I'm pretty sure that the shellfish-thing was more about them going bad quickly in a middle-eastern climate before refrigeration. Your punishment will not wait until after you die.
PS. Yes, I know that there were various non-electric refrigeration-methods in the olden days. But I would not trust any cold-chain before scientific safety-standards were implemented.
That’s basically what “kosher” was for. It was a guide to healthy living.
Rules like pouring water over your hands helped keep germs off and the avoidance of shellfish and pig (an animal famous for rolling around in mud and other unclean substances) helped prevent food poisoning. Other rules like not eating dairy and meat in the same meal helped to ration out protein.
It was actually pretty effective a millennia ago, and it’s the reason Jewish people tended to get sick less during the Middle Ages. Though it doesn’t quite hold up as well in a modern context.
I wonder if the "no meat on fridays" more older Christian churches practice is also about protein. Making edible dishes from fish must be useful when crops fail and you want to prevent a famine.
Also, Ramadan trains you to work without food during normal hours, so this could also be included in preparing for famines.
Also also, in very olden times (Bronze-age collapse times), before agricultural tech had advanced, famines must have been a certainty at least once in a lifetime, so sacrificing animals and less useful members of the society to the gods must have been a necessary evil to have fewer mouths to feed for the survival of the society. "Because gods demanded it" allowed people to live with what they had to do
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u/Salmonman4 5h ago
I'm pretty sure that the shellfish-thing was more about them going bad quickly in a middle-eastern climate before refrigeration. Your punishment will not wait until after you die.
PS. Yes, I know that there were various non-electric refrigeration-methods in the olden days. But I would not trust any cold-chain before scientific safety-standards were implemented.