How (Not) to Read the Bible: Making Sense of the Anti-women, Anti-science, Pro-violence, Pro-slavery and Other Crazy-Sounding Parts of Scripture

by Dan Kimball

Most scholars agree that God gave the dietary laws to reinforce the same concept we discussed before—keeping the people distinct and separate from the other people groups. One of the most practical ways to make this distinction is by making their diet—the food they could and could not eat—distinct. The reason is the same: God wants his people to remain loyal to him, the one true God. Every time we read about God giving a strange instruction about refraining from something, a command that sounds bizarre to us today, we need to remember that it wouldn’t have sounded bizarre to the people at that time. These restrictions were common ways of identifying your ethnicity and religious affiliation. The restrictions may not make sense to us, but they were normal for the Israelites at that time in history.