Cannibals and Kings (21 page)

The first domesticated species to become too expensive to serve as a source of meat was probably the pig. We know from the Old Testament that the Israelites were commanded to abstain from the eating of pork early in their history. Since the meat of cattle, sheep,
and goats played an important role in the ancient Israelite “great provider” redistributions, prohibition of the consumption of such an excellent source of animal flesh seems difficult to understand. Remains of domesticated pig appear in the neolithic villages of Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and Anatolia almost as early as those of sheep and goats. Moreover, unlike other domesticated species, the pig was domesticated primarily for its flesh. Pigs can’t be milked or ridden, can’t herd other animals, pull a plow, or carry a cargo, and don’t catch mice. Yet as a supplier of meat the pig is unrivaled; it is one of the most efficient converters of carbohydrates to proteins and fat in the entire animal kingdom. For every 100 pounds of feed consumed, a pig will produce about 20 pounds of meat, while from the same amount of feed cattle produce only about 7 pounds. In terms of calories produced per calorie of food, pigs are over three times more efficient than cattle and about two times more efficient than chickens. (Pound for pound, pork has more calories than beef.)

Before I attempt to explain why it was pork that first became the object of supernatural interdictions, let me say something about the general principles governing the establishment of taboos on animal flesh. As suggested by Eric Ross, who has studied the problem of animal taboos among the Indians of the Amazon Basin, the most important general point to be kept in mind is that the ecological role of particular species is not fixed for all time but is part of a dynamic process. Cultures tend to impose supernatural sanctions on the consumption of animal flesh when the ratio of communal benefits to costs associated with the use of a particular species deteriorates. Cheap and abundant species whose flesh can be eaten without danger to the rest of the system by which food is obtained seldom become the
target of supernatural proscriptions. Animals that have high benefits and low costs at one time, but that become more costly later on, are the principal targets of supernatural sanctions. The most severe restrictions tend to develop when a nutritionally valuable species not only becomes more expensive but its continued use endangers the existing mode of subsistence. The pig is such a species.

Pig raising incurred costs that posed a threat to the entire subsistence system in the hot, semiarid lands of the ancient Middle East. And this threat increased sharply as a result of intensification, depletion, and population growth linked to the development of pristine and secondary states throughout the region after 4000
B.C.
The pig is essentially a creature of forests, river-banks, and the edges of swamps. It is physiologically maladapted to high temperatures and direct sunlight because it cannot regulate its body temperature without external sources of moisture—it cannot sweat. In its natural forest habitat the pig eats tubers, roots, and fruits and nuts that have fallen to the ground. If it is fed on plants with a high cellulose content, it completely loses its advantage over ruminant species as a converter of plants to meat and fat. Unlike cattle, sheep, goats, donkeys, and horses, hogs cannot metabolize husks, stalks, or fibrous leaves; they are no better than people when it comes to living on grass.

When the pig was first domesticated, there were extensive forests covering the hilly flanks of the Taurus and Zagros mountains and the other upland zones of the Middle East. But beginning in 7000
B.C.
the spread and intensification of mixed farming and herding economies converted millions of acres of Middle Eastern forests to grasslands. At the same time, millions of acres of grasslands were converted to deserts.

Agricultural and pastoral intensification fostered the spread of arid-land plants at the expense of formerly lush tropical and semitropical vegetation. Authorities estimate that the forests of Anatolia were reduced from 70 percent to 13 percent of total surface area between 5000
B.C.
and the recent past. Only one-fourth of the former Caspian shorefront forest remains, one-half of the mountain humid forest, one-fifth to one-sixth of the oak and juniper forests of the Zagros, and one-twentieth of the juniper forests of the Elburg and Khorassan ranges. The regions that suffered most were those taken over by pastoralists or former pastoralists. The history of the Middle East has always been dominated by the ephemerality of the boundary between farm and desert, as epitomized in Omar Khayyam’s verse:

Today, as R. D. Whyte has noted, “The bald mountains and foothills of the Mediterranean shorelines, the Anatolian plateau, and Iran stand as stark witnesses of millennia of uncontrolled utilization.”

The ancient Israelites arrived in Palestine during the early to middle iron age, about 1200
B.C.
, and took possession of mountainous terrain which had not previously been cultivated. The woodlands in the Judean and Samaritan hills were rapidly cut down and converted into irrigated terraces. Areas suitable for raising pigs on natural forage were severely restricted. Increasingly, pigs had to be fed grains as supplements, rendering them directly competitive with human beings; moreover, their cost increased because they needed artificial shade and moisture. And yet they continued to be a tempting source of protein and fat.

Pastoralists and settled farmers living in regions
undergoing deforestation might be prompted to rear the pig for short-term benefits, but it would be extremely costly and maladaptive to raise pigs on a large scale. The ecclesiastical prohibition recorded in Leviticus had the merit of finality: by making even a harmless little bit of pig raising unclean, it helped put down the harmful temptation to raise a lot of pigs. I should point out that some of my colleagues have challenged this explanation on the ground that if pig raising was really so harmful there would have been no need for special ecclesiastical sanctions against it. “To require a taboo on an animal which is ecologically destructive is cultural overkill. Why use pigs if they are not useful in a stated context?” But it is the role of pigs in an evolving system of production that is under consideration here. To prohibit raising pigs was to encourage raising grains, tree crops, and less costly sources of animal protein. Moreover, just as individuals are often ambivalent and ambiguous about their own thoughts and emotions, so whole populations are often ambivalent and ambiguous about aspects of the intensification processes in which they are participating. Think of the pros and cons of offshore drilling and the ongoing debate about the taboo on abortions. It was not a matter of “cultural overkill” to invoke divine law against the pig any more than it is “cultural overkill” to invoke divine law against adultery or bank robberies. When Jahweh prohibited homicide and incest, he did not say, “Let there be only a little bit of homicide” or “Let there be only a little bit of incest.” Why, then, should he have said, “Thou shalt eat of the swine only in small amounts”?

Some people feel that ecological cost/benefit analysis of pig raising is superfluous because the pig is simply an exceptionally unappetizing creature that eats human excrement and likes to wallow in its own urine and
feces. What this approach fails to cope with is that if everyone naturally felt that way the pig would never have been domesticated in the first place, nor would it continue to be eagerly devoured in so many other parts of the world. Actually, pigs wallow in their own feces and urine only when they are deprived of alternative sources of the external moisture necessary for cooling their hairless and sweatless bodies. Moreover, the pig is scarcely the only domesticated animal that will, given the chance, gobble up human excrement (cattle and chickens, for example show little restraint in this regard).

The notion that the pig was tabooed because its flesh carried the parasite that causes trichinosis should also be laid to rest. Recent epidemiological studies have shown that pigs raised in hot climates seldom transmit trichinosis. On the other hand, naturally “clean” cattle, sheep, and goats are vectors for anthrax, brucellosis, and other human diseases that are as dangerous as anything the pig can transmit, if not more so.

Another objection raised against an ecological explanation of the Israelite pig taboo is that it fails to take into account the fact that the flesh of many other creatures is prohibited in the Old Testament. While it is true that the pig taboo is but one aspect of a whole system of dietary laws, the inclusion of the other interdicted creatures can also be explained by the general cost/benefit principles summarized earlier in this chapter. The majority of the forbidden species were wild animals which could only be obtained by hunting. To a person whose subsistence depended primarily on flocks, herds, and grain agriculture, the hunting of animals—especially of species that had become scarce or which did not live in the local habitat—was a poor cost/benefit bargain.

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.