mentioned as the inhabitants of ruins, those in the biblical texts are all unclean (with the possible exception of the sa Tr), and also that of the 21 or 22 names of unclean birds in the present texts of Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, many of which occur nowhere else, no less than

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ten are mentioned either in the biblical texts or in the Balaam inscription. It is true that the two Aramaic texts mention clean creatures also, but even then certain kinds of swallow are held to be unclean in the Talmud. There does seem to be a very high level of correlation between uncleanness and presence in a literary tradition concerned with destruction and desolation—more certainly for the biblical texts than could be expected by chance. But which way did the connection go? Are the birds named as unclean because they inhabit, or are believed to inhabit, desolate places, or does the literary tradition select birds recognized as unclean to play this lugubrious role? If we recall our investigations of the list of unclean birds in Chapter 2, we found there that the list has been expanded. Originally, we suspected, it contained just eight birds, and twelve have been added. Now, of the seven names of birds (including the bat!) in the biblical desolation passages that appear in Leviticus 11 or Deuteronomy 14, all but one are among the added ones in the latter part of the list; that is, of the twelve added names, six are found in this distinctive literary tradition; bringing the Balaam inscription into the equation would possibly bring the number up to eight, but would add no further names found in the earlier part of the passage, unless you count neser. That is, of the original list of eight no more than two are represented in this tradition, but of the twelve added names at least half are. It therefore does not seem likely that the literary tradition selected unclean birds, at least not from the list we know, but rather that the expansion of the list was inspired by the literary tradition. On the other hand, there is no need to ascribe any excessive care for realism to the writers of the desolation passages. They were using a tradition, and the choice of birds and beasts may have been governed more by a traditional sense of fitness for such a role—that is, by cultural attitudes of fear or contempt—than by the actual likelihood that they would inhabit desolate places. I have noted before (Chapter 2, §l.c.5) that if the y ansup and the qa'at (and the rahcan and the >anapa) were really water birds, it would be improbable to find them in desert places as described in Isaiah 34 and elsewhere. G.R. Driver (1955) concluded from this that such an identification was mistaken. But this may have been a hasty conclusion, if I am correct. One curious point that may have a bearing on this is the strange assertion in Isa. 34.16: 'Seek and read from the book of the LORD: not one of these shall be missing'. What book, we want to ask? The

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commentators agree that it is the prophecy itself, the book of Isaiah or the whole prophetic canon; cf. Delitzsch n.d.: II, 71; the verse instructs the future reader to compare prophecy with fulfilment, and Skinner (1896: 258) remarks, in accepting this view, that the words also imply the existence of a prophetic canon. For Kaiser (1974: 359-60) it is the book of Isaiah itself, the chapter being one of the latest in the book and itself dependent on other passages in the book. Wildberger (1982: 1349-350) takes the verse in the same way, but dating the chapter relatively early (sixth century), regards it as a much later supplement. One may agree that it is a gloss of some kind. But is it so certain that the glossator intended to refer to the book he was glossing? Why should he instruct the reader to search in the very book he was reading already? And what book was more likely to be called 'the book of Yahweh' in the late Second Temple period than the Torah? Thus the glossator could, I suggest, be calling attention to the fact we have just been noting: that very many of the unclean creatures of the Torah are to be found in the prophecy (and therefore, naturally, in Edom; I am not denying the presence of the theme of the fulfilment of prophecy). As it so often happens, there is an element of hyperbole in the scriptural utterance. And this late contributor to Scripture testifies to the maintenance of the equivalence we have been demonstrating: creatures that inspire fear or revulsion, for whatever cultural reason, most of them scavengers and blood-eaters, are those that appropriately inhabit places where the LORD'S sword has descended for judgment, and are also those that are declared unclean for eating. It may be worth comparing the list of birds seen in Mesopotamian sources as birds of ill-omen (cf. Salonen 1973). They include (this is by no means a complete list; I give them with Salonen's translation, though most are very difficult to identify): adaburtu 'flamingo'; amassanu 'wild pigeon'; anpatu, also 'flamingo' (cognate with Heb. 'anapa); arebu 'crow' (Heb. 'oreb); ensubu uncertain, but cf. Heb. yanSup; ellebu a hawk, perhaps the hen-harrier; hasibaru 'hoopoe'; igiru 'heron'; qadu the 'large pin-tailed sandgrouse' (Arabic qata), though it is generally taken as an owl. It will be seen that most of these are certainly or probably the same birds as ones in the Leviticus 11 list, though there is also a pigeon and perhaps a grouse which would certainly be clean birds in Israel. In very broad terms, therefore, there are similar tendencies observable everywhere in the region to invest certain birds with reprobate status, particularly birds of prey and

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others that might be seen as unclean feeders. It is difficult to say anything useful about attitudes to water creatures that could illuminate Lev. 11.9ff. They are simply not mentioned to any significant extent by the writers of those dry and landlocked hills. To suggest that the distinction has something to do with the observed diet of bottom-feeding molluscs and crustaceans (Levine 1989: 248) is plausible in view of what we have been noting just now, but it is not based on native evidence. However, we have already observed that fish were associated with Asherah, and that this led in due course to the development of a taboo on their flesh in some quarters. d. Resume We begin to trace the outlines of a structure of thought about animals in the society out of which the Old Testament arose, related to the structure of the priestly definitions, but anterior to it logically, if not chronologically. The primary distinction is between domestic animals and wild ones. Domestic ones are within the community in the limited sense in which this can be true for non-human creatures, and to some extent people are able to identify themselves with them. They are tame and submissive, their docility confirms human power over the animal world, and their diet is acceptably pure. Wild creatures refuse the dominion of humankind, they tend to be violent and dangerous, and their diet typically tends to include waste matter and blood. Ambiguity arises in the case of the dog and the pig, which are domestic at least in the sense that they inhabit human settlements (and camps in the case of the dog), but their diet puts them on the wrong side of the line. The pig of course is traditionally eaten—it is bred for nothing else—but the dog is not. It is hardly surprising that this ambiguity should be resolved by using 'dog' as a word of abuse and by identifying pigs with underworld deities or avoiding their flesh, nor that this should happen not only in Israel but in a whole range of other societies in this general cultural area. There is no ambiguity in the case of the ass, which because it exists for labour is not in any case eaten, but it is possible that it did arise in the case of the camel in the late biblical period. A different kind of ambiguity exists in the case of the domestic creatures that are bred for meat among other uses. Their use for food is hedged around, in traditional custom, with the limitations and controls of ritual. It is a solemn occasion, marked by the

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invitation of the deity to share the feast (for discussion, see Chapter 4, §3.c; Chapter 5, §l.a; Chapter 6, §l.d). There are also ambiguities among the wild creatures. The most obvious is that some wild beasts are hunted for food, in some places being sacrificed. These are, by and large, those large herbivores that had always formed part of people's diet in this area, and closely resembled the domestic stock in appearance and manner of life and diet. This could be understood in terms of the structure of thought that we have begun to trace: certain wild beasts, because of their diet, behaviour and mode of life, could be seen as domestic animals in an honorary sense, as it were; and this would be a popular attitude directly undergirding the more formal Levitical rule. So far as the evidence of actual practice goes, and it is very limited, birds might be treated analogously. We saw (Chapter 4, §2.b.5) that in the very thorough analyses of the material from Heshbon and the Ophel, the only wild bird species found in significant quantity was the partridge, a ground-feeding, chiefly graminivorous bird like the pigeon, the goose and the domestic fowl. This was not, however, developed into a rule in our texts, which limit their rejection of birds mainly to those that can be seen to be predators or carrion-eaters or are associated with desolation; this last certainly a late literary development. There is virtually no direct evidence that could enable us to say how the smaller creatures, falling into the category of seres, were treated; only the indirect evidence of Leviticus 11 enables us to guess that with the exception of locusts they were, to use Leach's term, unconsciously tabooed. The main classification of animals that I have established for P and paralleled from Egypt (Hornung 1967; Chapter 2, §l.c.2) is not likely to be a purely learned classification; I also paralleled it among the Rangi (Kesby 1979). And it clearly affects the likelihood of creatures being accepted as food; of the three groups of land animals, the proportion of acceptable creatures declines as one proceeds down the scale from the birds of the air, to the beasts, to the creeping things of the ground. The conclusion that should perhaps be drawn is that birds raised less tension than beasts, that they were less significant overall to society and consequently were less likely to be ambiguous and neede'd to be surrounded by fewer restrictions.

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2. Parallels a. Leach on Animal Categories There are a few studies that may be helpful in paralleling and hence illuminating the pattern of associations we have been working out. First we ought to say something more about the very well-known paper by Leach (1964) which I have already referred to, to see if it has anything to contribute to our understanding of this pattern. It is a wide-ranging paper linking observations on language use in English (in England) with his field work among the Kachin of Burma, and drawing general conclusions with his characteristic acuity and equally characteristic rashness. The significance of this work from our point of view lies in its establishment of the notion of 'social distance' as a key element in the understanding of taboo, whether the taboo is expressed in linguistic or in behavioural terms. He argues that animals tend to fall into groups according to their closeness to human society and the degree of significance that they bear for it. Thus there are in English society pets, whose place is in the home; farm animals; preserved game, which is in a half-way position between tame and wild animals; and unequivocally wild animals. Taboo ideas tend to be concentrated on those animals that are in ambiguous situations as between the categories—this is a familiar idea in social anthropology that goes back to Radcliffe-Brown. For Leach taboo is not necessarily a matter of dietary prohibition, but may be expressed in the use of the animals's name for verbal abuse or sexual allusions, or in the surrounding of its hunting or eating with ritual. And the idea of social distance in animals may be linked up with such an idea in relation to marriage rules. This is worked out in a quite unconvincing way as regards English society, but the example from the Kachin carries a certain degree of conviction. He shows that the designations of some significant female relatives in Kachin tend to have homonyms broadly designating those areas of social distance for animals that can be seen as analogous to those of the relative in the field of marriage rules. Thus ni means 'mother-in-law' (with whom relations are incestuous) and 'near' of those animals such as the dog or the rat which live in the house and which normally cannot be eaten; na means an elder sister— and with a classificatory sister illicit relations are acceptable—and also a sacred holiday, an occasion on which farm animals are sacrificed, a necessary condition of their being eaten; nam means a cross-cousin,

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the privileged category of woman for marriage, and also the forest, from which animals may be eaten without ceremony; raw means to cease to be related, and also a tiger, the type of the remote large animals that are never eaten (Leach 1964: 61-62) There is an obvious inconsistency here: the woman with whom the ceremonial relationship of marriage may be contracted does not correspond to the animal category that is eaten with ceremony. But as far as the pure idea of 'distance' is concerned, there is a certain degree of plausibility. How far is this an illuminating model for our study? It clearly is not going to account for the binary opposition that is the basis of the system in the Old Testament in its developed form. Leach himself considers the value of his own paper to lie in the development of Levi-Strauss's theories of binary opposition in the direction of a graduated scale (1964, 62-63). But it is true to say that in practice there is a graduated scale in Israelite thinking, and that the same four main categories of animal can be recognized: inedible (close) domestic animals, domestic animals edible after sacrifice, edible wild animals, and inedible wild animals. It could be argued that all the inedible or reprobated domestic animals are associated too closely with the human community or its rejected wastes. We can also recognize a category of 'vermin' (cf. 1964: 45) in the eight unclean creeping things of Lev. 11.29-30, which obviously are those that are most likely to be encountered in the house and in cooking vessels. Though there can be no question of eating swarming things of any kind, this group are given special attention and laden with particular ritual consequences, doubtless because they draw attention to themselves in much the same way as the dog or pig: their proper place is outside the human community, but they invade not just the settlement, but the very houses and the holy place. This means there may be some value in Leach's theory with regard to the kind of relationships and attitudes we have been considering. But it is a little difficult to argue that the difference between edible and inedible wild animals in Israel is that of 'social distance'. Gazelles are no less 'socially distant' than jackals. Certainly also the idea of ambiguity as the basis of taboo is useful; we have already used it in the case of the pig, the dog, the eight unclean creeping things, and in a different way with other domestic animals. But we should be careful: the ambiguous status of these animals is not the result of natural facts in relation to a particular scheme of classification. It is rather some-

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thing imposed on them by the way in which they are kept and used in that particular society. Hence I would prefer to say that ambiguity is associated with their taboo status rather than that it is the basis of it. It is much more speculative, as we have seen with Mary Douglas, to link the categorization of animals with social relationships. Leach had at least a plausible linguistic basis for such speculation; none such seems to exist in Hebrew, if we except the obscene use of keleb, 'dog'. Moreover, there is a theoretical objection to attempting such a link. The marriage systems of the Kachin on the one hand and the Israelites and most other Near Eastern peoples on the other are radically different. The Kachin have the widespread institution of the exogamous clan that intermarries with other such clans, but between whose members marriage is forbidden. But the Israelites, as we have seen (Chapter 3, §2.d.2), practised endogamy. At every level of the social system a wife from within the same group was preferred to one without. If Leach is right in making a connection between the Kachin animal categories and their social categories, it is difficult to see how a very similar system of animal categories could be linked with a completely different marriage system. It would however be possible to argue that the much narrower list of permitted beasts in the Israelite system is related to the tendency to look inwards rather than outwards for marriage partners and in many other areas of life. This would be closely related to Mary Douglas's argument (Chapter 3, §2.d.2), and it is open in a similar way to the objections of Sahlins (1976: 118-19) and Hallpike (1979: 198) that the system of animal categories simply becomes a system of empty signs related only analogically to the cognitive appreciation of the animals. We have tried to overcome this objection by investigating the substantive characters of the animals in Hebrew thought, and we need now to see if there are other possible models that could give us some better illumination in applying this information. Leach's essay is based entirely upon the language and customs of long-established agricultural communities with no pastoral background. But our discussion in the last chapter led us to suspect that the significance of pastoralism in Israel's life and background could have had much to do with the development of the dietary law. And there are in fact a number of possible parallels in the modern literature concerning pastoral peoples. It can be argued that these parallels are

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more significant than any that can be found with customs among settled peoples. b. Game and the Pastoralist Long ago Frazer (1918: III, 158-61) noted the resemblance between the limitations placed by certain pastoral peoples of East Africa, the Masai (now usually spelt Maasai) and Bahima, on their hunting of game for food, and the rules about clean and unclean animals in the Old Testament. Both tribes lived almost exclusively on the milk and meat of their cattle (never mixing the two, another parallel: 1918: III, 150-54). The Masai despised game in general, but made an exception for the eland and the buffalo, apparently regarding them as kinds of cattle (1918: III, 159, citing Hinde and Hinde 1901: 84, 120); the Bahima allowed a slightly wider range, 'though these are limited to such as they consider related to cows, for example buffalo and one or two kinds of antelope, waterbuck and hartebeest' (Roscoe 1915: 108, in Frazer 1918: HI, 159-60). Frazer himself relates this custom to the separation of milk and meat practised by the same peoples, 'from a belief that cows are directly injured whenever their milk comes into contact with the flesh of wild animals in the stomachs of the tribesmen' (1918: HI, 160), which appears illogical, since he has told us only a few pages earlier that they made a strict separation between beef and milk, so that the wildness or cattle-likeness of the animals can have nothing to do with it. More reasonably, he concludes that 'the Hebrew usages in all these matters took their rise in the pastoral stage of society, and accordingly they confirm the native tradition of the Israelites that their ancestors were nomadic herdsmen' (p. 161). Frazer's method of culling likely-looking parallels from the four corners of the world is not that of the modern anthropologist, and does not help us to understand the meaning of the custom among the Maasai and Bahima, still less among the Israelites. But all observers of the Maasai are agreed that they are a people whose involvement, and even identification, with their cattle, which are the foundation not only of their livelihood but of their entire social system, is profound. 'Cattle are objects of affection and supreme religious significance. To the Maasai cattle give meaning to life; they mean life itself (Arhem 1985: 17). In such conditions it is understandable that the possibilities of wild animals in general as a source of food should be ignored or rejected, an attitude found among another East African pastoral

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people profoundly identified in many complex ways with their cattle: the Nuer (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 266-67).1 As Evans-Pritchard shows in the same chapter, although the Nuer like eating meat, and all cattle eventually find their way into the pot, they do so only by way of sacrifice, as in old Israel, and 'it is regarded as a fault to kill them "bang lora", "just for nothing", the Nuer way of saying that they ought not to be killed for meat' (1956: 265). When cattle offer the religious and social benefits of sacrifice with the following feast, in addition to the physical pleasure of eating meat, it is clear that the eating of game could only be a pale shadow of that. The attitude of the Maasai is perhaps only a variation on this; the buffalo obviously, and the eland slightly puzzlingly (why the eland in particular, rather than any other antelope?), could be understood metonymically, because of their outward appearance and manner of life, as acceptable, though scarcely adequate, substitutes for cattle. The parallels do undeniably suggest that such a restriction of game as is implicit in the material evidence from the Levantine Bronze and Iron Ages and explicit in the Levitical and other dietary codes may arise from a pastoral people's strong self-identification with their cattle. One finds such an identification among the East African pastoralists, and we have found features in the Old Testament above that suggest a similar identification between the people and their cattle, and that therefore tend to suggest at least a strong pastoral aspect to the Israelite culture. c. Pastoral Livestock Codes But the restriction on game is only one aspect of the dietary codes we are examining. Equally striking is the contempt for, and ultimate rejection of, the pig. Now since the pig is not kept by exclusively pastoral people, this is likely, as we have suggested, to be related in some way to the interaction between pastoral and agrarian elements in the population. There are two studies of transhumant pastoral peoples who also engage in some agriculture that may well throw some light on this 1. 'Usually they only pursue those graminivorous animals which come to drink near their camps and seem to offer themselves for slaughter. It is not that it is thought to be wrong to kill them, but that except in time of famine, Nuer are little interested in hunting. They speak of it as a Shilluk or Dinka practice beneath the serious attention of a Nuer who can boast of a herd' (Evans-Pritchard 1956: 267).

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aspect of the matter. The earlier is J.K. Campbell's book (1964) on the Greek mountain shepherds known as the Sarakatsani; the other is Peter Parkes's study (1987) of the only remaining non-Muslim people in the Hindu Kush, the Kalasha. Despite the great differences in their way of life and especially in their religion (the Kalasha are polytheists and the Sarakatsani are of course Christians), these peoples have a great deal in common. Their life is based on the herding of animals that move from the valleys to the mountains for the summer. In the Hindu Kush the men go up alone with the goats, and the women remain in the valley. Sarakatsani families, on the other hand, move as a whole with their flocks of sheep. Yet they are very similar in the sharp dichotomy they make between the sexes in economic function and ideological status, which is associated with a dichotomized view of the world. In each case the men have the exclusive care of the animals that have the highest regard: the goats among the Kalasha, the sheep among the Sarakatsani, while the women may look after the other animals and carry on agriculture, which is of some economic importance for the Kalasha, but very low in esteem. In each case women are held (at least by the men!) to be impure, and polluting in relation to the sacred herds. And the animals that they look after are correspondingly impure or at any rate of low esteem. According to Parkes, among the Kalasha, goats are 'conceptually opposed to women as respective embodiments of the "pure" and "impure" ritual spheres' (Parkes 1987: 640). Women are forbidden to approach the goat stables, lest their sexual pollution should attract spirits of ill-health towards its herd. Goats, particularly male goats, are treated as the most sacred of animals: to be tended by herdsmen under conditions of ritual purity and to be sacrificed exclusively for male deities.

However, the Kalasha also keep cattle and sheep. Cattle are impure; in the past the Kalasha avoided all cattle products and the shaman still does so. Cattle are kept in the village stables all year round, fed on waste fodder, and are required mainly for draught. Sheep do go up the mountains with the men and the goats in the summer, but they are kept separate from the adult goats, and may be kept with the cattle in the winter. They are the sacrificial animals of women, and associated with the valley demons. But the truly polluting animals are domestic fowl, which are generally associated with Muslims and thought to be dirty. Parkes goes on to list a whole series of pairs of contrasting

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concepts that exemplify and reinforce the basic dichotomy between the sacred and the polluting which are related to male and female spheres of association. The mountains and their pastures, with their typical vegetation of juniper and holm-oak are opposed to the valleys with their onions and garlic and rhong (a dyestuff); goats, with certain wild animals such as markhor, and honey-bees, which exemplify the cooperation and solidarity of the men in their summer encampments over against the family disputes of the village where agriculture is organized by households, are opposed to cattle, to hens and eggs, and to some extent to sheep. Even within the valleys the goat stables and the altars are opposed to the basdli house, where women are segregated in menstruation and childbirth, and to the graveyard (1987: 649). This last point provides particularly strong points of comparison with ancient Israel. The Kalasha say the basalt house and the graveyard are haunted by demons who are constantly seeking to enter human life and cause illness, and female sexuality and death are their best points of access. Women spend six days in the basdli house for menstruation and twenty to thirty days after childbirth. They may not touch anything associated with the goat stables; an unwitting breach requires a purificatory sacrifice. But prepubescent girls and postmenopausal women may approach their relatives' herds. On ritual occasions young boys may milk the nannies, but adult men require purification from their contact with women (1987: 651-52). There are similar livestock codes among neighbouring peoples, but the particular species may be shuffled round (1987: 654). Among the Sarakatsani it is the sheep that are sacred (a sheep is an iero prama— Campbell 1964: 277), and the goats exemplify the pollution of the women's sphere. The Sarakatsani keep goats to exploit grazing that is unsuitable for sheep, but except for the grazing it is the women who look after them, milking them, shearing them, delivering the kids. Conversely women, particularly married women and girls in their periods, 'do not approach the sheep unnecessarily' (1964: 31). For the Sarakatsani, sheep and goats, men and women, are important and related oppositions with a moral reference. Sheep are particularly God's animals, and their shepherds, made in His image, are essentially noble beings. Women through the particular sensuality of their natures are inherently more likely to have relations with the Devil; and goats were originally the animals of the Devil which Christ captured and tamed for the service of man... Sheep are docile, enduring, pure and intelligent.. .To match [their] purity and passive courage shepherds ought to be fearless

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Anton Blok (1981) adds to this the observation that an opposition between sheep and goats, more specifically between rams and billygoats, is widespread among pastoral communities in the Mediterranean area, in relation to the code of honour. The ram represents the powerful man who protects his honour, and the billy-goat is the cuckold and the symbol of shame; this reflects an observable fact of the sexual behaviour of the two species (1981: 428), and accounts for the very widespread connection of horns with cuckoldry. The specific opposition of sheep and goats is not reflected in the biblical world. Blok is mistaken here: he has misread the instructions about sacrifice, as it is so easy to do, through not being familiar with the context. He reads the fact that billy-goats are prescribed for the purification offering and for the bearing of sin in the 'scapegoat' ritual (Lev. 16) as reflecting the goat's status as a a symbol of shame. He has simply omitted to read Leviticus 4, dealing with occasional purification-offerings, where a private person brings a female goat or a ewe-lamb for a purification offering (Lev. 4.28, 32), and a priest or the whole community a bull (vv. 3, 14); only in the case of a chief (nasT) is a male goat offered. Moreover, the fact that a goat is prescribed to bear the transgressions of the entire community on the Day of Atonement bears witness rather to the honour accorded to this animal than the reverse. In Leviticus 4 it seems to be rather a question of the monetary value of the respective animals. A whole-offering (Lev. 1), which is the most honorific type of offering, may be made from any of the herds or flocks, provided that it is a male. The importance of these studies for our own is rather, in the first place, that they provide us with clear examples, from an appropriate kind of society, the pastoral, in one case with an agricultural side to the economy, of a code of oppositions being structured round animals actually kept by the society, so that animals that they keep and use and

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perhaps eat may be despised in relation to others. This offers a possible parallel to the opposition between pigs and other animals that is suggested by the material remains from Palestine as well as the written evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia, with pigs being kept and yet given very low esteem and certainly never being offered in sacrifice to the acknowledged gods of state or tribe. As this situation must lie in the background of the sharper opposition found in the Old Testament texts, the parallels indirectly illuminate the proper subject of our study. And the whole series of oppositions worked out in these studies is rich in suggestive parallels to Israelite social and ritual customs, and may therefore help us in elucidating the place of animals in that culture. The societies studied by Campbell and Parkes are structured round a profound and far-reaching opposition between the sexes. In a society where women themselves are regarded (by men!) as dangerous and corrupting, the animals associated with them share their taint. And it is fairly clear that women were indeed viewed as dangerous and corrupting by a strong current of ideology among men in ancient Israel. This is suggested (not to mention a strong trend in the narrative of the Old Testament—Eve, Delilah, Jezebel and the rest) especially by an institution with close parallels in the pastoral societies of the Kalasha and the Sarakatsani: the uncleanness of menstruation and childbirth. While we cannot say how old this is, it is surely unlikely to be simply an exilic priestly invention (as for example Leonie Archer regards it, [1990: 38]); cf. 2 Sam. 11.4.1 Mary Douglas has convincingly argued that where men's determination to control their women is not sufficiently single-minded, but in conflict with other aims, sexual pollution is likely to be believed in. Sex is likely to be pollution-free in a society where sexual roles are enforced directly... But the principle runs into trouble if there is any other principle which protects women from physical control. For this gives women scope to play off one man against another, and so to confound the principle of male dominance (Douglas 1966: 141,149).

There is, however, no direct evidence that the sexes in ancient Palestine were associated with particular animals, at least not in the strict sense we find among the Kalasha and Sarakatsani. Certainly it is 1. Though this might conceivably derive from the sixth century or later (cf. Van Seters 1983: 277-91).

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not the case that women were kept away from the flocks. Shepherds were usually male, but in a couple of places in Hebrew narrative we find women in charge of the watering of the flocks: Rachel in Gen. 29.9, who is explicitly described as 'a shepherdess' (ro'a\ and the daughters of Reuel in Exod. 2.16ff. (Song 1.8 should also be compared). In both these places the women find themselves in difficulty, Rachel because only the men can roll away the stone from the mouth of the well, the daughters of Reuel because they are harrassed by the men; they are rescued in each place by the hero. Robert Alter has suggested (1981: 51-52) that we have here examples of a literary 'type-scene' (Gen. 24.10-61 is another), the conventional prelude to the hero's betrothal, which might suggest that we need not take their data all that seriously as social insight. But the situation presumed in any realistic narrative must be plausible to the reader; hence we can safely assume that girls did look after their father's flocks, but we have no evidence that married women might be shepherdesses. Whether the development of the situation in Exodus 2, with its suggestion of sexual antagonism on the part of the male shepherds, should also be seen as a common event, or whether it is simply there for the sake of the plot, is a more obscure question. It is also unclear whether communities existed or were common in which, as among the Kalasha, a large proportion of the men engaged in transhumance, leaving the women and the weak in the village, or whether transhumant pastoralism as part of a mixed economy was always only the work of a few specialist shepherds. We have even less information about the keeping of cattle, and still less of pigs, but it is safe to say that these were never taken away from home. And if, as I have supposed, where pigs existed they were mainly raised on domestic waste, they would almost certainly have been kept by the women; and this would have been even more likely where the men were absent for long periods. There is therefore at least some possibility that the pastoral contempt for swine was developed in the context of a sexual dichotomy for which other evidence exists. But this certainly cannot have been as strong or precise in relation to the animals as among the Kalasha or Sarakatsani. The importance of these studies may then be not so much in suggesting a very precise social situation out of which the pig taboo (and others) in Israelite society might have arisen, as in simply offering suggestive analogies to the situation that we can detect in that society. The key point is the development of a social dichotomy that is

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symbolized by particular animals seen as opposed to each other. Although there is a distinct possibility that a gender-based dichotomy lies somewhere in the background, there are more obvious ones suggested by the gradually emerging history of the distinction between clean and unclean animals. One is that between pastoral and agricultural communities, or within the same community where both 'clean' animals and pigs were kept. Since the most interesting parallels we have found have been in predominantly pastoral communities, it is this dichotomy that most obviously occurs to us. We can imagine that unfavourable comparisons (as among the Sarakatsani) could be made between the diet of pigs and those of the clean-living grazing animals (and that the omnivorous voraciousness of goats would be overlooked), and perhaps also between the ferocity of pigs, animals who will even eat their own offspring, and the docility of the shepherd's flocks. This would then offer a basis for linking the various wild animals with either sphere through the associations of ideas that we explored earlier in this chapter. Yet the dichotomy between city and village, suggested by significant aspects of the contemporary evidence, seems to be equally important, but it is not likely to be so closely illuminated by the Kalasha and Sarakatsani parallels, since it would have been a matter of unilateral city contempt for pigs without a dual symbolization of the two spheres. Let me make it clear here that when I speak of dichotomy, I am not speaking of communities alien to each other and in a state of open hostility. That would obviously not be true of the sexual dichotomy of the Kalasha or Sarakatsani, and it is also by no means often true of the dichotomy between pastoral and agrarian elements (Gottwald 1979: 437ff.), nor of that between city and village (Lemche 1985: 164ff.), even though in this case the relationship of mutual economic benefit frequently turns into one of exploitation. The right conditions for the emergence of cosmological dichotomizing as a reflection of social dichotomy occur when we have two elements that need each other, cannot live without each other, and hence can never be separated, and yet despise each other. That is unfortunately only too often the position between the sexes, and not only in a society like the Kalasha, and it may also be the position between economic classes or groups. Impurity is often an expression of tension or conflicting goals within society (Douglas 1966: 140-41). We may very well imagine, for example, that if economic configurations like that of Tell Jemmeh or

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the Refa'im valley were common, where communities depended both on pastoralism and on pigs in some measure, and if there were pressures driving the community towards the nomadic life (cf. Coote and Whitelam 1987: 113), the pigs and their keepers would easily become a source of tension. Whatever the source of social tension, attitudes of contempt only develop into formal taboos when a religious factor intervenes, and this is what we find when the pig is regularly excluded from the sacred offerings. Since it must have been city-based priestly elites who decreed this, it is not a direct reflection of the divide between pastoralists and pig-keepers, but it might possibly be an indirect result. At the end of Chapter 3 I suggested that while the Israelite priestly systematizers could not have imposed an entire body of custom upon a nation de novo, they could have supported one tradition against another within it. If we look at the whole body of customary avoidances codified in the Levitical and related codes, not only that of the pig, we are, I think, confirmed in our assumption that the pastoral tradition is their ultimate source. The principle of social distance, typical as Parkes notes (1987: 655) of agricultural communities, seems to be less significant, and the most suggestive analogies appear to be found in predominantly pastoral societies. At the very least, we may say that because of objections to non-ruminant game traditional in communities with a strong pastoral element or background, it was easier for the priests to enforce a code that distinguished among wild animals in the same way as among domestic ones. 3. Developments The evidence we studied in the last chapter suggests that the official cult throughout the West Semitic world adopted a code of meanings of this kind. It is striking how widespread is the agreement on the cultic unacceptability of the pig, and how different are the cults where the pig or indeed all non-ruminants are prohibited for food: those of the worshippers of one God at Jerusalem, of many gods at Harran, of the syncretized goddess at Hierapolis. Indeed, wherever we have explicit information of the presence of such dietary codes in the ancient Near East, they are connected with cultic situations: the only exception appears to be the reports about the Phoenicians. The precise Sitz im Leben in each case is surely likely to have been the pilgrimage festival.

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Both Jerusalem and Hierapolis were important pilgrimage sancturaries; perhaps Harran was once before the restriction of its cult to the city. The restrictions would have applied for the duration of the feast, even if not longer.1 The evidence also suggests that those populations who lived permanently within the influence of such cultic places, for example at Jerusalem, always observed the restrictions. Whatever the customary avoidances on which the priestly directors of these cults built, for them it served as a means of exalting the dignity of their divine patrons, protecting the holiness of their sanctuaries and controlling their worshippers. The dignity of the gods demanded that no contemptible victims should be offered to them, and that pointed to the pig, well-known as an eater of refuse. For the sake of the holiness of the sanctuaries, purity was demanded of the worshippers; this included abstinence from all flesh meats other than the sacrificial victims and a limited range of others that could be recognized, by the associations we have explored, as similarly acceptable. The confirmation of this range of associations by the supreme deities of these influential sanctuaries, who were frequently associated with state or nation, reinforced their protection of the social order by identifying the sacrificial victims and some like them with human society and condemning others as associated with the enemies of humanity. At some stage, however—the evidence is only late—those sanctuaries where one or more of the Semitic goddesses were worshipped elaborated this system in a novel direction. In their system, where doves or fish, or both, are avoided in honour of one of the goddesses, there are not two opposed groups of animals, but three, for it clearly cannot be said in this case that doves or fish are unclean; they are in fact holy. At the same time, so we are told, those who observed these avoidances also observed others more in line with the Old Testament system, and presumably regarded their objects as unclean. It is true that Lucian reports that devotees of the Dea Syria were disagreed on whether the pig was holy or unclean (see Chapter 4, §3.b.3). Perhaps a more 1. There are many parallels outside the immediate cultural region. In Babylonia gods had each their distinctive taboos, by which particular animals were not to be offered to particular gods (Saggs 1988: 306); a stronger parallel is afforded by the fifth oration of the emperor Julian (173d), in which he discusses the dietary requirements for the worshippers of the Magna Mater, introducing them under the heading •urcep TTJ