Leviticus 11, or The Unexpectedly Unclean Hoopoe

[Immortal Wombat]

If you are of the Biblical-perusal persuasion, you may know that Leviticus 11 is the chapter of the Bible that deals with unclean animals – the list of Dos and Don’ts as to which creatures the Jewish people can eat, and which are unclean in the eyes of God, and thus barred from human consumption. Most of you, I imagine, are well aware of the highest-profile animal upon this list – our friend the pig. Some of the more educated among you may perhaps know of some of the other creatures on God’s culinary Black List: the rabbit perhaps, or the gloopier sea creatures. I imagine somewhat fewer of you were aware that in this list is the hoopoe. Yes, that lovable pink and black, crested bird from Mediterranean regions is one of those things God found so distasteful as a child that, not content to leave it off his shopping list, banned the consumption of for all his chosen people.

But why? What is the reasoning behind this list of chosen foodstuffs marked unclean? Was it simply that God was a fussy eater as a child, whose doting parents were too besotted with to persuade him to eat his reds? I guess like all parents, God’s Mum and Dad thought he was the bestest little baby in the world, everyone’s little angel. Makes a change for them to be right. Hah. But I have theory:

Oh, and for reference, Leviticus 11 is here.

The unclean animals from Leviticus 11 can broadly be separated into three categories.

1. The Practically Unclean
This is the sensible third of the list. This includes the creatures that were banned for Good Reasons^tm.
Two subcategories:
- Sea food. Or more precisely:

[A]ll that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you”.

- The explanation which has been presented for hundreds of years, being of course the risk of diseases and stuff from such assortment of briny beasts. So no cockles, mussels, winkles, whelks, oysters, crabs, lobsters, eels, jellyfish, shark, manta ray, squid, octopus, old boots, sunken GreenPeace protest vessels, abandoned oilrigs or the missing two-thirds of Britain’s radioactive waste for you then!


- Predatory Birds. Well, not as such… God doesn’t ban Condors for some reason (Jews on holiday consult your Rabbi for guidance), but still:

[A]nd these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, and the vulture, and the kite after his kind; every raven after his kind; and the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckoo, and the hawk after his kind, and the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the stork, the heron after her kind.

- Ok, so the heron and stork are pushing it, but goodness knows what unclean wiggly little water creature they may have eaten! So yes, these are also banned for good reason. Either that the damn things are rather angry at being eaten, and considerably better at putting up a resistance than say, sparrows, or that the meat is terribly stringy and coarse, quite unfit for the palette of the people whom God has chosen for his own.


2. The Bureaucratically Unclean
Because we all know about Priests. Priests are all power-hungry, mad, raving, child-molesting, weirdos. Of course. So there’s bound to be some weird-ass rules that nobody can quite fathom. Sure enough, Leviticus 11 has its fair share. The best of these being the one that came up with the pigs.

Whatsoever parteth the hoof, and is clovenfooted, and cheweth the cud, among the beasts, that shall ye eat.
Nevertheless these shall ye not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the hoof: as the camel, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you.

So if you can imagine a Venn Diagram of the animal kingdom, with a circle of cloven hoofed on the left and a circle of cud-chewers on the right. Anything in the overlap is good to eat: cows, sheep, goats, horses (presumably) and so on. Anything on one side or the other (like camels, rabbits, hares, pigs, llamas, Lucifer) is unclean in the eyes of God, or at least in the eyes of his priests, who wanted some more excuses to keep people in line, (and lets face it, probably had a good pork export deal with the Gentiles).


3. The Theocratically Unclean

These also are unclean to you of the species breeding upon the earth; the mole, and the mouse, and the lizard species, the snail, and the gecko, and the shrew, and the crocodile, and the chameleon

I’ve seen various translations of this, and none of them concur on more than about 80% of the creatures. I’m quite tempted to list them all, but that would be overkill. Just think of as many animals as you can that creep on the ground. The creeping is the important thing here.

Besides the French, nobody in their right minds would dream of eating them anyway, but possibly that fact may have inspired the rules in the first place. Israel’s basically a desert, and we can suppose times did get hard. I find myself picturing a particularly nasty drought where the priest’s wife turns round and says something along the lines of “Get me something to cook, husband- even that gecko will do.” And the priest running off to catch the gecko. And the gecko being a bugger to catch, as geckos are. And the priest coming back empty handed. And the wife getting a bit pissed off, and the priest, with the only excuse he can make, under the circumstances, “Yeah, well… God declared geckos unclean, anyway.”
And a closer inspection of that list sees a pattern emerging. All those creature are either a bugger to find (mole), a bugger to catch (gecko), a bugger to kill (crocodile), or a utterly repugnant assuming you are the most powerful man in the village (snails).

Which pretty much covers the entire list. With the exception of one: the hoopoe. I can only explain it one way: Hoopoes aren’t unclean at all, they were put on the list because God likes themso much, he doesn’t want to see them eaten by a bunch of dusty, dirty, desert nomads who wouldn’t appreciate beauty if beauty was a large stick with a nail in it.

[FrustratedPoet]

[Jamski]

/me is speechless *

ummm, yes Wombat. But note also that God lets the chosen people eat anything that he hasn't heard of yet. Kangaroos, for example

-Jam

[Immortal Wombat]

Not neccessarily. If kangeroos chew the cud, then they're out

[Jamski]

Do wombats chew the cud

-Jam

[Immortal Wombat]

n... er... Yes! Definately. Mhmm. No eating me. Unclean. yes. Hm

[Jamski]

Could we just have a definite statement like, "I am unclean according to Jewish law" so I can use it in my sig

-Jam

[Immortal Wombat]

Stop spamming my thread Jamski

[Skanky Burns]

Originally posted by Jamski
But note also that God lets the chosen people eat anything that he hasn't heard of yet. Kangaroos, for example

Ha! The joke is on them!
I mean, have you ever tried kangaroo? :shudder:

[Ben Kenobi]

"I am unclean according to Jewish law" so I can use it in my sig.

Noted.

I am unclean according to Jewish Law.

"What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean,' but what comes out of his mouth, that is what makes him 'unclean.' "

Matthew 15:11, and that's all I'm going to say on the issue of Jewish dietary laws.

[chequita guevara]

Snails are delicious.

[Demerzel]

it is a pretty bird, God must have been upset to see the dusty nomads eating them and talking to him with theirs mouths full of feathers!

[FrustratedPoet]

Originally posted by obiwan18
"What goes into a man's mouth does not make him 'unclean,'

Why don't you quote that one in the "basic human right to be gay" thread?

[Q Classic]

i'm glad that we in asia weren't held back by this.

i mean, dried and roasted squid? who wouldn't want to eat that? or snail soup? or raw octopus? mm....

[Immortal Wombat]

Over the centuries, theologians and philosophers have struggled with the rationale behind the inclusion of the hoopoe in The List. Indeed some have gone as far as to claim it as a mistranslation, and in its place write “lapwing” as the second to last “bird”. (Bats were also included here, since taxonomy had yet to be discovered). These clearly being the less ornithologically pernickety of translators, who believed that “brightly coloured and with a crest” was sufficient data to make an accurate identification, and that Hebrew tribes frequently launched hunting trips to Hackney Marshes.

But let us cast aside such Briticisms, and assume the hoopoe shares with the pewit no more than an onomatopoeic name, and not a place in Leviticus 11 v19. What has this charming tricoloured avian done to deserve God’s wrath?

One theory is that it arose during the Israelite slavery in Egypt. The ancient Egyptians held the hoopoe in high regard, even basing a hieroglyph on its crest; and though none of the major Egyptian gods took on hoopoe form, we can see that other Egyptian gods took on forms that God also took objection to for culinary purposes: the crocodile, the hawk, the oyster… Could it be the hoopoe’s favour with the Egyptians was too good a snubbing opportunity for God to miss? Maybe the very reason we see no evidence for a hoopoe god today is because of this unwise feud with Yahweh, who was rapidly rising in the power-stakes at the time. Perhaps this hypothetical hoopoe god was the Egyptian god of conjuring tricks, humiliated by God’s stick-into-snake-using-Moses-as-a-ventriloquist’s-dummy routine. (Or was it Moses. Note to self: check) Or perhaps he was the god of high-speed chariot chases, drowned in the waters of the Red Sea. In any case, such an event would have left him on the divine equivalent of the “Go to Jail” square in the gods’ ineffable game of Monopoly^tm.

Another theory often espoused by Gentiles more frequently than Jews is that of the mind-controlling God. If we look further into hoopoe-related literature, we find that several mediaeval texts refer to the hoopoe as a magical bird, and the consumption of certain parts thereof being a great aid to memory. Omniscient God, knowing this already, would have wished to prevent for some reason, the Jews from remembering. Whether this is benign (would you want to remember your circumcision?) or otherwise (“That prayer last week that you never answered… how about that God? I remember!”) we may never know. This theory isn’t popular. God is Good (he told me so himself).

The most rational theory I have found, unsurprisingly is not religious or philosophical at all, but based on real biological evidence. It also ties in quite nicely with the pigs and the vultures. Because like so many other birds, the hoopoe can secrete an oily substance to keep its feathers healthy. Unlike most other birds, the female and young hoopoes can eject this substance with some force as an anti-predatory device, and evolution has favoured those individuals with a –shall we say- more pungent secretion.
The hoopoe’s nesting sites are thus somewhat notorious for their offensive odour. It is proposed that this repulsive smell led to the common –false- belief that hoopoes are unhygienic and thus unclean. In fact, hoopoes are not unhygienic at all, the young even endeavouring to excrete their faecal matter outside the nest, hanging their posteriors out of the opening to achieve the feat.

My favourite theory, I’m afraid, is none of these. For all the hoopoe-related mines of information I have excavated, I’m still not convinced that they actually exist, and aren’t just some mass conspiracy or hallucination designed to keep us looking for the hoopoes that aren’t there, so we can marvel at their non-existent beauty, and not eat their insubstantial bodies. Sure, this little map here has a big red blob all over Eurasia, sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, but what if… what if when the hoopoes petitioned King Solomon to get their gold crests changed into feathers… What? You’ve not heard this? Yeah, well basically, hoopoes apparently used to have gold crests, but people kept killing them for it, so King S gave them feathery ones in his infinite wisdom. What if the wise king in fact gave them faster than light travel? Hmm? It all starts to make sense. One hoopoe could fly from place to place acting out the role of an entire population. Which would allow King Solomon to kill all the rest, and steal their golden crests: the perfect conspiracy.

So picture the scene, it’s Israel, some time ages ago, and the legend of the really fast bird is beginning to die a slow death, ridiculed as children’s fairy tales, and forgotten. Meanwhile, everyone’s hard at work writing this third great holy book. A rulebook. And they’ve got to chapter 11. Mostly this involved sitting around and praying, but some bright chappy came up with the idea of doing a chapter on food, so this week there was a good deal of eating as well. By now, the priests had almost finished, and were itching to get to chapter 18. But before then, there was all the unpleasantness of chapters 12 through 17 to get over with, and if another food arose, they wouldn’t have turned down an extension on food week. They should probably check the list just once more…

And out on the mountain, a young goatherd was tending his flock. He’d just cooked himself some supper, and because there wasn’t an awful lot of food on Israeli mountainsides at the time, he was cooking the carcase of a small pink black and white bird that he’d found embedded in a tree. And it was at this time that the Egyptian god of chariot races and conjuring decided to make his last-ditch come back attempt. What occurred next I blame on the education system. How that boy can have passed his GNVQ in Goat Husbandry without basic knowledge like what to do if a minor Egyptian deity materialises in front of you in the form of a hoopoe, I don’t know. But he must have done, because he evidently had no idea how to deal with the situation. But being a good Jewish boy, and pretty quick on the uptake (and remembering the tale of what happened after the Egyptian god of gold and calves appeared in just such an occasion), he put two and two and two together, made 4.4, rounded down and legged it to the nearest village.
And so, fearing the wrath of God, verse 19 gained a word, and hoopoes, those mythical birds of untold beauty were declared unclean in the eyes of God.

The boy became a minor local celebrity in the manner of a Big Brother contestant: somewhat admired, and universally disliked at the same time. As for the hoopoes, I guess the faster-than-light gene was bred out of the population, and we are able once more to witness their greatness.