Is Kosher Eating Still Required?
Outside of weekly Sabbath observance, kosher eating is easily the most contested aspect of a person's journey coming out of Constantinian Christianity toward living a life of Biblical faith. Traditional Christian teaching relegates the Jewish kashrut laws as obsolete with the advent of the New Covenant, citing mainly the writings of the Apostle Paul as well as famously quoted passages in the New Covenant Scriptures like Matthew 15 and Acts 15; in most quarters of the Christian community, keeping kosher is viewed synonymously with trying to earn one's salvation through the Torah of Moses—and many actually trumpet the idea that 'anti-kosher' eating is a 'right' that was purchased for us on the cross—freeing us from 'the burden of the Law'.
Unless a person specifically advocates salvation by kosher eating, however (I do NOT), this charge against those who teach adherence to the practice is ridiculous at best. Take this comparison: most modern Christians worldwide would agree that God wants everyone to read the Bible; in fact, they would say that it is a good practice promoting health and growth in their spiritual journey with God, and it is detrimental—perhaps even sinful—for a person to neglect reading the Scriptures (I wouldn't quite go that far, but many do). Yet no one would say that we are saved by reading the Bible. The same is true for advocacy of a kosher diet when one views it properly.
What do I mean by ‘viewing it properly’? Well, let’s go through the Bible to see what it has to say about what we eat, both in the Tanakh and in the Apostolic Writings, and then we can determine how we should approach this subject.
| Event | Reference | Verse (or summary if passage is too long to fit here) | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Creation | Genesis 1:29-31 | Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every animal of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. | God made all creatures vegetarian to begin with; in the absence of death, no creatures would be killed. This would not apply to plants, since they are regenerative; parts of plants could be eaten and regrow, and fruits could be eaten and actually help plants to propagate |
| Garden | Genesis 2:16-17 | The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.” | Even in the Garden, God instructed man to distinguish between what he did and did not eat |
| Fall | Genesis Chapter 3 | Verses 1-5: the serpent gets Eve to question God's command and motivation about eating; Verse 6: Eve judges for herself whether the fruit was good to eat, and gave some to Adam, who made the same decision; Verses 11-19: Adam and Eve are judged because they disobeyed God's command about eating; Verses 17-23: Man is judged to have to work for his food, and is forbidden to eat that which would give him life forever | While certainly the sin was in the decision to worship themselves by rejecting God's standard and making thier own, eating was the mechanism by which man sinned and died. God clearly felt it was a big deal what they ate and didn't eat. |
| Corruption | Jubilees 5:2-3 (Genesis 6:1-5) | Lawlessness increased on the earth and all flesh corrupted its way, including men, cattle, wild animals, birds, and everything that walks on the earth—all of them corrupted their behavior and their created order; and they began to devour each other, and lawlessness increased on the earth. And God looked down on the earth, and the LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become: [how] it was corrupt, and [how] every creature had corrupted its created order, and that everyone on the earth had brought about every kind of evil before His eyes, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the hearts of men was only evil all the time. | All creatures began to eat one another as a result of the Watchers' corruption, especially blood |
| Flood | Genesis 7-9 (Jubilees 5-6) | Genesis 7:2-3: God tells Noah to bring seven pairs of clean animals, but only one pair of unclean animals into the Ark. Genesis 9:4-6 (Jubilees 6:6-15): God permits man to eat the beasts of the earth, the birds of the sky, the creatures that move on the ground, and the fish in the sea, but forbids men from eating meat with the blood still in it. | Even before the Flood, God distinguished between clean and unclean animals. After the Flood, God permits man to eat the animals, but forbids blood. Jubilees 6:10-38 expands on the connection between the prohibition of eating blood and the covenant through Noah. This is one of the 'two meanings' of the Feast of Shavuot: the renewal of covenant by refusing to eat blood. |
| Burying blood and firstfruits | Jubilees | ||
| The LORD's meeting with Abraham | Genesis 18:7-8 | "Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree." | The LORD appears as three men to Abraham in this passage (or at least as the LORD and two angels, as testified by the later passage about Sodom and Gomorrah). Abraham, the first one after Babel to worship the LORD, the most righteous of his generation, the father of all Jews and the adopted father of all Christians, slaughters a young calf from the herd and serves it to the Almighty and His servants along with curds and milk—and they ate it! If literally eating milk and meat together are prohibited, then both Abraham and God sinned in Genesis 18. |
| Offerings | Leviticus 7 | This passage gives instruction about food used as offerings. Interestingly, it adds that clean animals that were attacked by wild animals are unclean for eating or sacrifice, but are clean for other purposes. Also, a person who became unclean by food who then eats at the LORD's table while unclean is to be cut off from the nation. | |
| Kashrut (initial) | Leviticus Chapter 11 | This passage gives definition to clean versus unclean animals: of land animals, any animal that chews the cud and has split hooves is clean. All others are unclean. Of creatures that live in the water, animals with both fins and scales are clean; everything else is unclean. Clean birds are not specified, but unclean birds are—they are mostly birds of prey. Of insects, only the locust kind is clean; all others are unclean. Furthermore, the passage gives teaching on how to handle items contaminated by unclean animals. | This passage, along with Deuteronomy 14, forms the basis of the Jewish kashrut laws. It is interesting that while bees are unclean according to the definition and logic here, the eating of honey is permitted throughout the Bible. |
| Kashrut (reiteration) | Deuteronomy 14:3-21 | This passage, along with Leviticus 11, forms the basis of the Jewish kashrut laws. | |
| Eating is simple pleasure | Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) 3:12-13 | I know that there is nothing better for them than to rejoice and to do good in one’s lifetime; 13 moreover, that every man who eats and drinks sees good in all his labor—it is the gift of God. | God created food partially for our enjoyment. |
| Idolatry | Isaiah 66:17 | “Those who consecrate and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following one who is among those who eat the flesh of pigs, rats and other unclean things—they will meet their end together with the one they follow,” declares the Lord. | This verse is about idolatry; in the ancient world, sacrificial animals were often eaten, so the eating of these animals mentioned would have been part of a worship ritual. However, it is clear that these are detestable to the LORD. |
| Gluttony | Sirach 37:29-31 | Do not be greedy for every delicacy, and do not eat without restraint; for overeating brings sickness, and gluttony leads to nausea. Many have died of gluttony, but the one who guards against it prolongs his life. | Eating too much will hurt you. |
| Jesus washing hands | Matthew 15:1-20, Mark 7:1-23 | Parallel passages. In both passages, Jesus says that what goes into a man (food) does not make him unclean; but what comes out (sinful thoughts and actions) makes him unclean. The Mark passage states that by saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. | Jesus is putting the kashrut system in its proper perspective. When Jesus 'declared all foods clean,' He wasn't saying everything men find to eat is good for them, nullifying the earlier command of the Torah; He was saying that food does not make one holy or unholy. |
Ok—it’s clear the Bible has a lot to say about eating; I didn’t even include Scripture passages analogizing food and drink to spiritual teaching, like when Jesus said that “…man does not live by bread alone, but by every Word that comes from the mouth of God…” because we’re just talking about Scriptural teaching on literal food that people put in their mouths. However, can we put all this into a summary that gives us direction for our lives?
First, we have to stress that there is a difference between what the Jewish kashrut laws are versus what the Bible says about eating—they are similar, and the former is based off the latter for sure, but they’re different. For example, the Bible says in three places “Do not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.” (Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21)
Because of this, the rabbis have determined that God does not want us to cook any milk products with any meat products at all, so Orthodox Jewish law is that Jews must have two separate kitchens in their house or at least two separate sets of cooking and eating utensils, one for dairy dishes and one for meat dishes. Furthermore, they have surmised that if God does not want us to cook milk with meat, He must not want us to eat milk with meat either; therefore, it has become Jewish law that one must not eat any milk products together with any meat products—in fact, one must wait at least six hours between eating something with meat to consume something with dairy, or vice-versa if eating solid dairy like cheese (if drinking milk, one must eat something pareve, and then they can eat meat, or wait an hour)—otherwise, the contents may mix and constitute ‘cooking’.
Now, the fact that the Bible repeats this command three times shows that it is indeed very important; however, Deuteronomy 14 is the only place in Scripture where this is even placed in close proximity to laws about food, and even then, it is placed outside the passage of other laws about eating. So it may be a proverb and not a literal command to refrain from cooking a young goat in its mother’s milk. However, even if it is intended to be literal, the factual instruction from Scripture is far less restrictive than the Jewish kashrut laws on this issue:
The command says nothing about cooking goat meat with goat milk—only the use of the mother’s milk when cooking the offspring is prohibited
The command says nothing about cooking other meats with other milk—only goats are mentioned. Cows deer, chickens, etc. do not necessarily apply.
The command says nothing about mixing and/or eating said meat with said milk—only cooking.
The interpretations of the rabbis and resulting Jewish laws, to whatever degree they may be reasonable deductions, are not found in the original commandment, and so they are not binding on us as Judeo-Christians. As I read the Scriptures, the final nail in the coffin for a literal interpretation of this command comes from Genesis 18. As was mentioned above in the table, the LORD visits Abraham and Sarah to tell him about what He is going to do to Sodom, Gomorrah, and the other cities in the Jordan plain (manifesting in physical form as a man, no less). When Abraham sees the LORD and the other two with Him, he offers them something to eat, and the LORD obliges him; so he hurries off and prepares a young calf from the herd, and serves it to the Almighty LORD along with curds and milk—and the LORD and the two with Him actually eat it!
If the interpretation of “do not cook a young goat in its mother's milk” means a literal prohibition on cooking and/or eating any kind of dairy products with any kind of meat products, then both Abraham sinned (by cooking it) and the LORD sinned against His own commandment (by eating it). This cannot be. There’s only one answer: this is an idiom for some other scenario with which the ancient Israelites were familiar.
J. Webb Mealy wrote an interesting theory in an academic paper that this idiom referred to a common practice of peasant farmers in the Ancient Near East who were required to pay tribute to an oppressor. They would take some of the old grain from a prior year’s surplus (the ‘mother’s milk’) and mix (‘cook’) it in to the harvest from the new year (the ‘young goat’) and present it as tribute, cheapening the offering.
The immediate context of all three passages is the presentation of one’s yearly tithe to the LORD: the command was not to cheapen the firstfruits offering. Now read all three passages in their context: