A widely held view has been that God did it because He was concerned for the health and hygiene of His people. In those far-off primitive days, so the argument goes, when people had no scientific understanding of germs and viruses, and no refrigeration to stop meat going bad, God forbade the eating of certain animals, birds, and fish, to protect His people from the poison that those creatures could easily carry.

Why did God originally forbid Israel certain foods?  The answer is: to teach them certain lessons by introducing the categories of ceremonial cleanness and uncleanness.

Leave aside for the moment these food laws. Israel as a nation was separated out from the other nations to enjoy a special relationship with God and to carry a special role among the nations. As Balaam put it, “I see people who live apart and do not consider themselves one of the nations” (Num. 23:9). As God explained to them at Sinai: “...out of all nations you will be My treasured possession. Although the whole earth is Mine, you will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex. 19:5-6). In accordance with this special role, therefore, they were commanded naturally enough to keep themselves pure from the moral and spiritual uncleanness that so polluted the Gentile nations. Listing and prohibiting the sexual immoralities, the religious idolatries, the commercial dishonesties, the infanticide, demonism, and incest prevalent among the Canaanite nations, God explained:

Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. Even the land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants...And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you (Lev. 18:24-28).

These, then, were moral and spiritual prohibitions. But to reinforce them, God added laws providing for ceremonial cleanness:

You must therefore make a distinction between clean and unclean animals and between unclean and clean birds. Do not defile yourselves by any animal or bird or anything that moves along the ground—those which I have set apart as unclean for you. You are to be holy to Me [or, to be My holy ones] because I, the Lord, am holy, and I have set you apart from the nations to be My own (Lev. 20:25-26).

These ceremonial and ritual laws would have both a positive and a negative effect. Positively, they reinforced in Israel’s thinking that as a nation they were separated to the Lord; specially set apart for Him. However morally and spiritually clean the members of another nation might have been, they did not have the role that Israel as a nation had. Israel’s role, as a kingdom of priests, was special, indeed unique. The ceremonial separation from certain kinds of food which other nations ate reinforced and underlined the fact that they were in a special sense separated to the Lord, especially “holy” in a ritualistic way.

Negatively, these food laws had an immediate practical effect: they made social mixing with Gentile nations difficult, since Israelites could not eat Gentile food. This would not only reinforce the fact that Israel was a special nation, but also act as a constant reminder that Israel was to avoid the moral and spiritual uncleanness of the Gentiles.

Now of course not all Gentiles were as corrupt and filthy as the Canaanites. But here too was a problem: many Gentiles were guilty of corrupt habits. How could Israel therefore be protected from their influence? The way God used was to build a wall between Israel and all Gentiles. Just as a parent will do with a child: not all men are child-molesters, but enough of them are to make it a wise and sensible thing for parents to do, to forbid their young children to take candy or money or car-rides from any man they don’t know.

And the analogy holds good for a further point. Parents may forbid their early-teenage daughter from going to certain sleazy parts of a city. They do so, not because they think their daughter is essentially better than other girls, but rather because they know that their daughter is essentially no better than others. She has the same human nature as others. She too could be corrupted as others have been. A good apple put among bad ones does not improve the bad ones: they corrupt it.

Israel under the law, says Paul, was like a child (Gal. 4:1-3); and God treated them appropriately. He put a wall of ceremonial food laws around them to remind them that they were a people separated to God, and to protect them as far as possible from Gentile pollution. The need for, and the importance of, that wall can be seen from their history: when they disregarded the wall, they generally became as corrupt as the other nations.

Taken from the book True to the Faith, by David Gooding