Holiness Reaches Mourning, Meals, and the Harvest

The prophets of Baal cut themselves “after their manner with knives and lancets” on Carmel (1 Kings 18:28). Israelites did it too: Jeremiah 16:6 assumes mourners would cut themselves and shave their heads, and men arrive at Mizpah with cut bodies in Jeremiah 41:5.

Almost word for word 7:6, which grounded a war law; here the same sentence grounds rules for the body and the table. “Peculiar” comes from the Latin peculium, the private property a son or slave held in his own name, a close match for the Hebrew segullah.

“Abominable thing” is to’evah, the heading over the whole list. Genesis uses the same word for how Egyptians felt about eating with Hebrews (43:32) and about shepherds (46:34). Every people had its table boundaries; this verse names Israel’s.

Ox, sheep and goat are the three domestic animals that also went on the altar. Leviticus 11 gives only the tests for clean animals; Deuteronomy adds names, ten of them, three tame here and seven wild in the next verse.

The wild seven are hard to identify. The hart is a deer, the roebuck a gazelle. The wild goat is probably the ibex, and “pygarg”, from Greek for white rump, an antelope such as the addax. The chamois never lived in the region; the Hebrew zemer may be a wild sheep. Solomon’s table served harts, roebucks and fallowdeer (1 Kings 4:23).

The hoof test is itself double: the hoof must be parted and the cleft must run right through into two separate claws, not merely be notched. “Cheweth the cud” is literally brings up the cud, the regurgitated food ruminants chew a second time.

The coney is the shaphan, the rock hyrax, not a rabbit: Proverbs 30:26 calls them “a feeble folk, yet make they their houses in the rocks”. The hyrax and the hare move their jaws as if chewing the cud. The camel’s two toes rest on a soft pad, not a true hoof.

Pork became the test of loyalty under Antiochus IV. 1 Maccabees 1:47 records the order to sacrifice swine, and 2 Maccabees 6-7 tells of Eleazar and seven brothers who died rather than eat it. Isaiah 65:4 already condemned those “which eat swine’s flesh”.

Fins and scales exclude eels, shellfish and the scaleless catfish common in the Sea of Galilee. The parable of the net in Matthew 13:47-48, where fishermen keep the good and throw away the bad, probably reflects this sorting on the shore.

Leviticus 11:10-12 states the same rule and calls such creatures sheqets, a detestable thing, four times over. Deuteronomy says it once and uses the milder word, unclean. The content is identical; the tone is not.

No test is given for birds, only a list of exceptions. The Mishnah (Chullin 3:6) later supplied signs, chiefly that a bird which seizes its prey is unclean. Clean birds were used in the cleansing of a leper (Leviticus 14:4).

The nesher is probably the griffon vulture: Micah 1:16 speaks of its baldness, which suits a vulture better than an eagle. The ossifrage, bone-breaker, is peres, most likely the bearded vulture, which drops bones on rocks to split them and eats the marrow.

Deuteronomy names three birds where Leviticus 11:14 names two. The extra, ra’ah, is spelled almost like Leviticus’ da’ah, since the Hebrew letters r and d look alike, so the glede may be a copyist’s double. Glede is old English for the red kite.

Every raven after his kind covers the whole crow family. Noah’s raven went to and fro and did not come back (Genesis 8:7), and ravens brought Elijah bread and flesh morning and evening at the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:6): an unclean bird serving a prophet.

The “owl” is bat haya’anah, daughter of the desert, which most now take as the ostrich; Lamentations 4:3 is cruel “like the ostriches in the wilderness”. The night hawk and cuckow are guesses at tachmas and shachaf, the second perhaps a gull.

The little owl, kos, is the “owl of the desert” of Psalm 102:6. The “swan”, tinshemet, is a puzzle, because Leviticus uses the same word twice, once among birds (11:18) and once among creeping things, where the King James calls it the mole (11:30).

The gier eagle is rachamah, probably the Egyptian vulture. Its name shares the root of rachum, merciful (4:31), and the old explanation was its devotion to its young. The cormorant is shalakh, the plunger, a bird that dives for fish.

The stork is chasidah, from chesed, the loyal one; Jeremiah 8:7 notes that it “knoweth her appointed times” of migration. The lapwing is the hoopoe, voted Israel’s national bird in 2008. The bat is listed with birds because the list sorts creatures by flight, not by anatomy.

Winged swarming things are insects. Leviticus 11:21-22 allowed four kinds of locust, those with jointed legs for leaping, and John the Baptist lived on locusts and wild honey (Matthew 3:4). Deuteronomy states only the general rule.

The forbidden list, twenty-one names, is framed by two permissions, here and in 14:11. The frame decides how the list reads: the ordinary bird is allowed, and the exceptions are named one by one.

A carcass may be given free to the resident stranger, ger, but sold to the foreigner, nokhri, passing through. Leviticus 17:15 let an Israelite who ate one wash and be unclean until evening. The kid in its mother’s milk is forbidden for the third time in the Torah (Exodus 23:19, 34:26).

“Truly tithe” doubles the verb, asser te’asser. The Talmud (Ta’anit 9a) heard a pun in it on the similar word for wealth: tithe, so that you become rich. “Year by year” makes it an annual reckoning of what the field produced.

Numbers 18:15-18 gives the flesh of firstlings to the priests, yet here the owner eats them at the sanctuary. The difference sits beside the one over the tithe in 12:17, and the rabbis worked to reconcile the two. “To place his name there” uses shakan, to dwell.

The problem is abundance: “when the LORD thy God hath blessed thee”, the tithe of a good year is too heavy to carry. “If the way be too long” is literally if the way be too much for thee.

Money here is silver by weight, not coins, which came centuries later. “Bind up the money” is tsarta, to tie in a bundle, like the tseror kaspo, each man’s bundle of money, that Joseph’s brothers found in their sacks (Genesis 42:35).

Strong drink is shekhar, beer or date wine, which the Nazirite must refuse (Numbers 6:3) and Proverbs 20:1 calls raging. This is the one place in the Torah where buying it is part of a sacred meal. The list ends with an open clause: whatever your appetite asks for.

The Levite depended on these gifts. Malachi, when they failed, called withheld tithes robbery of God: “Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house” (Malachi 3:8-10).

The rabbis fixed this in the third and sixth years of the seven-year cycle, calling it ma’aser ani, the tithe of the poor, which replaced the pilgrim’s tithe in those years. 26:12 calls it “the year of tithing”. Amos 4:4 mocks those who tithe punctiliously while oppressing the poor.

The farmer later declares before the LORD that he has done it: “I have brought away the hallowed things out of mine house, and also have given them unto the Levite, and unto the stranger, to the fatherless, and to the widow” (26:13). The promise of blessing on the work of thine hand returns at 15:10 and 24:19.