Complex Numbers

Unkosher

Today's article might be a little fishy.

What Archaeology Tells Us About the Ancient History of Eating Kosher  
A new study of fish remains deepens scholars’ understanding of how the dietary laws came to be

Just a few points to clarify here before we begin, for anyone who may not have a lot of background in the whole "kosher" thing:

1) Kashrut, the dietary laws, apply year-round
2) There are additional special dietary laws that apply only on Pesach (which ends today).
2a) Contrary to popular belief, God did not command us to eat gefilte fish, and I wouldn't do it even if he did.
3) The dietary requirements laid out in the Torah, which gets all the publicity, were later expanded and fenced in by far more stringent rules in the Talmud, a set of documents set down by religious leaders sometime around the first century C.E. This article seems to be about the pre-Talmudic commandments.
4) Not all practicing Jews today keep kosher, and some ignore the Talmud.

Now, on to the actual article, which I think is pretty fascinating as a historical investigation, regardless of one's religion or lack thereof.

After Adler spoke about his research on the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, Omri Lernau—senior research fellow at Haifa University and Israel’s top authority on all things fish—spoke about remains of aquatic creatures unearthed in ancient Judean settlements. He mentioned catfish, skate and shark.

Adler, who works at Israel’s Ariel University, was instantly intrigued. According to the Jewish laws of kashrut—the set of rules written in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, that outline foods suitable for human consumption—these species are deemed non-kosher, and therefore unfit to eat.

There are at least two ways to approach this kind of thing. The first is to assume that every word in the Torah is literally true, laid down by you-know-who, and go from there. The second, which is my approach, is to ask why people wrote what they did in what would become the Bible, and one of the ways to answer that is through archaeology.

It's not my purpose here to ignite a religious argument, just to explain where I'm coming from in this entry.

According to the study, archaeologists have found the remains of three non-kosher species in the two ancients Judean settlements—the Kingdom of Israel in the region’s north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Judah residents in particular ate a lot of catfish.

I should become a copy editor.

Scholars don’t know exactly when these rules and practices were written down into the Torah, but in his upcoming book, Adler argues that evidence for its observance does not appear until the Hasmonean period that lasted from 140 B.C. to 37 B.C. And the point in history at which Judean citizens adopted the dietary rules prescribed in Torah into their lifestyles, essentially becoming kosher, is also not certain.

Another case for a copy editor. I could be wrong about this, but one does not "become kosher." One "keeps kosher," or "starts keeping kosher." Only the food is kosher or not.

The two scientists didn’t have to dig deep for the vestiges of aquatic life— Lernau had a collection of about 100,000 fish remains gathered from dozens of sites in Israel, which spans 10,000 years, from the Neolithic times to the present.

I'm imagining a bunch of those cartoon fish bones, like when an animated cat eats a fish and pulls the bones back out of its mouth. The reality is likely far less amusing.

The collection resides inside his home’s Fish Bone Cellar, which doubles as a bomb shelter during times of armed conflict.

"The Palestinians are shelling us again."

"Better go down to the Fish Bone Cellar."

Lidar Sapir-Hen, archaeozoologist at Tel Aviv University, who also studied the history of Judeans’ dietary restrictions but was not involved in this study, found similar evidence that Judeans weren’t following the laws of kashrut around similar dates that Adler examined. She had examined pig bones found in ancient Judean settlements. Pork is another type of non-kosher food and yet some digs yielded a number of pig remains.

Probably the most well-known proscription is the one against eating pork. My amateur opinion has long been that it's mostly a cultural thing, a desire to differentiate themselves from neighboring tribes. It's like if people in New Jersey looked at the people in Pennsylvania and said, "Those ungodly heathens eat cheesesteak, so we're going to pass a law that forbids cheesesteak." (Of course, cheesesteak isn't kosher either, as it blends a meat product with a dairy product, but that's not important right now.)

Other people have speculated that the anti-pork lobby was due to incomplete cooking practices and the possibility of trichinosis and other diseases that can lurk in improperly cooked pig. That explanation never really sat well with me, because it assumes that a) people before modern stoves couldn't cook for shit and b) other cultures were too stupid to notice that they were getting sick from eating pork. As a lot of people from other cultures survived munching on bacon, and even populated the rest of the world, neither assumption seems to be reasonable.

It's good to have actual archaeologists working on this, though. Perhaps they'll come up with a reason better than the above or "because God said so."