Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What is it about this animal that makes it to the forbidden fruit list?
What was the reasoning back in the day?

People even now get sick every year eating shellfish and undercooked pork. People have died.

Back in biblical times, there were no microwaves to nuke the parasites and harmful bacteria in creatures which eat filth, feces, or feast on the dead. These animals God declared unclean to eat.

Similarly, God said not to wear mixed fabrics. Back in those days, there were no powerful detergents, no hot water rinse or steam cycles to destroy fleas and lice which hide and lay eggs in the gap between the two fabrics.

Note that there was no death sentence for eating unclean foods or wearing mixed fabrics but there was a death sentence for rape of a betrothed woman, homosexuality, and adultery.

Learn more about the highlighted parts. You are very uninformed as to how laundry was done for thousands of years until the 1940s.

In ancient Middle Eastern cultures, laundry typically involved handwashing clothes in rivers, streams, or communal washhouses using natural cleaning agents like wood ash, clay, or even urine. The process often included beating clothes against rocks to remove stains, followed by rinsing and drying in the sun. (AI Google search).

So you see, there was no steaming or hot water wash, no super hot dryers to dry clothes.

Lye had been invented but not used on an industrial scale like today’s detergents.

For the common person, and the poor, they wore the same clothes often, dirty for days. The nobility probably had good, clean clothes but everyone else, not so much.

If you think urine and sunshine kill nits, fleas, and their tiny eggs, then I think it is you who may be misinformed.

Good lord LEARN MORE.
It's like you never heard of boiling water.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The problem with saying “pork isn’t kosher because of trichinosis” is that plenty of other people in the ancient near east didn’t have this prohibition. Are we supposed to think only the ancient Israelites realized pork could make you sick? I personally don’t buy that. Same thing with shellfish. Also, many of the other kashrut rules seem fairly arbitrary (why isn’t chicken parve, they don’t produce milk? why is burying a knife in dirt sufficient to kasher it sometimes?), so it makes little logical sense to think the whole system was some kind of proto-public health campaign.

Finally, evidence for their being a "chosen" people

Ha, yes, exactly (though, just fwiw, "chosen people" in Jewish context means "chosen by God to have to obey 613 commandments," not "chosen to get special treatment").

Anonymous wrote:The problem with saying “pork isn’t kosher because of trichinosis” is that plenty of other people in the ancient near east didn’t have this prohibition. Are we supposed to think only the ancient Israelites realized pork could make you sick? I personally don’t buy that. Same thing with shellfish. Also, many of the other kashrut rules seem fairly arbitrary (why isn’t chicken parve, they don’t produce milk? why is burying a knife in dirt sufficient to kasher it sometimes?), so it makes little logical sense to think the whole system was some kind of proto-public health campaign.

Finally, evidence for their being a "chosen" people

The problem with saying “pork isn’t kosher because of trichinosis” is that plenty of other people in the ancient near east didn’t have this prohibition. Are we supposed to think only the ancient Israelites realized pork could make you sick? I personally don’t buy that. Same thing with shellfish. Also, many of the other kashrut rules seem fairly arbitrary (why isn’t chicken parve, they don’t produce milk? why is burying a knife in dirt sufficient to kasher it sometimes?), so it makes little logical sense to think the whole system was some kind of proto-public health campaign.