2. of all the animals that are on the land. Although the last word in this chain, ʾerets, often means “earth,” the list that immediately follows makes clear that the category in question is land animals.

3. Everything that has hooves and that has split hooves. The inventory of permitted and prohibited creatures and much of the language in which it is cast are quite similar to what one finds in the dietary laws in Deuteronomy 14. Jacob Milgrom makes a plausible argument that the author of the laws in Deuteronomy was familiar with our text and offered what amounts to an abridgement of it. Absent from the parallel passage in Deuteronomy is the lengthy section here, beginning with verse 31, that is concerned not with dietary taboos but with impurity (“uncleanness”) imparted by contact with the bodies of the forbidden animals. Purity and impurity, of course, are a preoccupation of the Priestly writers.

5–6. the hare . . . the rock-badger. Already at this point in the list, there is some uncertainty about the identity of the animals named in the Hebrew, and this uncertainty grows as the text moves on to birds, amphibians, reptiles, and insects. See the comment on Deuteronomy 14:7–19. The use in translation of relatively rare zoological designations such as “gecko” and “skink” jibes with the puzzlement that many of the Hebrew terms elicit.

7. the pig. It is only later, in the Hellenistic period, that the pig becomes the prohibited animal par excellence, although the anonymous prophet of the Babylonian exile whose words are recorded in Isaiah 66:17 brackets eaters of pig and rat as participants in some unspeakable pagan rite. Pork was a common food among the Philistines and was also sometimes eaten by Canaanites, as archaeological inspection of the bones of animals consumed has determined. Interestingly, in the high country in the eastern part of Canaan, where Israelite population was concentrated toward the end of the second millennium B.C.E., the percentage of pig bones discovered is only a fraction of what it is in the Canaanite lowlands. This suggests that the taboo was already generally embraced by the Israelites at an early period (well before the composition of the Torah) and also that some Israelites chose to disregard it.

10. that have no fins or scales, of all the swarming creatures of the water. Mary Douglas has proposed that what underlies the dietary prohibitions is a general commitment of the Israelite mind-set to clear and distinct categories: forms of animal life that appear to be ambiguous instances of their particular zoological class may not be eaten. That proposal seems a little strained for the land animals because it is not self-evident that a nonruminant with hooves, such as the pig, is somehow a violation of the category “land animal.” Her argument is more plausible for sea creatures, and, perhaps also, for amphibians and reptiles. Fish, possessing fins and scales, are the exemplary category instance of denizens of the water. Yet the sea “swarms” or pullulates (Hebrew shorets) with polymorphous creatures in shells and plasmic blobs and tentacles that seem altogether unlike fish, and from this pullulation the Israelites are enjoined to distance themselves. It is noteworthy that terms from the Creation story abound here: “swarming creatures” (sherets), “according to its kind” (which is to say, “of every kind”), “gathering of water,” “stirs” (romeset, which in the different context of Genesis 1 was rendered as “crawling”). The dietary laws are framed to make a statement about the Israelites’ place in the created order of things that is a kind of qualifying addendum to the Priestly panorama of creation in Genesis 1. God’s fecund world calls all sorts of living creatures into existence, and man is one of these. But the Israelites are expected to set themselves apart from the natural world to which they belong just as they are required to set themselves apart from the nations with which, of necessity, they participate in political, economic, and cultural intercourse. Thus they are forbidden the flesh of whole classes of living creatures, especially when animal life seems to manifest its most intense, category-dissolving pullulation. One may wonder whether behind all this, at least for sea creatures, reptiles, insects, and amphibians, there is some sort of horror of the inchoate, the seemingly formless, a horror akin to the revulsion in the face of the primordial serpent.

21. that which has. The Masoretic Text reads “that which does not have,” ʾasher loʾ, almost certainly a scribal error for ʾasher lo, “that which has.”

24. Whoever touches their carcass shall be unclean. It is the dead unclean animal that conveys this impurity by touch, not the living one. (Abraham ibn Ezra expresses indignation against the Sadducees for imagining that living animals are included.) Dead bodies of any sort impart ritual impurity, but in the present case, because a dead animal is potential food, the “uncleanness” inhering in the prohibited creature assumes an especially dangerous potency. It is imagined as a source of contamination transmitted by physical contiguity, rather like a physical contagion.

25. whoever bears off anything from their carcass. As several medieval commentators note, the act of carrying off part of the carcass necessarily involves closer and more sustained contact with the source of impurity and so it requires laundering of the garments as well as bathing.

27. whatever goes on its paws. This category of prohibition is of course already implied in the earlier stipulation regarding split hooves, but the Priestly writers seek to make the classes of proscribed animals as clear and explicit as possible.

32. whatever upon which something from them falls. Here and in the subsequent verses the notion of contamination through contact is extended. Impurity is imparted not only to a person when he or she reaches out to touch or pick up the carcass of a forbidden creature but also when any part of the carcass—say, a piece of decaying bird whose body is lodged in a tree—comes in contact with any substance. Porous substances that can be suffused with water in immersion—wood, cloth, skin, sackcloth—can be purified of the contamination through immersion. Earthen vessels, which are porous but cannot be saturated, must be destroyed.

36. And he who touches their carcass shall be unclean. This clause looks suspiciously out of place—perhaps an inadvertent scribal repetition from above.

38. should water be put on seed. This stipulation is an especially vivid illustration of how impurity is imagined as a contagion in quasimedical terms. Dry planted seed in the ground is deemed part of the natural growing world and resistant to contamination. Wet, softened seed becomes permeable to the contaminating substance.

39. one of the beasts die which are your food. Even the carcass of a permitted animal (which has died rather than been deliberately slaughtered) conveys impurity. Milgrom, noting the horror of the dead body and invoking the ban on consuming blood and on eating a kid boiled in its mother’s milk (neither of these mentioned here), argues that the dietary prohibitions are an affirmation of life over death. That claim seems apologetic, for it is not clear why, say, the prohibition on eating nonruminants is an affirmation of life.

42. Whatever goes on its belly. This phrase, of course, is another allusion to the Creation story, or rather, to the end of that story in the Garden of Eden, when an enmity between humankind and a representative of the animal kingdom (the serpent) is first introduced.

45. you shall be holy, for I am holy. This is a grand concluding generalization, but its precise application to the dietary prohibitions is not entirely clear. Imitatio dei is ringingly proclaimed. Perhaps because God is involved with creation yet loftily removed from it, Israelite man in his image in this cosmic hierarchy (compare Psalm 8) is enjoined to set himself at a certain distance from the natural world of which he is necessarily a part by restricting categories of animal food, by not ingesting all living creatures in the teeming polymorphous fullness of their pullulation. The reiterated verb “to divide” is a key to the Priestly account of creation in Genesis 1: the world comes into coherent being when God divides the chaotically interfused primal elements—light and darkness, the waters above and the waters below, the sea and dry land—from each other. Here the Israelites are commanded to emulate God by setting up a framework for daily life in which they are to “divide” (verse 47) between the unclean and the clean, between what is forbidden and permitted to be eaten.