The Pig in Torah and History

Leviticus 11 names many animals that are not food: the camel, the rock badger, the hare, the eagle, the vulture, the owl, and the creatures in the water without fins and scales. Yet when people argue about the food laws today, they almost never argue about vultures. They argue about the pig.

Behind the whole debate sits a question, even when nobody asks it out loud.

“Why the pig? If God made it, why would He forbid it? Surely it is just an animal like any other, and the rule was for a time before good cooking.”

It is a fair question. The answer comes from three places: from where the pig lived, from what it did, and from what happened when an enemy of Israel chose it as his weapon.

Where the Pigs Were

Though pork was not food to a Jew, the pig was still a real animal in a real land, and the Gospels show us where it lived.

Mark 5:11-13 Now there was a large herd of swine feeding nearby on the mountain. The demons(individual evil spirits to be expelled) implored Him, saying: "Send us into the swine so that we may enter them." And immediately Yeshua gave them permission. And coming out, the akathartos ἀκάθαρτος ak-ath'-ar-tos(unclean) pneuma πνεῦμα pnyoo'-mah(spirits) entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea — about two thousand of them — and were drowned in the sea.

The scene is “the region of the Gadarenes,” across the Sea of Galilee, in Gentile country (Mark 5:1). The herd was large, “about two thousand of them.”

Luke 15:13-16 And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living. Now when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he was longing to fill his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving anything to him.

The son who wasted his inheritance went “into a distant country,” and there a citizen of that country sent him “into his fields to feed swine.”

In both stories the pigs are among the nations. They were kept in Gentile fields, not in Israel’s kitchens.

A Working Animal

The pig earned its place among the people who kept it. It eats almost anything: kitchen scraps, refuse, carrion, mice, and snakes.

It is also one of the few animals that can take a venomous snake’s bite and live. In 2015 the journal Toxicon published a study by Danielle Drabeck, Antony Dean, and Sharon Jansa. They found that the pig, like the honey badger and the hedgehog, carries a change at the very spot on its nerve receptor where cobra-type venom must lock on, so that the venom cannot bind.

Farmers on the American frontier knew the result without the science. They turned hogs loose on rattlesnake ground to clear out the snakes, and the hogs killed them and ate them.

Consider what that meant in Bible lands, for families living in tents and thin-walled houses in a land of snakes. A pig at the door cleared the refuse and killed the snakes. It was a guard, a cleaner, and a working animal worth keeping.

It was useful, but being useful did not make it food.

A watchdog is useful too. It guards the house, warns of strangers, and chases off what should not be there. Families have kept dogs for thousands of years and have been glad to have them, yet that does not put the dog on the dinner table. Usefulness answers the question “Why keep it?” It does not answer the question “Is it food?” For that, God had already given the answer in writing.

Where the Torah Draws the Line

Now look at exactly where the Torah puts the pig’s uncleanness.

Leviticus 11:7-8 And the swine, because it parts the hoof and is cleft, splitting the cleft, but it does not ruminate the cud, it is unclean to you. Of their flesh (basar בָּשָׂר baw-sawr') you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch; they are unclean to you.

The verse names two things: eating its flesh, and touching its dead body.

The same chapter says this of the unclean beasts in general.

Leviticus 11:24 And by these you shall become unclean; everyone who touches their carcass shall be unclean before(ad עד) the evening.

It is the carcass, the dead body, that makes a person unclean. A living pig does not. A man could touch it, feed it, drive it out of his yard, or keep it at the door, and he was not made unclean by it. The line the Torah draws is not around the animal walking in the field. It is around the mouth and around the dead body.

Modern medicine adds a fact that fits. The larvae of the roundworm Trichinella live in the muscle of pigs, and people who eat undercooked pork can get trichinosis from them. The scavenger that keeps the yard clean carries in its own flesh what it has eaten.

The Test the Enemy Chose

Because every faithful Jew knew that the pig was not food, the pig became the test that the enemies of God’s people reached for.

In 167 BC the Greek king Antiochus IV, who ruled over Judea, set out to force the Jews to give up the Torah. He set up an altar to Zeus in the temple in Jerusalem and offered swine upon it. Then he ordered the Jews to eat pork on pain of death.

An old scribe named Eleazar, ninety years old and highly respected, was seized, and his captors tried to force his mouth open to make him eat it. Some of the officials, who had known him a long time, offered him a way out: he could bring meat of his own and only pretend to eat the pork. He refused. If an old man pretended at ninety, he said, the young would think that Eleazar had gone over to the ways of the nations, and they would be led astray because of him. He chose death instead (2 Maccabees 6).

Three years later the temple was cleansed and dedicated to God again. That cleansing is Hanukkah, the Feast of Dedication, and Yeshua walked in the temple at that very feast.

John 10:22-23 At that time the Feast of Dedication took place in Jerusalem; it was winter, and Yeshua was walking in the temple in the portico of Solomon.

He was there for the feast that remembers the cleansing of God’s house after swine had been offered on its altar.

What Isaiah Saw at the End

Isaiah names the eating of swine among the marks of a rebellious people.

Isaiah 65:4 who sit among the graves and lodge in the secret places, who eat the flesh (basar) of swine, and broth of foul things is in their vessels;

A few verses later comes the great promise: “For behold, I am creating new heavens and a new earth” (Isaiah 65:17). In the chapter that follows, still speaking of the end, Isaiah writes this.

Isaiah 66:3 He who slaughters the ox strikes a man (ish אִישׁ eesh); he who sacrifices the lamb breaks a dog's neck; he who offers up a grain offering offers swine's blood; he who burns frankincense as a memorial blesses iniquity. Indeed, they have chosen their own ways, and their soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh) delights in their abominations.

God sets the offering of swine’s blood beside striking a man and breaking a dog’s neck. Their worship has become detestable, because “they have chosen their own ways.”

Isaiah 66:17 Those who sanctify themselves and purify themselves toward the gardens, behind one in the midst, who eat the flesh (basar) of swine and the detestable thing and the mouse, together they shall come to an end, declares the LORD.

This is written in the setting of the last days. Just before it, the LORD comes “in fire” to judge (Isaiah 66:15-16). Just after it come the new heavens and the new earth, when “all flesh (basar) shall come to worship before me” (Isaiah 66:22-23).

The prophet places the swine and the mouse not in some early age that the Messiah would close, but at the end, beside the new creation. If the line between food and not-food had been erased, Isaiah would have had no reason to name the pig in his last chapter.

What the Pig Was For

The pig was for guarding, for cleaning, and for clearing out the snakes. It was never for the table of God’s people.

One man had known that from childhood. He had been in the house when Yeshua explained His saying about what enters a man, and years after the resurrection, on a rooftop by the sea, a voice told him to kill and eat.