Lecture 4: Ancient Judea—From Eden to Kosher Laws
The Great Flood and Noah’s Ark
There is a cataclysmic fl ood. Everyone and everything drowns—
except for Noah. When it’s all over, Noah takes some ritually clean
beasts and birds and burns them whole on the altar, and the Lord
smelled the soothing odor. Above everything, God wants justice,
and killing, no matter who does it, demands punishment. To right things in the universe, someone or something has to be
punished whenever someone or something is killed. God doesn’t
really care who is punished, strangely enough, so when you do
something wrong, you can substitute a goat—a scapegoat—who is
sacrifi ced in place of you. What’s odd is that God hasn’t explained this whole system of justice
yet, and presumably, it’s later Hebrews putting this sacrifi ce in the
story to show that Noah is pious and good. However, it doesn’t
really make sense yet. God also changes the human diet. Humans can’t be expected to live
as vegetarians anymore because they’re killers, so God lets them
kill animals and eat meat. This is an admission by God that humans
are faulty. As a way to enforce justice in the universe, God states that murder
of all kinds is forbidden: If you kill a man, then someone must be
punished with death, and if you kill an animal, then God wants
satisfaction in the form of sacrifi ce. There’s actually only one dietary restriction at this stage: Humans
can’t eat blood. It seems that the Hebrews thought that blood
contained the “life” of the creature, and all life belongs to God. The
blood prohibition is still in effect among Jews; animals have to be
slaughtered painlessly and the blood completely drained to be kosher.Moses and the Seder Plate
Israelites are enslaved in Egypt, and Moses is trying to get them
set free. The last of the nasty plagues is that the fi rst-born son of