Let us start with the four-footed beasts with “paws” (Lev. XI: 27). Though not identified by species, the “pawed” animals must have consisted primarily of carnivores such as wildcats, lions, foxes, and wolves. The hunting of such animals as a source of protein epitomizes low-benefit/high-cost meat production. Such animals are scarce, skinny, hard to find, and difficult to kill.
The taboo on animals with paws probably also included the domesticated cat and dog. Cats were domesticated in Egypt to serve the highly specialized function of rodent control. Eating them, except in emergencies, would not have made life better for anyone except mice and rats. (As for eating mice and rats, cats do that more efficiently.) Dogs were used primarily to herd and hunt. To produce meat, anything (other than bones) fed to a dog would be better spent put into the mouth of a cow or a goat.
Another category of forbidden flesh in Leviticus consists of water dwellers without fins or scales. By implication, these include eels, shellfish, whales, porpoises, sturgeons, lampreys, and catfish. Most of these species, of course, were unlikely to be encountered in significant numbers on the edge of the Sinai Desert or in the Judean hills.
“Birds” constitute the largest group of specifically identified forbidden creatures: the eagle, ossifrage, osprey, kite, falcon, raven, sea gull, hawk, owl, cormorant, ibis, water hen, pelican, vulture, stork, heron, hoopoe, and bat (the last erroneously classified as a bird, Lev. XI: 13–20). All of these are also either highly elusive, rare, or nutritionally trivial species—their nutritional value is about what you would expect to get from a mouthful of feathers.
Turning to the category “insect,” it is written that “all winged insects that go upon all fours” are forbidden with the exception of locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers, “which leap upon the earth.” The exceptions are highly significant. Locusts are large, meaty insects; they occur in vast numbers and are easily gathered for food during what is likely to become a hungry period as a result of the damage they inflict on fields and pastures. They have a high benefit-to-cost ratio.
There is also the prohibition of animals that “chew the cud” but are not “cloven footed”: “camel, rock badger and hare.” And animals that are “cloven footed” but “do not chew the cud,” of which the sole example is the pig.
The rock badger is a nondomesticated creature which seems to conform to the general pattern of the other interdicted feral animals. Though the hare is also a feral species, I am reluctant to pass judgment on its cost/benefit status. After a lapse of so many thousands of years it is difficult to assign this species a definite role in the local ecosystem. But I don’t think I have to show that 100 percent of the interdicted feral creatures conform to the pattern of high costs and low benefits. I am not opposed to the idea that one or two of the species mentioned in Leviticus may have been interdicted not for ecological reasons but to satisfy random prejudices or to conform to some obscure principle of taxonomic symmetry intelligible only to the priests and prophets of ancient Israel. I should like these remarks to apply also to the category of animals that are called “swarming things”: weasel, mouse, lizard, gecko, crocodile, and chameleon. Some of these species—crocodiles, for example—would seem to be quite useless as a source of food for the Israelites, yet one cannot be certain about others on the list without a detailed study of their ecological status.
Although the camel is the only domesticated animal specifically mentioned among the non-cloven footed cud-chewers, rabbinical authorities have always included horses and donkeys in the same category. What these three domesticated species really have in common (none of them “chew the cud”) is that they are large high-cost/high-benefit animals kept by the Israelites for their contribution to transport and traction. Neither camels nor horses were kept in significant numbers. The horse was used primarily for aristocratic and military purposes, while camels were specialized for deep desert caravans. Neither could have supplied significant amounts of animal protein without interfering with their primary function. Donkeys were the Israelites’ principal pack animal, but these too could not be slaughtered for food except at great economic loss. In other words, the domesticated non-cloven-footed “cud-chewers” were just too valuable to be eaten.
To sum up: There is nothing about the list of species interdicted in Leviticus that runs counter to the ecological explanation of the pig taboo. If anything, the whole pattern seems to be one of banning inconvenient or expensive sources of meat.
The confusion surrounding the question of animal taboos appears traceable to an overly narrow preoccupation with the unique history of particular cultures abstracted from their regional settings and from general evolutionary processes. To take the case in point, the ancient Israelite pig taboo can never be satisfactorily explained in terms of values and beliefs that were peculiar to the Israelites. The fact is that the Israelites were only one among many Middle Eastern peoples who found the pig increasingly troublesome.
The pig taboo recurs throughout the entire vast zone of Old World pastoral nomadism—from North Africa across the Middle East and Central Asia. But in China, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Melanesia the pig was and still is a much-used source of dietary proteins and fats, as it is in modern Europe and the Western Hemisphere. The fact that the pig was tabooed in the great pastoral zones of the Old World and in several of the river valleys bordering these zones suggests that the Biblical taboos must be seen as an adaptive response valuable over a wide area in relation to recurrent ecological shifts brought about by the intensification and depletions associated with the rise of ancient states and empires.
The ancient Israelites even shared their abhorrence of the pig with their mortal enemies, the Egyptians. In the words of H. Epstein, one of the outstanding authorities on the history of animal domestication in Africa,
from a position of extreme importance at the beginning of the neolithic period [the pig] gradually declined in significance, and records from the dynastic period reveal the development of an increasing prejudice against it.
During Middle Dynastic times (2000 B.C.) the Egyptians began to identify pigs with Set, the god of evil. Although pig raising survived into post-Dynastic times, the Egyptians never lost their prejudice against pork. Egyptian swineherds were members of a distinct caste. They used their herds to tread seeds into the Nile flood plain as part of the planting process, and this useful function—together with the availability of permanent wetlands and swamps in the Nile Delta—may help to account for the occasional eating of pork in Egypt up to the time of the Islamic conquest. Still, according to Herodotus, the swineherds constituted the most despised caste in Egypt and, unlike all others, were forbidden to enter the temples.
Something similar seems to have happened in Mesopotamia. Archaeologists have found clay models of domesticated pigs in the earliest settlements of Lower Mesopotamia in the fifth and fourth millennia B.C. About 30 percent of the animal bones excavated from Tell Asmar (2800–2700 B.C.) belonged to pigs. Pork was eaten in Ur in pre-Dynastic times. In the earliest Sumerian dynasties there were specialist swineherds and pork butchers. After 2400 B.C., however, pork evidently became taboo and was no longer eaten.
The disappearance of the pig from the Mesopotamian diet coincides with severe ecological depletion and declining productivity in lower Sumeria, the cradle of the earliest Middle Eastern states. For 1,500 years Sumerian agriculture underwent continuous intensifications involving the construction of irrigation canals fed from the silt-laden waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The percentage of salt in the irrigation waters was harmless when the water was applied directly to the surface. However, the continuous irrigation of fields raised the level of the ground water. Through capillary action the accumulated salts were brought to the surface, rendering millions of acres unsuitable for growing wheat. Barley, more salt-resistant than wheat, was planted in zones that suffered less damage. But Sumeria became progressively weakened economically, leading to the collapse of the last Sumerian Empire, the Third Dynasty o
f Ur. By 1700 B.C. wheat had completely disappeared in the south. Thereafter, the center of population shifted to the north as Babylon began to emerge under Hammurabi. And even that great “giver of abundant riches” could not afford to keep his people fed on pork.
With the rise of Islam, the ancient Israelite pig taboo was incorporated directly into still another set of super-naturally sanctioned dietary laws. The pig was singled out for special opprobrium in the Koran, and today Moslems are as opposed as Orthodox Jews are to eating pork. Incidentally, the Koran contains an important bit of evidence in support of the ecological cost/benefit interpretation of animal taboos. The prophet Mohammed retained the Israelite taboo on the pig, but he explicitly released his followers from the taboo on eating camel flesh. The Arabian pastoralists, Mohammed’s earliest supporters, were camel nomads who inhabited true desert oases and who were often obliged to make long journeys across barren wastes where the camel was the only domesticated creature that could survive. While the camel was too valuable to be eaten regularly, it was also too valuable not to be eaten at all. Under emergency conditions associated with military campaigns and long-distance caravan trade, its flesh often meant the difference between life and death.
At this juncture I would like to clarify one point which I am eager not to see misrepresented. By tracing the origin of religious ideas to the cost/benefits of ecological processes, I do not mean to deny that religious ideas themselves may in turn exert an influence on customs and thoughts. The authors of Leviticus and the Koran were priests and prophets interested in developing a coherent set of religious principles. Once these principles were formulated, they became part of Jewish and Islamic culture down through the ages and undoubtedly influenced the behavior of Jews and Moslems who lived far from their middle Eastern homelands. Food taboos and culinary specialties can be perpetuated as boundary markers between ethnic and national minorities and as symbols of group identity independently of any active ecological selection for or against their existence. But I don’t think such beliefs and practices would long endure if they resulted in the sharp elevation of subsistence costs. To paraphrase Sherborne Cook’s remarks about Aztec rituals, no purely religious urge can run counter to fundamental ecological and economic resistance for a long period of time. I doubt that modern-day observant Jews or Moslems suffer protein deficits as a result of spurning pork. Were this the case, I would expect them to begin to change their beliefs—if not at once, then in a generation or so. (Millions of Moslems do suffer from acute protein deficits, but no one has ever suggested a causal link between the taboo on pork and underdevelopment and poverty in Egypt or Pakistan.) I do not claim that the analysis of ecological costs and benefits can lead to the explanation of every belief and practice of every culture that has ever existed. Many alternative beliefs and alternative courses of action have no clear-cut advantages or disadvantages with respect to raising or lowering standards of living. Moreover, I admit that there is always some feedback between the conditions that determine ecological and economic costs and benefits and religious beliefs and practices. But I insist that on the evidence of prehistory and history the force they have hitherto exerted on each other has not been equal. Religions have generally changed to conform to the requirements of reducing costs and maximizing benefits in the struggle to keep living standards from falling; cases in which production systems have changed to conform to the requirements of changed religious systems regardless of cost/benefit considerations either do not exist or are extremely rare. The link between the depletion of animal proteins on the one hand, and the practice of human sacrifice and cannibalism, the evolution of ecclesiastical redistributive feasting, and the tabooing of the flesh of certain animals on the other, demonstrates the unmistakable causal priority of material costs and benefits over spiritual beliefs—not necessarily for all time, but almost certainly for the cases in question.
One more link in this chain remains to be examined: namely, how it happened that in India the neolithic promise of meat for all culminated in the Hindu prescription of meat for none.
12
The Origin of the Sacred Cow
In India today only untouchables freely partake of red meat. Observant high-caste Hindus limit their diets to vegetable foods and dairy products. To eat meat is always undesirable, but the worst of all is to eat beef. High-caste Hindus feel about eating beef as an American feels about eating the family poodle. And yet there was a time when meat, especially beef, appealed to the inhabitants of India as much as steak and hamburgers now appeal to the inhabitants of North America.
Village life in India during the neolithic period was based on the production of domestic animals and grain crops. Much like Middle Eastern villagers, the earliest Indians raised cattle, sheep, and goats in combination with wheat, millet, and barley. At about 2500 B.C., when the first large settlements began to appear along the Indus River and its tributaries, vegetarianism was still a long way off. Among the ruins of the earliest cities—Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro—half-burned bones of cattle, sheep, and goats are mixed in with the kitchen debris. In the same cities, archaeologists have also found bones of pigs, water buffalo, hens, elephants, and camels.
The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, notable for their fired-brick buildings and their extensive baths and gardens, seem to have been abandoned sometime after 2000 B.C., partly as a result of ecological disasters involving changes in the course of the river channels upon which they depended for irrigation. In their weakened condition they became vulnerable to “barbarian tribes” moving into India from Persia and Afghanistan. These invaders, known as Aryans, were loosely federated, semimigratory pastoralist-farmers who first settled in the Punjab and later fanned out into the Ganges Valley. They were late bronze-age peoples who spoke a language called Vedic, the parent tongue of Sanskrit, and whose way of life strongly resembled that of the pre-Homeric Greeks, Teutons, and Celts beyond the pale of the centers of state formation in Europe and Southwest Asia. As Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro declined, the invaders took over the best lands, cleared the forests, built permanent villages, and founded a series of petty kingdoms in which they set themselves up as rulers over the region’s indigenous inhabitants.
Our information about what the Aryans ate comes largely from the holy scriptures written in Vedic and Sanskrit during the second half of the first millennium B.C. This literature shows that during the early Vedic period—up to 1000 B.C.—they dined on animal flesh, including beef, frequently and with considerable gusto. Archaeological investigations at Hastinapur also strongly suggest that cattle, buffalo, and sheep were among the animals eaten by these earliest settlers of the Gangetic plain.
Om Prakash, in his authoritative study Food and Drinks in Ancient India, sums up the situation in the early Vedic period as follows:
Fire is called the eater of ox and barren cows. The ritual offering of flesh implied that the priests would eat it. A goat is also offered to fire to be carried to forefathers. A barren cow was also killed at the time of marriage obviously for food.… A slaughter house is also mentioned. The flesh of horses, rams, barren cows, and buffaloes was cooked. Probably flesh of birds was also eaten.
In the later Vedic period,
it was customary to kill a big ox or a big goat to feed a distinguished guest. Sometimes a cow that miscarried or a sterile cow was also killed. Atithigva also implies that cows were slain for guests. Many animals—cows, sheep, goats, and horses continue to be killed at sacrifices and the flesh of those sacrificial animals was eaten by the participants.
The later Vedic and early Hindu texts contain many inconsistencies concerning the consumption of beef. Along with numerous descriptions of cattle being used for sacrifice are passages indicating that cows must never be slaughtered and that beef eating should be abandoned altogether. Some authorities—A. N. Bose, for example—claim that these inconsistencies can best be explained by the hypothesis that orthodox Hindu scholars interpolated the anti-beef-eating, anti-cow-slaughtering passages at a later da
te. Bose feels that “beef was the commonest flesh consumed” throughout most of the first millennium B.C. Perhaps a less controversial solution to the contradictions in the sacred texts is that they reflect gradual changes of attitudes over an extended period during which more and more people came to regard the eating of domesticated animals—especially cows and oxen—as an abomination.
What emerges with crystal clarity is that the late Vedic-early Hindu Ganges Valley kingdoms had a priestly caste analogous to the Lévites among the ancient Israelites and the Druids among the Celts. Its members were called Brahmans. The duties of the Brahmans are described in the Sanskrit works known as Brahmanas and sutras. There is no doubt that early Brahman ritual life, like that of the Druids and Lévites (and the earliest religious specialists of every chiefdom and statelet between Spain and Japan), centered on animal sacrifice. Like their counterparts all over the Old World, the early Brahmans enjoyed a monopoly over the performance of those rituals without which animal flesh could not be eaten. Brahmans, according to the sutras, were the only people who could sacrifice animals.
The sutras indicate that animals should not be killed except as offerings to the gods and in extending “hospitality to guests” and that “making gifts and receiving gifts” were the special duties of Brahmans. These prescriptions precisely duplicate the regulatory provisions for the consumption of meat characteristic of societies in which feasting and animal sacrifice are one and the same activity. The “guests” honored by early Vedic hospitality were not a handful of friends dropping by for dinner but whole villages and districts. What the sutras are telling us, in other words, is that the Brahmans were originally a caste of priests who presided over the ritual aspects of redistributive feasts sponsored by “open-handed” Aryan chiefs and war lords.
Cannibals and Kings Page 17
