Why swine meat is unclean?

Answer 1

Hogs-and-Other-Hazards

By Joe Crews

During my 46 years of ministry, largely in public evangelism, I have observed some interesting methods of Bible study. For example, many people diligently search the Scriptures, not to find truth, but simply to gather support for their preconceived religious ideas. Their minds are not open to be taught by God's Holy Spirit, and therefore they can manipulate the sacred texts to mean exactly what they want to believe.

One of the great, basic principles of Bible study is to search out the truth on any given subject from all the texts in The Bible. It is literally true that you can prove almost anything you want to prove by using a single, isolated text of Scripture. That is why it is so important to bring together the consensus of what Moses, David, Jesus, Paul and all other inspired authors have to say on the subject. That may involve a hundred or more verses! And even then, there still might be some confusion, because five or six of those hundred texts can always seem to contradict the rest.

So should those half-dozen aberrant verses be discarded since they don't harmonize with the others No indeed. They should be given special study in the context of surrounding verses, and also in comparison with the 95 which are in agreement. Very quickly it will be discovered that the ambiguity exists only in the mind, and the total Bible picture is in perfect focus and unity.

Someone has said that a text without its context is a pretext, and I believe it. This is particularly true of several strange verses which have been a stumbling block to thousands of earnest Bible students. Under careful scrutiny, however, these "problem texts" are found to be in harmony with each other and also with the rest of the inspired record. Because these texts relate to diet -one of the most popular subjects on the public mind today- we shall seek to untangle some of the confusing questions which have been raised about forbidden foods and biblical health laws.

The four scriptures we shall examine are in apparentconflict with scores of other clear declarations scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments on the subject of proper diet. But before we begin, it is important to note some of the landmark points which God has made through the writings of His servants.

Entire chapters, such as Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14, have laid down detailed listings of the clean and unclean categories of animals. And since the original diet prescribed by God included no meat whatsoever (Genesis 1:29), we can be absolutely certain that no forbidden, "unclean" meat was included in the diets of those who lived before the flood and followed God's law.

After the flood, even though clean animals were introduced to the diets of the eight survivors due to the universal destruction of all vegetation, no unclean animals were permitted for food. God commanded the preservation of clean animals in the ark by sevens and the unclean animals by twos (Genesis 7:1-3). Obviously, this allowed only for the clean category to be eaten, while the male and female of the unclean animals were preserved for perpetuating the species.

Incidentally, this post-diluvian per-mission to eat even the clean animals produced an interesting phenomenon. Almost immediately, the life span of the human race fell from around 800 years to about 150 years.

The flood experience also demolishes a popular argument used by those who insist on eating both clean and unclean animals. They claim that the law of unclean foods only applied to the Jewish people. This cannot be correct, since there were no Jews in Noah's day when the restriction was laid, by God Himself, upon all the human race. Furthermore, the Bible declares that the forbidden-meat law will still be in effect at the second coming of Jesus. (Isaiah 66:15-17.)

Answer 2

Deuteronomy 14:8

See all of Deuteronomy 14 to see what is clean and unclean