Showing posts with label pig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pig. Show all posts

Thursday, March 26, 2020

Israelites Native to the Levant


People in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean ate a lot of pork. Those in the Levant ate little. These traditions, enmeshed into the fabric of everyday life, would later lend themselves as markers of difference between groups of people, such as the Israelites (native to the Levant) and the Philistines (migrants from the Aegean) around 1200 BCE.

Galvanized in this manner, pork took on a new meaning. It became an indicator of “us” vs. “them” in Philistine-Israelite conflicts. Drawing on this, and with the likely intent of crystallizing ethnic traditions to shore up political power, the Biblical authors (writing in the early-mid-1st millennium BCE) declared pigs an abomination.

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