boneyard bill

Jesus says we should not cast our pearls before swine. When he casts out demons they inhabit a herd of swine that then run over a cliff and die. After the prodigal son blows all his money, he gets a job as a swineherd.

Swine are no good as draft animals. Unlike sheep, they do not produce any hair worth making into cloth. The only reason for raising and breeding swine is to eat them.

But Jews are supposedly forbidden by torah from eating swine. So why are they raising so many of them?

How much do we know about pre-Christian Judaism? It was a temple sect. And people made pilgrimages to Jerusalem on holy days to sacrifice at the temple. But they did follow the torah? Or was this an invention of the Pharisees? And how important were the Pharisees before the diaspora?

Could it be that in pre-Christian Palestine the Pharisees were a rather minor sect and only seem to be important because of their subsequent conflicts with the Christians?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I'm hoping that someone on these boards does. There seems to be modern assumption that torah was a defining characteristic of Judaism from its inception, but it seems as if the temple and animal sacrifice was much more important in Jesus' day. And while I know that Jesus makes at least one reference to a synagogue, I don't know how common they were at that time. I understand that they actually emerged from Greek influence.

What I'm really getting at is, what was the Judaism that Jesus was dealing with and how does it differ from modern Rabbinical Judaism and how much do we really know about these differences. After all, the first talmud was about 400 A.D.

excreationist

boneyard bill:
Other people lived in the area - like Samaritans and Romans. They probably kept some pigs - so Jews would still know what pigs are.

http://bible.gospelcom.net/cgi-bin/b...ig&version=NIV

Proverbs and Isaiah also mention pigs.

Moses' laws talk about animal sacrifice - specifically in Leviticus. The temple was built by Solomon I think, as a place to put the ark of the covenent (where the ten commandments were held?) - while in the desert Moses kept the ark in some kind of mobile temple (a tent).

Well in Jesus's time, most priests were Sadducees... these priests followed the written Torah (the Law). They rejected the resurrection, the immortality of the soul and the existence of angels.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13323a.htm
On the other hand, the Pharisees believed in the resurrection, angels, and the immortality of the soul - and in the oral Torah - the other bits of the OT after Moses(?).
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11789b.htm

The priests would try and follow the Torah themselves, though on the numerous occassions when Jesus broke the "no work on the Sabbath" law they didn't put Jesus to death... they even stopped stoning an adulteress (like Moses's law told them to) after Jesus talked to them...

On the other hand, perhaps a lot of the Jews, because of intermarriage and living near each other, ate some pork... after all, many times in the OT, the Jews drifted into lawlessness and did bad things (like worshipping golden calfs, etc). Or if they didn't eat pigs they might raise them to sell to non-Jews... the point is that there would be some pigs around, even if they are pigs for foreigners.

boneyard bill

excreationist writes:

Obviously they would have to know what pigs are in order to outlaw them. Samaritans, I believe, would be under the same law as the Jews. They just had a different temple.

It's possible that Jews raised pigs to sell to the Roman army, but the references seem too commonplace for them to have been an exotic food.

We know for a fact that there was no talmud i.e. no standardized interpretation of the law. And the written torah would only have been available to a very few. Torah was read in the synogogue once a year (a small part each week). But when did the synogogues start? And who went to them? Only Pharisees? Or did Sadducees attend as well. What about Essenes? Or was it only acolytes and no common people. They were supposed to be centers of education after all, not for religious worship.

Jesus wasn't stoned for violating the law. But who were the authorities on the law? Jesus himself claimed to be such an authority. "The Sabbath was made for man."

Were the New Testament debates aimed at the common people or were they esoteric arguments among intellectuals? If they were just the latter, that doesn't tell us what ancient Judaism meant to the ordinary Jew.

excreationist

http://www.newadvent.org/almanac/thisrock94.htm
It seems you're right - they believed in the first 5 books of the Bible.

http://www.bible.org/docs/nt/topics/...s/mircl-15.htm
That link talks about pigs being possessed by demons....
http://www.agabus.co.uk/mark/chapter5.htm
More comments about that story:
See the Catholic Encyclopedia entry for "synagogue":
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14379b.htm

Maybe the OT law about killing Sabbath workers wasn't enforced at that time, like how the laws about killing witches and adulterers probably aren't enforced in the present day. The Romans were ultimately in charge of the laws... maybe they just allowed the Jews to enforce some of their own laws. e.g. in the case of Jesus's execution, they had to turn to the Romans (even though Moses's law ordered the execution of false teachers) and he was tried under Roman law (though Pilate apparently just went along with the crowd's demands).

Jesus also had discussions with non-intellectual type people.