This is part of our “Leviticus for the Modern Reader” series, focusing on themes that God’s people today can take away from what is typically seen as a dry and perplexing book. You can read the previous ones on burnt offerings, spiritual nakedness and clothing, and spiritual leprosy here.
If you’ve ever read Leviticus, you know that in chapter 11 God gives Moses a long and detailed accounting of what animals are allowed to be eaten or touched, and which are not. He calls the prohibited animals “unclean”, and says they are an abomination. He also prohibits eating the blood and fat of an animal being sacrificed. These food-focused scriptures are where we’ll focus today.
Even for people who love reading their bible, Leviticus can be a tough book to connect to. It’s effectively a comprehensive instruction manual for Israel’s priesthood, filled with blueprints, detailed societal rules, the process for various sacrifices, and purification rituals.
It’s logical to wonder why it was included in the bible, or to chalk it up to a dry-but-interesting historical record and move on, thinking “Welp, glad it doesn’t apply to me today!” While those are understandable reactions, we know that everything in the bible is there for a reason, and that all scripture is God-breathed and given to us for our education, inspiration, and growth (II Tim. 3:16).
So what should we make of these seemingly-random dietary laws in Leviticus?
If we pull back and look take a 30,000-foot view, Leviticus is ultimately a book about holiness and sanctification—what it means to be set apart by God for a purpose. God was showing His newly-established nation what it means to worship a holy God, for Him to dwell with them, and be in relationship with Him. He continually tells them, “You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Lev. 19:2).
In previous posts we examined what Christians today can learn from the burnt offerings and rules about clothing and nakedness. In this study we’ll dive into what Leviticus says about what we put IN our bodies—what God prohibits us from consuming, and what the bible tells us about our spiritual diet.
This focuses on one of the passages in Leviticus that I believe does have literal application to our lives today, and we’ll start there. First we’ll look at what Leviticus commands about what we eat and whether it is still a command for modern Christians. But stick with me, we’ll then dive more into what the bible tells us about our spiritual food and drink, and why what we put into our body (spiritually) matters.
“They are unclean to you…”
Let’s start in Leviticus 11:2. It’s a long chapter so we’ll skim through and hit some high points. God tells Moses, “Speak to the children of Israel, saying, ‘These are the animals which you may eat among all the animals that are on the earth…” Here are the cliff notes:
- God tells the Israelites that they CAN eat animals that chew the cud and have divided hooves, fish that have fins and scales, a couple insects (locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers), and then prohibits a whole list of very specific birds (with the implication that anything outside that list is okay).
- In each section about the unclean animals, he specifies some version of “their flesh you shall not eat, and their carcasses you shall not touch. They are unclean to you” (Lev. 11:8).
- A few verses later when speaking of sea creatures, He reiterates, “But all in the seas or in the rivers that do not have fins and scales…they are an abomination to you. They shall be an abomination to you; you shall not eat their flesh, but you shall regard their carcasses as an abomination” (Lev. 11:10-11).
- He uses similar language as He goes through birds and winged insects, as well as later in the chapter referring to creeping things (reptiles, for instance).
The Israelites are warned that if they ate any of these unclean animals, or if the dead bodies came into contact with them or their belongings, it made them unclean (Lev. 11:24-28, among other verses). Why does God spend almost fifty verses on this topic?
“You shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing that creeps; nor shall you make yourselves unclean with them, lest you be defiled by them. For I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy, for I am holy.
Neither shall you defile yourselves with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth. For I am the Lord who brings you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God. You shall therefore be holy, for I am holy. This is the law of the animals and the birds and every living creature…to distinguish between the unclean and the clean, between the animal that may be eaten and the animal that may not be eaten” (Lev. 11:41-47)
The easiest answer to why this is commanded is, “because God said so”. In terms of why those specific animals are forbidden, there are a number of schools of thought—including health reasons, as well as animals that were frequently worshipped and eaten by the pagan societies around them. (I do believe there is a strong case to be made for both of those, for what it’s worth.) Ultimately, we can’t be sure what specific reason God had for making the distinction beyond it being His choice, but that’s all that matters.
Leviticus is packed with rules about what makes someone or something “unclean”. This designation is generally a ritual impurity rather than a sin, and requires temporary separation from God’s tabernacle and rituals (usually washing) to come back into contact with holy spaces. Most of the “unclean” rules were part of daily life, such as having sex, childbirth, a woman’s period, or certain diseases.
There are, however, two things that make the dietary laws in Leviticus largely unique—and they should make us sit up and take notice.
Do the unclean meat laws in Leviticus apply to Christians today?
Should we simply classify the clean and unclean meat laws (and rule against eating blood) the same way we do other ritual impurity laws, which had to do with either health quarantine rules or the ability to visit the tabernacle (and thus are no longer applicable)?
There are two indications that these do not fall into the same category. The first is that God uses very strong language in prohibiting the eating of these animals. We see not only “unclean”, but “abomination” and “abominable” (modern translations usually render this “detestable”). This wasn’t a mild preference, God wants His people see eating these as truly disgusting.
And this isn’t the translators being melodramatic. The Hebrew word translated “unclean” is tame (taw-may, H2931), which means polluted, unclean, or impure. And “abomination” is sheqets (H8263), signifying filth or an idolatrous object (here’s a deeper study on what the bible says is an abomination).
The other “unclean” rules do not go this step further to call the actions or conditions “abominable”. The only other laws in Leviticus that use this same combination are the ones condemning and prohibiting sexual sins—including homosexuality, incest, bestiality, and child sacrifice (Lev. 18:22, 18:30, 20:13). The bible is consistent in those prohibitions absolutely still being in effect today, so it puts the dietary laws in a different category from simple ritual impurity.
Additionally, the food laws (and sexual sin laws mentioned above) are unique in that breaking them would have been a conscious choice. The other laws around being unclean had to do with women menstruating, couples having sex, giving birth, diseases, or touching an animal that had died of unknown causes. While these forced you to be mindful of your actions, most of them were either accidental or part of daily life.
Instead, a person would have had to purposefully break God’s law by seeking out an unclean animal and eating it, or consuming blood, showing a willful disobedience to His commands.
I don’t have time to go into a full study here of why we should keep the clean and unclean meat laws, but will mention a couple important points.
It’s critical to note that the clean and unclean meats were not a command solely in Leviticus and for the ancient Israelites. The distinction between clean and unclean animals pre-dates the flood, as God told Noah to gather seven pairs of the clean animals and only two pairs of the unclean animals (Gen. 7). So clearly this is a separation that God has consistently made for His people, not only part of the Levitical priesthood era.
Similarly, God prohibits consuming blood many times and specifically comments that this is a perpetual law, not only related to sacrifice offerings in Leviticus (Gen. 9:4-5, Lev. 17:14, Acts 15:19-20).
Fast-forwarding to the New Testament era, many people try to use Peter’s vision of the sheet full of unclean animals in Acts 10-11 to say that the unclean animals were done away with. But the scripture interprets itself—Peter specifically says that “God has shown me that I should not call any man common or unclean” and later explains this vision as the reason he began ministering to the Gentiles (Acts 10:28, 11:1-18).
The other two sets of verses that many people use in the New Testament to say that the unclean meat laws don’t apply any more are in Mark 7:18-19 and in Romans 14:14-20. I don’t want to spend tons of time here as it isn’t the full focus of this study, but if you read the surrounding verses to put them in context, neither are dealing with unclean meats.
Jesus is addressing the hypocrisy of the Pharisees’ strict hand washing laws when their hearts were not right. And Paul had a number of passages in his letters that are taken out of context around this topic but he is always addressing specific issues or cultural customs—not broadly changing God’s commands. For instance in that Romans passage, he sets the topic up as being about someone who is weak in the faith and so is a vegetarian to avoid stumbling…so taking Paul’s later statements about not offending a brother over food or what is unclean is in a clear context.
Again, the scriptures interpret themselves if you pay attention to the context. Plus, God not only calls these meats unclean, but detestable, and they pre-date the Levitical laws.
There’s a lot more that we could speak to here about why these biblical laws are still in effect today, but I want to pivot now to the spiritual implications of these Levitical laws.
“This worthless bread…”
“Why do you spend money for what is not bread, and your wages for what does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in abundance…Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near” (Is. 55:2, 6)
In Leviticus God indicated both what was, and what was not, allowed for food. But this was definitely not the first time He’d done so.
In the first few pages of the bible, after creating and setting into order the entire world and creating Adam, God told the first man, “Of every tree in the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).
Does God care about what we consume? I don’t believe it’s any coincidence that food was the occasion of the first sin—the original place where belief in God, and relationship with Him, came face-to-face with man’s carnal desire to seek his own nourishment. From the first pages of the bible, God used food as a point of differentiation and test of obedience.
And when Adam and Eve sinned, God tells them of the hunger and futility that they would experience as a result of trying to live apart from God (“in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread,” Gen. 3:19). This is the beginning of man’s struggle to feed himself—physically, sure, but spiritually as well.
Fast-forward a couple thousand years, and the Israelites had left Egypt physically, but struggled to spiritually make the same trek. God tied their deliverance from slavery to symbols of food (unleavened bread, lamb) and blood.
Then not long after they began their desert journey, they complained first about the lack of water, and then about their food situation. “Oh, that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the pots of meat and when we ate bread to the full!”, they cried (Ex. 16:3). I don’t know about you, but I’m not buying that food was as abundant in slavery as they were choosing to remember. But it was the food of their former enslavement that their desires spoke of.
And we are often much the same. We look back on our past life, at the pleasures and sins we left behind before committing ourselves to follow Jesus, and we reinvent what we think we had, just like Israel was doing. Our hearts are, indeed, deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and our sinful nature combined with our adversary the Devil work to convince us that the perishing things of this world are of greater value than the eternal (Jer. 17:9).
So God gave the Israelites a miracle. He sated their hunger with a brief overabundance of meat (quail, a clean bird) and with daily manna—bread from heaven. He quenched their thirst with springs of water from a rock. At first they were amazed, and they gathered and ate their fill every day (except the Sabbath).
But it didn’t take long before they grew bored and tired of God’s daily provision as well. They spoke against God and Moses, crying, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and our soul loathes this worthless bread!” (Num. 21:5).
Worthless! The Israelites didn’t value the nourishment God was providing, and no longer recognized the miracle behind it. It’s so easy to judge them for this and their many other unfaithful moments.
But aren’t we the same?? God gives us Jesus as the Bread of Life, and the bible as our spiritual sustenance—our daily bread—and we so often do the bare minimum while yearning to get on with whatever “regular life” activity we want to do.
Which brings us to the next step.
Partaking of “the food which endures”
Leviticus actually has another food command that we haven’t touched on yet: “And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the Feast of Unleavened Bread to the Lord; seven days you must eat unleavened bread” (Lev. 23:6).
During the Passover season and Days of Unleavened Bread this command reminds us of our need to take in God’s Word and ask Him to renew His spirit in us every single day. This is an annual reminder, but our need isn’t limited to just those seven days.
Jesus’s model prayer reminds us of this need to take in God’s word and maintain our relationship with Him daily—“give us this day our daily bread” (Matt. 6:11).
Like the Israelites wandering in the desert and receiving manna each day (Ex. 16), we have to rely on God to supply our spiritual sustenance every single day of our walk through the spiritual wilderness that is this physical life.
“Do not labor for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to everlasting life, which the Son of Man will give you…Most assuredly, I say to you, Moses did not give you the bread from heaven, but My Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is He who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’
Then they said to Him, ‘Lord, give us this bread always.’ And Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst…” (John 6:27-35)
During the week of Passover, we are commanded to eat nothing leavened and to consume unleavened bread every day. Paul calls this the “unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (I Cor. 5:8). Often an analogy is made with leavening and sin, but here I think the point is that unleavened bread is pure and uncontaminated…nothing has been added to it yet.
It’s a fresh start—just as we are, once we’ve repented, committed ourselves to God’s way, and been baptized (I Pet. 3:21).
Jesus continues in that same passage in John, hammering home the connection between physical food that God provided and its inability to preserve life, versus the spiritual foods He’s given us.
“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven (spiritual manna)…Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
For My flesh is food indeed…He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me” (John 6:47-57)
As we discussed earlier, God commands us not to drink blood throughout the bible, and I do believe that physical law is still in effect (and no, I’m not talking about if your steak is a bit on the rare side). There could have been hygiene reasons for this, and also pagan traditions He wanted them to stay away from.
But I believe the biggest reason is that blood covenants were a common practice in the cultures around them, and He didn’t want His people entering into them—because our ONLY blood covenant is supposed to be with God through the blood of the Lamb, our Savior Jesus Christ. We memorialize this covenant every year when we take the wine at the Passover service (Matt. 26:28).
Hungering and thirsting for spiritual nourishment
As Moses prepared the Israelites to finally enter the Promised Land, he rehearsed everything they had gone through and the lessons they should have learned over the past 40 years.
“So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the Lord” (Deut. 8:3).
Bread and water are a constant throughout the scriptures, symbolizing the basic sustenance we need to survive. Despite God providing miraculous manna and springs of water in the wilderness for forty years, the Israelites repeatedly decried their hunger and thirst—because they were looking for the wrong kind of solution.
Jesus Christ repeated Moses’s words while refuting Satan’s temptation, and later exhorted His disciples that we must ask God for “our daily bread” (Matt. 4:2-4, Matt. 6). This wasn’t just asking that our physical needs be fulfilled, but for spiritual nourishment—DAILY.
The only way to get that is by spending time with God’s word, and in prayer talking to Him. Jesus also said that His food was to do the will of the Father and finish the work. If we’re following Him, ours should be likewise.
I have to ask myself, do I truly hunger and thirst for God’s word and my connection to Him every single day? Or am I so full all the time, stuffing every moment with the worldly things I love to read and watch and think about, that I never leave the time and space to feel that hunger and longing for Him?
If I’m being honest with myself, I have to answer no to that first question. Sure, I read the bible every day. But crave it, yearn for it, feel like I’m wasting away without it?? I don’t have that hunger and thirst for righteousness nearly as often as I should (Matt. 5:6).
To be clear, I’m not saying we should spend every minute of our day in prayer and bible study. But just like I can’t make 80% of my diet nachos and wine and still be a healthy, functioning person, neither can we do the same spiritually—the foundation of our diet has to be the bread of God’s word (the bible) and the living water of God’s spirit.
Just like in our physical diet, it’s about balance, making sure we’re consuming the quality and quantity of nourishment we need to thrive. And just like with physical food, our spiritual health depends not only on *what* we’re consuming, but also how well we absorb it. We must CHEW our spiritual food.
Do we rush through prayer and bible study, ticking it off our to-do list and moving on with our day? The only way to get the spiritual nourishment we need is to “chew on it”…break it down, mull over, and meditate on God’s word.
Lastly, there’s a reason that “you are what you eat” is one of the most recognizable sayings in our culture—the things we consume or allow into our body will ultimately define our physical, mental, and spiritual health.
Just like God looks at the unclean meats and calls eating them “detestable”, what would God make of the other things that we consume—specifically what we allow into our hearts and minds?
Whether it’s the music we listen to, the shows we watch, what we read, and just as importantly, our thoughts as we go through the day…are we allowing content into our hearts and minds that God would find detestable? Put another way, if Jesus Christ lives in me (Gal. 2:20), why would I allow something Christ would consider detestable into the same space that He dwells?
I want to spend a minute here to really land on that point about our thoughts, since it’s easy to gloss over. We’re used to thinking about the media we consume. But we rarely stop to think about the thoughts that we allow in. Yes, ALLOW IN.
Whether they’re nasty or judgmental toward other people, or constant negative thoughts about ourselves, God makes clear that we are responsible for what we allow to swirl around constantly in our minds. And He tells us what He wants us to be thinking on.
“Finally brethren, whatever things are true…are noble…are just…are pure…are lovely…of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things” (Phil. 4:8)
“They shall neither hunger nor thirst anymore”
It’s tempting for us today to think that God’s commands about unclean and detestable meats, or eating blood, don’t really matter to us today. But from the first couple pages of the bible, up until the very last chapter, God is focused on what we consume—physically and spiritually.
Food is there at the beginning, and at the end. It was the catalyst for mankind’s initial sin in Genesis 3, and it will be the eternal reward after God wholly redeems them. In Revelation we see the marriage supper of the Lamb and His spotless bride, God’s faithful chosen (Rev. 19:7). And then at the very end, we’re shown a crystal-clear river of water, flanked on either side by the Tree of Life, which yields its life-giving fruit every month (Rev. 22).
And then that deep-seated hunger that God planted in us, to yearn for a spiritual nourishment that this world could never fulfill will finally be satisfied.
“Then one of the elders answered saying to me, ‘Who are these arrayed in white robes, and where did they come from?’…’These are the ones who come out of the great tribulation, and washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
They shall neither hunger anymore nor thirst anymore…for the Lamb who is in the midst of the throne will shepherd them and lead them to living fountains of waters. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes’” (Rev. 7:13-17)
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