Ancient Judeans ate non-kosher catfish, sharks

ROSSELLA TERCATIN

The biblical prohibition against finless and scaleless sea creatures emerged in spite of this consolidated habit.

Anterior vertebra of ancient catfish excavated in Jerusalem.
(photo credit: PROF. OMRI LERNAU)

For over a millennium, ancient Judeans ate non-kosher fish and the biblical prohibition against finless and scaleless sea creatures emerged in spite of a consolidated habit, a new study published in the academic journal Tel Aviv on Tuesday showed.

The research is part of a larger project devoted to uncovering the origins of Judaism from an archaeological perspective, as Dr. Yonatan Adler, a senior lecturer at Ariel University and the director of the project, explained.

“The project focuses on exploring from which point in time we have evidence that ancient Judeans knew about the Torah and were keeping its laws,” he said.

As a child, Adler was always bothered by one question: Why do the characters of the Bible not appear more Jewish?

“When we read the stories about King David and King Salomon, the prophets and so on, nothing is ever mentioned about them keeping Shabbat, or immersing in a ritual bath,” Adler said. “However, when I started studying the Mishna and the Talmud, those rabbis – Hillel, Shammai, Rabbi Tarfon – were very Jewish. The contrast bothered me.”

Many years later Adler would start to work on understanding when the shift happened.

“I came to recognize that archaeology is a wonderful tool for discerning human behaviors in the past, to see what people were actually doing,” he said.

“These you may eat of all that live in water: anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales – these you may eat. But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and scales, among all the swarming things of the water and among all the other living creatures that are in the water – they are an abomination for you,” reads verses 9-10 of Leviticus chapter 11.

Adler and the co-author of the study, Haifa University Prof. Omri Lernau, analyzed the data from some 56 fish bones assemblages found in 30 sites throughout the region and dating between the Late Bronze Age through to the end of the Byzantine period (ca. 1550 BCE to 640 CE).

The researchers demonstrated that the consumption of non-kosher fish was very common up until and including the Persian period (586 BCE-332 BCE).
The period of time covers centuries when a great part of the biblical narrative is believed to have taken place, the time of prophets and kings.

The sites chosen by the researchers included Jerusalem, Lachish and Ramat Rachel; ancient settlements that because of their geographic location and because of the material culture they presented, were undoubtedly Judean.
“Ancient Judeans ate a lot of catfish and sharks,” Adler said.
Both species do not present scales and are not kosher.

“This is interesting because what it means is that compilers of the Pentateuch, assuming that they were working in the Persian period which is what most biblical scholars think, legislated a prohibition against eating a scaleless fish at a time when Judeans were eating and had been eating these fish for quite some time,” the researcher explained.

The norm therefore went against a longstanding practice, contrary to what happened with the prohibition of eating pork.

“Pork at that time was not eaten by many populations in the Levant,” he said.

Archaeological findings support the notion that ancient Jews did not eat pork.

Very little evidence remains regarding the dietary habits in Judea during the Hellenistic period (332–63 BCE) – as archaeological remains from those centuries are in general very rare.

In the fish assemblages dating back to the 1st century BCE and later, however, non-kosher fish bones become practically absent, a sign that the Jewish masses by that time were mostly keeping the Torah’s dietary laws.

“We cannot pinpoint the exact time when they started, but by then they were not eating scaleless fish anymore,” Adler said.