Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Today we enter a section of laws that pertain to cleanness and uncleanness, which, if you recall,

is one of the areas God told the priest to be mindful of.

We'll be in this section today and a little bit of tomorrow.

Today starts with God giving instructions on what to eat and what not to eat.

If you felt like this had echoes of Eden in it, you can eat this, but don't eat that.

You're spot on.

God is recreating all of this space.

There are lots of theories on why specific animals are forbidden.

Hygiene, deviation from the norm, affiliation with Canaanite culture, but we don't really know.

Keeping these food laws is one part of what is referred to in Jewish culture as keeping kosher.

There are lots of other aspects to this, but dietary law is a big one. And the saddest part of today's reading was here in 11-7. No bacon. In fact, one of the ways modern archaeologists can tell

when and where ancient Jews lived in Israel is because there are no pig bones in that layer of soil.

Pigs were wildly popular food among the Canaanites,

whom I've never felt such a kinship with until now. So there are pig bones all over pagan

country, but not where God's people lived. They're also not allowed to eat anything that dies on

its own. It has to be killed. Likely because if it dies on its own, it might have a disease.

By the way, the word detestable that we see repeated here only appears twice outside of the book of Leviticus, and one of those times

is in reference to idols. So there seems to be a correlation here with turning away from God.

In chapter 12, there are laws for women who give birth and how they go about being clean afterward.

I can't give you a definitive answer as to why having a female child makes a woman unclean for twice as long as a male child,

but it's probably because she was giving birth to someone else who would also bleed and give birth.

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