I ALWAYS look forward to evening prayer on the day when verses from Leviticus 11 are prescribed in the one-year “pillar” lectionary, which is widely used in cathedrals and large churches. This is because it is difficult to read, or even hear, with an entirely straight face the list of animals that may not be eaten: “Among those that chew the cud or have divided hoofs, you shall not eat the following: the camel, for even though it chews the cud, it does not have divided hoofs; it is unclean for you.”
The ban on camel burgers is followed up by a ban on eating rock badgers, hares, and pigs; and the passage goes on to forbid flying things that are off the menu: “the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the buzzard, the kite”, and, for good measure, “the heron, the hoopoe, and the bat”. Then there are things that swarm, move on their bellies, or on all fours, or have many feet. So, do not think to snack on snake, or centipedes, or lizards.
The New Testament lesson that follows, from Acts 10, comes as rather an anti-climax. Peter is encouraged in a dream to eat from a whole trolley of four-footed creatures, reptiles, and birds, which are let down from heaven in a sheet. The dream is symbolic. Peter is being instructed to admit the ritually unclean Gentiles into the Church, not to munch on a lizard.
What we miss in the Leviticus reading is what it means in its own context, and could mean in ours. Jewish law is ultimately about discernment, and it is not simply abolished by either by Jesus or Paul, although both comment on it and interpret it afresh, as the scribes and the rabbis always did. The categorisation of different creatures, and the division into the clean and unclean, is a display both of the wonders of God and the limits of human capability.
God does not hate rock badgers. But the interpreters of the law categorised them as animals not suitable for human consumption. Christians changed their minds about pork and shellfish, but many of the rest of the proscribed creatures are still not widely eaten, and would be on the menu only in I’m a Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here!
But we should remember that both clean and unclean animals were taken into Noah’s ark; neither were wiped out in the flood. The real lesson for us from Leviticus is that God has a purpose and a delight in those aspects of nature which are forbidden for us to consume. There is here the beginnings of an eco-theology that demands a boundary on human appetite and empty curiosity, and a recognition that, whatever God intends by the complex created world in which we live, it is not all about us.