Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Leviticus 11:7
And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven-footed, yet he cheweth not the cud; he [is] unclean to you.
7. The flesh of the pig is forbidden because it is not a ruminant. Of the four animals here mentioned, the swine was specially obnoxious to the Jews, either owing to its being an object of heathen worship (cp. Isa 65:4; Isa 66:3; Isa 66:17), or for sanitary reasons. To eat pork was by them regarded as abjuring their religion, and it is recorded as one of the abominations that were forced upon the Jews by Antiochus Epiphanes in the Maccabaean persecution, 2Ma 6:18-19 .
Fuente: The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
He divide the hoof … – It is cloven-footed and completely, etc. See Lev 11:3 note. Of all the quadrupeds of which the Law forbids the flesh to be eaten, the pig seems to have been regarded as the most unclean. Compare the marginal references. Several other nations have agreed with the Hebrews in this respect: the reason being that its flesh is unwholesome, especially in warm climates.
Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible
Verse 7. And the swine] chazir, one of the most gluttonous, libidinous, and filthy quadrupeds in the universe; and, because of these qualities, sacred to the Venus of the Greeks and Romans, and the Friga of our Saxon ancestors; and perhaps on these accounts forbidden, as well as on account of its flesh being strong and difficult to digest, affording a very gross kind of aliment, apt to produce cutaneous, scorbutic, and scrofulous disorders, especially in hot climates.
Fuente: Adam Clarke’s Commentary and Critical Notes on the Bible
The Jews would not so much as name
the swine, but called it another or a strange thing, lest the naming of it should tempt them to eat this meat, which was so commonly used and so much esteemed by others.
Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole
7. the swineIt is a filthy,foul-feeding animal, and it lacks one of the natural provisions forpurifying the system, “it cheweth not the cud”; in hotclimates indulgence in swine’s flesh is particularly liable toproduce leprosy, scurvy, and various cutaneous eruptions. It wastherefore strictly avoided by the Israelites. Its prohibition wasfurther necessary to prevent their adopting many of the grossestidolatries practised by neighboring nations.
Fuente: Jamieson, Fausset and Brown’s Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be cloven footed,…. Not only its hoofs are parted, but cloven quite through, and so in this respect answers Moses’s first descriptive character of clean creatures; though Aristotle u and Pliny w speak of some kind of swine in Illyricum, Paeonia, and other places, which have solid hoofs; but perhaps these were not properly swine, though so called:
yet he cheweth not the cud; and a learned physician observes x, that such creatures that chew not the cud, so perfect a chyle cannot be elaborated by them as is by those that chew the cud, and therefore their flesh must be less wholesome; and of the swine, he says y, they have but one belly, and so there is no rumination or chewing the cud by them; wherefore they are to be placed, and are in a lower degree than the camel, the coney, and the hare; and as they cannot digest the chyle so well as those that chew the cud, and also live upon most sordid and filthy food, the eating of swine’s flesh, he observes, must produce many inconveniences to the body, as especially scorbutic, arthritic, scabious, and leprous disorders: so Manetho the Egyptian says z, that he that eats swine’s milk is liable to be filled with the leprosy; and Maimonides a gives it as the principal reason of its being forbid the Jews, because it is such a filthy creature, and eats such filthy things:
he [is] unclean to you: and so it has always been accounted by the Jews, and nothing is more abominable to them, as is even testified by Heathen b writers; and in this they have been imitated by many nations, particularly the Egyptians, who, as Herodotus says c, reckon swine a very filthy creature; so that if anyone does but touch it passing by, he is obliged to plunge himself into a river with his clothes on; and keepers of them may not go into any of their temples, nor do the rest of the Egyptians intermarry with them, but they marry among themselves; the reason of this their abhorrence of swine, Aelianus says d, is because they are so gluttonous that they will not spare their own young, nor abstain from human flesh; and this, says he, is the reason why the Egyptians hate it as an impure and voracious animal: likewise the Arabians entirely abstain from swine’s flesh, as Solinus says e, who adds, that if any of this sort of creatures is carried into Arabia, it immediately dies; and the same Pliny f attests: and so the Phoenicians, the near neighbours of the Jews, would not eat the flesh of them; hence Antoninus is said to abstain from it after the manner of the Phoenicians g, unless the historian should mean the Jews; also the Gallo-Grecians or Galatians h; nay, even the Indians have such an abhorrence of it, that they would as soon taste of human flesh as taste of that i, and it is well known that the Mahometans abstain from it; and they have such an aversion to it, that if any chance to kill a wild pig, for tame they have none, they look on the merit of it to be almost equivalent to the killing a Christian in fight k: now these creatures may be an emblem of filthy and impure sinners, especially apostates, who return to their former impurities and wallow in them, 2Pe 2:22.
u Hist. Animal. l. 2. c. 1. w Nat. Hist. l. 11. c. 46. x Scheuchzer. ut supra, (Physic. Sacr. vol. 2.) p. 282. y Ib. p. 284. z Apud Aelian. de Animal. l. 10. c. 16. a Moreh Nevochim, par. 3. c. 48. b “Et vetus indulget”, &c. Juvenal. Satyr. 6. “nec distare putant”, &c. Ib. Satyr. 14. Vid. Porphyr. de Abstinentia, l. 4. sect. 11, 12. c Euterpe, sive, l. 2. c. 47. d Ut supra. (Apud Aelian. de Animal. l. 10. c. 16.) e Polyhistor. c. 46. f Nat. Hist. l. 8. c. 52. g Herodian. Hist. l. 5. c. 16. h Pausan. Achaica, sive, l. 7. p. 430. i Ctesias apud Aelian. de Animal. l. 16. c. 37. k Pitts’s Account of the Mahometans, p. 163.
Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible
(7) And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted.Better, And the swine, though he is clovenfooted, and entirely separateth the hoofs. (See Lev. 11:3.) Having given these illustrations of animals which comply with the first condition onlyi.e., which are ruminant but not bisulcousand hence must not be eaten, the lawgiver now concludes the list of prohibited quadrupeds with an illustration of a contrary natureviz., the swine, which comply with the second condition only, but not with the first. Here, too, the description is according to appearance. The feet of the pig tribe generally have four toes enclosed in separate hoofs. The two middle hoofs, however, are much larger, and are divided by a deep cleft, and hence to all appearances the swine is bisulcous. Though the law before us simply describes the swine as wanting in one of the two criteria, like the camel, the coney, and the hare, yet the abhorrence which the Jews, as a nation, have always had of this animal, and the impurity which they have ascribed to it infinitely surpass their repulsion of any other unclean beast. For this reason it became the symbol of defilement and the badge of insult (Psa. 65:4; Psa. 66:3; Psa. 66:17; Pro. 11:22). The eating of pork was regarded as renouncing the Law, and as a sign of apostasy. Hence Antiochus Epiphanes adopted it as a test that those Jews who ate it had forsaken their religion and submitted to his rule. Hence we read that when swines flesh was forced into the mouth of Eleazar, the aged scribe, he spit it forth, choosing rather to die gloriously than to live stained with such an abomination (2Ma. 6:18-19). During the time of the commonwealth there were no swine in Judea. Hence it was in a far country that the prodigal son was sent into the field to feed the swine (Luk. 15:13-15). The swine in Galilee in our Lords time (Mat. 8:30) were undoubtedly kept by Gentiles for the Roman legion. The very name of swine (chazir) was discarded, and the animal was designated by the euphemistic expression, the other thing. This brutish of all animals was, moreover, regarded as propagating cutaneous and many other disorders. The Talmud declares that ten measures of pestilential diseases were spread over the earth, and nine of them fell to the share of pigs. On the other hand, many of the Pagan nations regarded the swine as an emblem of the productive power of nature. Hence they sacrificed them to those deities to whom they ascribed the fertility of the soil, and the fruitfulness of cattle. Thus, the Egyptians offered them in honour of Isis and Osiris once a year at the festival of the full moon. The Athenians, too, offered the swine in their mysteries; so did the Boetians and the early Romans.
Fuente: Ellicott’s Commentary for English Readers (Old and New Testaments)
7. The swine The Jews are not alone in their abhorrence of swine’s flesh. It was forbidden to the Egyptian priests, disallowed by the Koran, and rejected by the Phenicians, Ethiopians and other Eastern nations. At the present day a hog is scarcely ever seen in Palestine. Native Christians abstain from pork out of a prudential regard for the scruples of their Moslem and Jewish neighbours. Besides being a non-ruminant it is probable that the swine was excluded from the diet of the Hebrew on hygienic grounds, as liable to induce cutaneous diseases, especially the leprosy. The intimate connexion between disorders of the skin and the eating of pork is found in the derivation of the word scrofula, from the Latin scrofa, a breeding-sow.
Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments
Lev 11:7. And the swine The aversion of the Jews to this animal, is universally known; it is generally considered as an emblem of impurity, but was most probably forbidden chiefly on account of its tendency to breed the leprosy: hence the Jews had a proverb, that of ten measures of leprosy which descended into the world, the swine took nine to themselves. The swine, says Dr. James, is the only animal in the creation subject to the leprosy, and also something very like what we call the king’s evil, called in Latin scrophula, from scropha, a sow: as this disease is in Greek called , from , a swine. The measles is another contagious disease with which this animal is often infected; insomuch that it has passed into a proverb, as we learn from Juvenal, who calls it porrigo: in this distemper all the fleshly parts are full of innumerable small, round, white, hard substances, somewhat like hailstones. Hence, it must be plain to every reasonable observer, that the flesh of this animal, as an aliment, must be highly improper for a people so subject to leprosies as the Jews appear to have been, and who were inhabitants of a warm climate, which renders every thing more inclinable to putrefaction. It was, no doubt, for these reasons, that various other nations, inhabiting warm climates, had the same aversion to swine’s flesh with the Jews. The Egyptians, we are informed, had it in great abhorrence, (see Gen 46:34.) and the Arabians, Pliny tells us, carried their aversion to swine so far, that they would not suffer them to live among them; an antipathy, which subsists to this day among the Arabs, Moors, Tartars, and others; and which, as we lean from Dampier’s Voyages, chap. 12 is propagated by the Mahometans into distant countries, particularly one of the Philippine Islands, where, if any person do but touch one of these creatures, he is not permitted to come into any body’s house for several days after. See Spencer de Legibus Heb. lib. i. c. vii. sect. iv.
Note; 1. God’s people must always be separated from the world. Though these ceremonial distinctions have ceased, yet the table of the godly man and the profane will afford as great a difference still; not only in the temperance of the one and the luxury of the other, but also in the prayer which consecrates the one, and the impious neglect of it which profanes the other. 2. From the beasts which answered but half the description, being still unclean, we may observe, that those who with some marks of the children of God, carry evident proofs of the want of others, are only almost-christians, and will as surely perish, unless altogether such, as they who make no pretences to religion.
See commentary on Lev 11:4
Fuente: Commentary on the Holy Bible by Thomas Coke
Lev 11:7 And the swine, though he divide the hoof, and be clovenfooted, yet he cheweth not the cud; he [is] unclean to you.
Ver. 7. And the swine. ] Anima sui data pro sale, ne carnes putrescant, said Cleanthes. The swine hath his soul for salt only; so hath the drunkard.
Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)
swine: Deu 14:8, Isa 65:4, Isa 66:3, Isa 66:17, Mat 7:6, Luk 8:33, Luk 15:15, 2Pe 2:18-22
Reciprocal: Mat 8:30 – an Mar 5:11 – herd Luk 8:32 – there an
Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Lev 11:7. And the swine This animal is remarkable for filthiness, and for feeding on all manner of ordure, even carrion if it falls in its way, and therefore a sow wallowing in the mire is set forth as an emblem of impurity, by writers sacred and profane. And Maimonides alleges its filthiness as the chief reason of its flesh being prohibited. Vossius, however, adds another, namely, that it had a tendency to breed the leprosy, a disease incident to those countries. And, according to the author of the Medicinal Dictionary, it is the only animal in the creation subject to the leprosy, and to something very like the kings evil, called in Latin scrofula, from scrofa, a sow. The flesh, therefore, of this animal could not but be highly improper, as an aliment, for a people subject to leprosies, as the Jews appear to have been, and who were inhabitants of a warm climate, which renders every thing more inclinable to putrefaction.