There are many versions of the riddle, but this is the one I heard when I was a kid: A blind war veteran goes into a seafood restaurant, orders shark, eats one bite, and kills himself. Took us hours to figure that one out, and hundreds of questions. But I’ll spare you all that, skip to the solution, and tell you what happened: Four decades ago, during the Second World War, the soldier in question—the one who just killed himself—was shot down in the Pacific Theater. The airplane crash landed on a remote desert island. He was blinded by the explosion, but the other two survivors (friends of his) were not.
There’s plenty of fresh water to be found on the island but very little food, and, as a consequence, the three soldiers are soon on the brink of starvation. The two soldiers (not blinded by the blast) do the unthinkable: they begin cooking and eating the corpses of the five men in their unit who died in the plane crash. Out of love for their blind friend, they decide to lie to him: they tell him he’s eating shark. After all, they reason, there’s no reason for all three of us to live with this horrific knowledge. Besides, if we survive this war, he’s going to be handicapped by blindness for the rest of his life; no reason for him to be handicapped by nightmares too.
The three men are rescued a month later. But the memory of what they did to survive proves too much for the two men who know the truth to bear: one becomes a smelly recluse who drinks himself to death before his 30th birthday, whilst the other—who seemed fine to everyone, including his wife—blows his brains out after a New Year’s Eve party in 1950. The blind vet’s post-war life isn’t nearly so tragic. He marries his high school sweetheart, settles down in the suburbs, gets a job with the city, and fathers five children. But alas, on that fateful day, four decades after the war, our blind vet is forced to face up to the truth. And it crushes him.
I realize now, and only in retrospect, that the riddle’s dramatic conclusion attests to the strength of the cannibalism taboo in our culture. It’s clearly much stronger, for instance, than the incest taboo. Very few of us fantasize about eating a sibling, but—studies have shown—a fair number of us have, at some point, fantasized about sleeping with one. Be that as it may, the riddle’s main problem—logistically speaking—is that human flesh doesn’t taste anything like shark; it does, however, taste a great deal like pork. Smells like it too—at least that’s what a friend of ours told us, after witnessing an open-air cremation in rural Nigeria.
In her anthropological classic, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), Mary Douglas made mincemeat out of our anachronistic understanding of the prohibition of pork found in the Book of Leviticus: “Even if some of Moses’ dietary rules were hygienically beneficial it is a pity to treat him as an enlightened public health administrator, rather than as a spiritual leader.” Douglas details an alternate explanation for the prohibition’s origin in Leviticus as Literature (1999). It’s a provocative and profoundly learned argument, the product of a lifetime devoted to serious study; but it’s also, alas, rather far-fetched. Imagine what a really smart version of The Da Vinci Code (2003) might look like. Regardless, my guess is that the prohibition of pork emerged for rather pragmatic reasons along with the prohibition of ritualistic cannibalism and the ban on human sacrifice.
The clues have always been right there, hiding in plain sight, in an altogether familiar story: a Middle Eastern Sky God—with a jealous streak as long as the Jordan—tells an Iron Age patriarch to sacrifice his only legitimate son. Dying without a rightful heir was a terrifying possibility for a patriarch like Abraham: it meant a fate worse than death: namely, the death of his line, his name, his memory. As such, nothing demonstrated faith and trust in your god more than the sacrifice of your firstborn son. And the “Father of Faith” was prepared to do it. Abraham takes his son Isaac to the top of the Mountain and ties him up. Out comes the ceremonial blade. The knife is at his son’s throat. And he’s just about to slit it open when an angel of the LORD calls out to him from heaven: “Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. And Abraham lifted up his eyes, and looked, and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram, and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son” (Genesis 22:12-13).
If Hyam Maccoby is right—and I strongly suspect that he is—the Abraham and Isaac story is a mythological representation of a massive cultural shift: from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice. In The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt (1982), Maccoby maintains that although “the institution of human sacrifice was widely practiced throughout the ancient world,” it gradually gave way to animal sacrifice “because growing civilization and humanitarianism, combined with a higher valuation of human status and a lessened awe of animals, caused a horror of human sacrifice to develop.” The didactic purpose of the Abraham and Isaac story is “to show that God Himself ordained that animal sacrifice should be substituted for human sacrifice. At the same time, the story contains no moral revulsion from the very idea of human sacrifice. On the contrary, it is imputed to Abraham as extraordinary merit that he was willing to sacrifice his favorite son, Isaac, at the behest of God.”
But alas, there were then—as there have always been—conservatives who cling to the old ways, resist change, and hate innovations—as well as the faddish reformers who champion them. Politically-incorrect patriarchs of this stamp would have stubbornly kept on practicing human sacrifice, albeit on the down low. Probably took centuries to force these guys—and the pockets of resistance they represented—to get with the program and fall into line. My guess is that the prohibition of pork emerged during this period as part of an ongoing attempt to enforce the ban on human sacrifice.
When my wife was a kid, the state of New Jersey banned the keeping of crows as pets. They did this despite the fact that crows were not, as a species, endangered in any way. Their rationale was based on two inescapable facts: (1) ravens make really great pets, especially if you get them when they’re young; and, (2) it’s really hard for most people to tell the difference between an immature raven and an immature crow. Ravens were (and still are) seriously endangered, and nest poaching for the pet trade was putting further pressure on their dwindling numbers. As such, New Jersey officials wanted to put an end to the practice. But a prohibition on the keeping of ravens as pets was proving exceedingly difficult because pet store owners who were caught red-handed could always plausibly plead ignorance: “I swear, officer, I thought it was a baby crow.” So they decided to close the loophole by banning crows and ravens. I suspect that pork was banned for similar reasons.
—John Faithful Hamer, From Here (2017)