Leviticus 11 and the Pulled Pork Sandwich

Curtis, whose son plays second base next to Caleb, set up a smoker behind the backstop on Saturday and sold pulled pork sandwiches out of a cooler for the team fund. When I got to the front of the line he looked at me a second and said, "Wait, can you guys even have this? I thought the pig was your whole thing."

I told him the pig was somebody else's whole thing, a few thousand years back. Then I asked for the coleslaw on top. He said "Huh" and gave me the extra scoop. I've been turning it over since, though, because he was wrong about us and a little bit right about the chapter. Most of us have a position on Leviticus 11 and very few of us have sat down with it for an hour.

Does Leviticus 11 apply to Latter-day Saints?

No, and the reasons are written down. In 3 Nephi 15:4 the Savior says "the law is fulfilled that was given unto Moses," and in verse 8 that "the law which was given unto Moses hath an end in me." The Word of Wisdom, which is the food rule we actually keep, says in D&C 89:12 that the flesh of beasts and fowls is "ordained for the use of man with thanksgiving" and then asks that it be used sparingly. It doesn't name the pig. It doesn't name anything. I had two sandwiches on Saturday, so I'm not the man to lecture on sparingly.

Acts has its own scene for this, and it's a stranger one than I remembered. In Acts 10 Peter is on a rooftop in Joppa, hungry and waiting on lunch when he sees a sheet let down with every kind of animal in it, the four-footed beasts and the creeping things and the fowls. A voice says to rise and kill and eat. Peter's answer is the part I like, because it's so ordinary: "Not so, Lord," he says, "for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean" (Acts 10:14). He had never once. He argues with the voice, and the whole exchange happens three times before the sheet goes back up.

Then the chapter turns on a sentence you could easily skate over. Standing in Cornelius's house, Peter tells the room that "God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean" (Acts 10:28). Peter takes the vision to be about people.

The food is the picture and a household of Gentiles is the thing pictured. I'll come back to why that matters, because I think it tells us what Leviticus 11 was for in the first place.

What are the clean and unclean animals in Leviticus 11?

The land animals first, and the rule is stated once and plainly in verse 3: "Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat." Both. A split hoof is not enough and a cud is not enough. You need the pair.

Then the chapter does something I would do too, if I were writing the validation rules for a payments form. It lists the edge cases by name. Anybody who has shipped that kind of code knows the cases you spell out are the ones people were going to argue about. Three animals chew the cud and don't divide the hoof, which are the camel, the coney and the hare (verses 4 through 6). One animal has the split hoof and doesn't chew the cud, and that's the pig (verse 7). Four animals, each one short by exactly one test.

What that does is make the pig harder to wave off. A pig looks like it belongs on the clean side of the line. The text goes out of its way to say so, "though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted," and then turns on the word "yet." The camel is a working herd animal and still fails. Nothing in the chapter says why the test is these two features and not some other pair. The line is there and it runs through the middle of things that look alike.

Fish get the same both-and treatment in verses 9 through 12, fins and scales together, and birds don't. There's no test for birds at all. There's a list, twenty names long, running from the eagle in verse 13 to the bat in verse 19 (the chapter files the bat with the birds). Clean birds are never named. You find out what you can eat by what's missing from the list. My two hens, Penny and Waffle, aren't on it.

The chapter gives no health reason, and I've heard the trichinosis explanation from more than one person at more than one church barbecue, and it may even be true about pork as a matter of biology, but the text never makes the claim. When Leviticus 11 finally gives a reason, it gives a different one, and it saves it for the end.

Why does so much of the chapter talk about touching?

This is the part I noticed this time through, and it changed how I read the whole thing. Verses 24 through 40 are about contact with a dead animal, and that's seventeen of the chapter's forty-seven verses, a little over a third. The phrase "until the even" turns up nine times in them. You touch a carcass and you're unclean until evening. You carry one and you wash your clothes and you're unclean until evening. Every lesson I've heard on this chapter was about the menu, and I can't remember one that mentioned the touching.

The details get oddly specific once the chapter gets to the kitchen. A wooden vessel, a garment, a skin or a sack that a dead creature falls on goes into water and stays unclean until evening, and then it's clean (verse 32). A clay pot can't be washed, so it's broken (verse 33), and so is an oven (verse 35). A spring or a pit with plenty of water in it stays clean even though it touches the carcass (verse 36). Seed waiting to be sown stays clean if a carcass falls on it dry, and becomes unclean if it was wet first (verses 37 and 38). I read that last one three times. Water carries it and dry grain doesn't.

Two things stand out to me, and I'm saying them as my reading of the verses and not as anything the chapter announces. The first is verse 39. An animal that's perfectly good to eat, a clean one, dies on its own, and whoever touches the body is unclean until evening just the same. So the uncleanness in these verses can't come from the species. It comes from the carcass, from contact with something dead. The second is that nowhere in the whole chapter does anyone bring an offering, or confess anything, or get called a sinner. You wash. You wait for the sun to go down. The status is real and it's temporary, and it doesn't carry a moral charge at all. The things that can't be washed, the clay and the oven, are the only casualties.

Leviticus 7 already had timing built into the meat, which I wrote about in Leviticus 7 and the three-day rule on the meat. Chapter 11 turns the same attention on the kitchen itself, down to the oven.

What is the point of all these rules?

Verse 44, finally, is where the chapter says what it was doing:

For I am the Lord your God: ye shall therefore sanctify yourselves, and ye shall be holy; for I am holy.

Leviticus 11:44

And the next verse names the one who is speaking by pointing at what he did: "For I am the Lord that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God" (verse 45). The reason given is a relationship and a rescue. Then the last verse of the chapter sums up the whole list in one sentence:

To make a difference between the unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the beast that may not be eaten.

Leviticus 11:47

Make a difference, it says, and Leviticus 20:25 says nearly the same thing and tells you the other half, that the people were to "put difference between clean beasts and unclean" because the Lord had "separated you from other people" (Leviticus 20:24). The whole system is a way of drawing a line an Israelite met at every meal. You didn't have to decide to be set apart. You ate, and the meal did it for you. Leviticus 20 goes on in verse 26 to say that the Lord had "severed you from other people, that ye should be mine." I notice that the sentence ends on belonging and not on distance, and that the distance is how the belonging got practiced on a Tuesday.

Which brings me back to Peter, and to a verse in Ephesians. Paul writes to Gentile believers that Christ "hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us" and "abolished in his flesh the enmity, even the law of commandments contained in ordinances" (Ephesians 2:14-15). I wrote about the half of that chapter after verse 10 in Ephesians 2. Put it next to Leviticus 11:47 and you can see which wall is meant. It's a wall made out of lunch. By Acts 10 it has a hungry man on a roof who says he has never once crossed it, and a voice that tells him to eat, and a centurion's house where he finds out what the vision was about.

I don't have a tidy application for this.

I eat the pork, and the Lord himself said the law had its end. But I come away from the chapter thinking that holiness, as Leviticus 11 describes it, is something you do with ordinary hands at an ordinary table, and that the chapter takes the ordinariness seriously enough to have rules for the oven.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Latter-day Saints eat pork and shellfish?

Yes, since there's no church rule against either one. The Word of Wisdom speaks of flesh in general and asks that it be used sparingly (D&C 89:12), and it says nothing particular about pigs or shrimp. Plenty of members eat both and plenty don't care for either, and that's a matter of taste.

Was the pig forbidden because it carries disease?

The chapter doesn't say so, and I'd be careful about adding a reason Moses didn't give. The reason Leviticus 11 itself offers is holiness and the covenant, in verses 44 through 47. You may find the health argument convincing and I won't fight you on it. I just wouldn't call it what the text says.

Could the Israelites eat locusts?

Some of them did, because verses 21 and 22 allow four kinds, the locust, the bald locust, the beetle and the grasshopper, because they have "legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth." That's the only exception to the rule against flying insects. It's why Matthew 3:4 can say of John the Baptist that "his meat was locusts and wild honey" without anybody blinking.

What happened if you touched a dead unclean animal?

You were unclean until evening, and if you carried the body you washed your clothes (verses 24 and 25). Nothing else is asked of you in this chapter. No offering, no confession. I think that's the most overlooked fact in it.

That's Leviticus 11, and I'll take Leviticus 12 up next on its own, because I know less about what it says than I'd like and it follows directly from this one. The left roller on our garage door has started squeaking, and there's a can of white lithium grease sitting on the back step waiting for me tomorrow.

— D.