Clean Animals Since Noah

Part One ended in a conversation about bread, where Yeshua told the crowd, “Do not work for the food which perishes” (John 6:27), and where the faith He meant was a faith that obeys. Part Three goes back to where that conversation began, at the table.

Of all the places where Christians find it hard to believe the Bible as it is written, this one stands first. Many sincere believers who would never say that the Ten Commandments were abolished are quite sure that what God once called unclean is now on the menu. In this part, then, we first set out the laws of clean and unclean: blood, birth, skin, the marriage bed, the dead, and unclean spirits. Then we open every verse used to say “eat anything,” one at a time and each in its own setting, and go on to Daniel’s table, the holy table, and the goal of all of it, which is a single word: holy.

One thing stays fixed on every page. No one is saved by food laws. A sinner is made right with God by grace, through faith in the Messiah’s blood, as a gift. The question of this part is how the saved are called to walk.

The Claim

Here is the claim in its plainest form.

“Food is food. God told Noah that every moving thing would be food for him (Genesis 9:3). Whatever people eat is food, and what you eat is between you and God.”

It sounds like common sense, yet it passes over a question that almost nobody asks. When Yeshua and His apostles said “food,” what did they mean by the word?

The answer is simple. They meant what Scripture calls food; nothing else was in the word.

Where Leviticus Begins

For a Jew of the first century, the line between food and not-food was not a matter of taste or habit. God had drawn it in writing.

Leviticus 11:2 Speak to the sons of Israel, saying: This is the living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) which you may eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.

The chapter does not open with a list of what is forbidden. It opens by naming what is food: “This is the living thing (chai) which you may eat.” The Hebrew word here is chayyah (חַיָּה), from chai, alive, and it simply means a living thing; out of all the living things on the earth, God names the ones that are for eating.

The same chapter closes by saying why the list was given.

Leviticus 11:46-47 This is the Torah of the beast, and of the bird, and of every living soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) that moves in the waters, and of every soul (nephesh) that swarms upon the earth; to make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the living thing (chai) that may be eaten and the living thing (chai) that may not be eaten.

There are two kinds of living things, then: one is food, and the other is not. Moses says it again in Deuteronomy in one short sentence, and he gives the reason in the sentence before it.

Deuteronomy 14:2-3 For a holy people you are to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be to Him for a people, a treasured possession, out of all the peoples that are upon the face of the ground (adamah אֲדָמָה ad-aw-maw'). You shall not eat any abomination.

The line around Israel’s table is drawn because of whose people they are: “For a holy people you are to the LORD your God.” The word for abomination, toevah תּוֹעֵבָה to-ay-baw', names something God finds detestable. It is not a lesser kind of food. It is not food at all.

Older Than Moses

The line is older than Sinai. Before the flood, God gave Noah an instruction about the animals.

Genesis 7:2 Of every clean beast you shall take for yourself seven seven, a man (ish אִישׁ eesh) and his woman (ishah אִשָּׁה ish-shaw'); and of the beast that is not clean, two, a man (ish) and his woman (ishah).

God did not stop to tell Noah which animals were clean, because Noah already knew. He sorted them by sevens and by twos, and when the waters went down, he used the same knowledge at the altar.

Genesis 8:20 And Noah built an altar to the LORD, and took of every clean beast and of every clean bird, and offered burnt offerings upon the altar.

Only the clean went on the altar.

Now read the verse that is quoted to say that everything became food.

Genesis 9:3-4 Every moving thing that is alive (chai) shall be for food for you; as the green herb I have given you all. But flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') with its soul (nephesh), its blood, you shall not eat.

God is speaking to a man who had just spent a year living with the difference between clean and unclean. He had loaded the ark by that distinction and worshiped by it. The word itself is worth noticing as well. “Every moving thing that is alive (chai)” uses a word from the same Hebrew root as Leviticus’s “the living thing (chai) which you may eat”: chai, alive, in Genesis, and chayyah, a living thing, in Leviticus.

Think of a father who tells his teenage son, “Eat anything in the fridge.” The boy knows what that means: the leftover pizza, the apples, the sliced meat. He does not take it as permission to drink the bottle of medicine on the bottom shelf, because what counts as eating was already understood between them.

The very next words put a limit on the eating: “But flesh (basar) with its soul (nephesh), its blood, you shall not eat.” Genesis 9:3 is not an open door. A food law follows it at once, and the apostles later gave that same law to the believers from the nations. We will read it in Chapter 22.

We Worship What We Know

Yeshua spoke of this kind of knowing. Talking with a Samaritan woman about worship, He said:

John 4:22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for Salvation is from the Jews.

He spoke as a Jew, of what the Jews knew because God had told them in His word. They did not have to guess whom to worship, and in the same way they did not have to guess what food was.

A Jewish mother did not need to sit her children down and explain that pork was not food, any more than a mother today needs to explain that the dog’s dish is not dinner. It was simply known, from the first time a child could chew. Why the pig in particular became the line no faithful Jew would cross is a story of its own, bound up with Hanukkah and the last chapters of Isaiah, and Chapter 28 tells it.

Even When the Word Is Not Spoken

The same is true where the word “food” is not used at all. In Mark 7, Yeshua speaks of “whatever goes into the man from outside” (Mark 7:18). In Matthew, He says “everything that enters the mouth” (Matthew 15:17). To Yeshua and to every Jew around Him, what went into the mouth was clean food. Nothing else was on the table to be talked about.

Peter is the proof. Years after the resurrection, a voice in a vision told him to kill and eat, and he answered in astonishment.

Acts 10:14 But Peter said, "By no means, Lord, for I have never eaten anything koinos κοινός koy-nos'(common, worldly) or akathartos ἀκάθαρτος ak-ath'-ar-tos(impure, unclean)."

When he told the story in Jerusalem, he put it even more plainly.

Acts 11:8 But I said, 'By no means, Lord, for nothing koinos(common, worldly) or akathartos(impure, unclean) has ever entered my mouth.'

From the day he was born until that day on a rooftop in Joppa, nothing unclean had gone into Peter’s mouth. And, as Chapter 15 shows, he was in the house when Yeshua explained what enters the mouth.

Peter was not the first to answer God in this way. Centuries earlier, God told the prophet Ezekiel to bake his bread over human dung, as a sign of the unclean bread Israel would eat in exile (Ezekiel 4:12-13). Ezekiel recoiled.

Ezekiel 4:14 And I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, my soul (nephesh) has not been defiled; and a carcass, or what is torn, I have not eaten from my youth even until now, and foul flesh (basar) has not come into my mouth."

“From my youth even until now,” said the prophet in Babylon, and the apostle in Joppa answered with the same reflex. God heard Ezekiel and gave him cow’s dung instead (Ezekiel 4:15). Neither man had to be told what was not food. Both had guarded their mouths by that knowledge all their lives.

What This Chapter Says

In every verse ahead, then, one question stays before us: when Yeshua or an apostle says “food,” what did the word mean to those who heard it? It meant what Scripture calls food.

Peter, however, did not say only “unclean.” He used two words, koinos and akathartos, and the voice from heaven answered only one of them. Those two words are the key to more than one passage in the New Testament.