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The food laws of Lev 11:3–23 and Deut 14:3–20 are among the great enigmas of biblical law. This paper views the food laws as a series of “narrative paradigms” aimed at a high-context society in which information is shared and internalized. This shared social knowledge raises the question of how the common environment of ancient Israel would make the categories intuitively clear. The narrative paradigms make sense because they reflect day-to-day engagement with the environment. The paradigm cases identify certain characteristics of a taxonomic group, which are then negated. The effect is to convey a complex body of knowledge about what can and cannot be eaten in an economical, unambiguous, and practical manner. The laws build on one another, enabling the audience to accumulate knowledge as they progress through the different categories. In this way, the very construction of the categories clean and unclean—and hence the structure and presentation of the laws themselves—is shaped by practical wisdom. This is consistent with self-executing narrative rules elsewhere in biblical law. This reanalysis helps us to understand both the compositional strategy of the food laws and their social function.

At Wisdom’s Table: How Narrative Shapes the Biblical Food Laws and Their Social Function