Catfish was being eaten in Jerusalem and surrounding areas even as Judaism was emerging there
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Non-kosher fish was on the menu in areas that are now part of Israel and Egypt while Judaism was developing in the region and the Hebrew Bible was being written there.
The Torah – the first five books of the Hebrew Bible – states that certain foods, including pork and aquatic animals that lack fins and scales, shouldn’t be eaten. Modern, practising Jewish people are prohibited from eating these foods.
To explore the origin of the custom, Yonatan Adler at Ariel University in the West Bank and Omri Lernau at the University of Haifa in Israel examined ancient fish bones from 30 archaeological sites in Israel and Sinai dated from about 1550 BC to AD 640. They found that finless and scaleless fish were regularly eaten during that 2000-year period.
“What people were doing in the past often leaves a footprint on the material record, just as we leave footprints today,” says Adler. “We are, as archaeologists, rifling through ancient people’s garbage, essentially, and learning about their actual behaviour. So, by looking at archaeological finds, we learn what ancient Jews were doing.”
The research forms part of a larger project to determine the origins of Judaism, in this case looking at food laws.
Lernau identified different fish species from about 20,000 bones and found that of the non-kosher fish, catfish was eaten the most. Other non-kosher fish that were eaten include rays and sharks.
“If you have fish, especially in a place which is far from a water source, let’s say Jerusalem [where one of the 30 sites was located]. People were bringing these fish to Jerusalem, and if you brought a fish to Jerusalem, it was to eat it. You can’t really do anything with fish aside from eating it,” says Adler.
Many scholars believe that the Jewish dietary laws came about because there wasn’t a precedent for eating these foods in the culture at the time, but the presence of non-kosher fish in these ancient diets suggests otherwise.
“We can see that things developed very slowly, and the interpretation of these laws were not as fixed as people might think,” says James Aitken at the University of Cambridge. “Jewish identity was a slow process and not immediately apparent. Jews did not look different from their neighbours. They did not behave differently or eat differently.”
Journal reference: Tel Aviv, DOI: 10.1080/03344355.2021.1904675
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