What Does the Bible REALLY think of eating meat?

My new book: Taming the Beast: Human-Animal Encounters in the Bible (Wipf and Stock Publishers) strongly disagrees. The Bible has always had a generic or built-in frown on consuming meat, even after meat eating became permissible following the flood. This bias begins with God effectively prohibiting “Adam” — the first pair of humans – as well as all animals, the killing of animals for food (Gen 1:29-30). Food for all that lives must exclusively come from plants, as was the case on Noah’s ark (6:21).

A sudden and inexplicable change follows Noah’s arbitrary (and pagan-like) erection of a slaughter site after the flood on which he makes the first biblically recorded slaying of animal for a sacrifice to God – see  The Blogs: The sacrifice of animals and the fall of Noah | Yossi Feintuch | The Times of Israel . (I explain in my book why it would be erroneous to presume that Abel killed animals “for” God, even when unlike Cain’s all-produce gift, his offering of live premium individuals from his flocks was received favorably by God.)

God’s permission – not a demand – to humanity (through Noah) to eat the flesh of animals just like plants is mysterious; many attempts have been made to shed light on it. Significantly, it was given merely three verses after God laments the inclination of the human heart that did not end with the flood to choose “evil from youth” (8:21). As the sanctioning of meat precedes immediately the prohibition against murder it stands to reason that “since humans killed other humans before the flood (e.g., Cain) but did not turn their arms on animals, they might kill, perchance, fewer people, if not avoid manslaughter altogether, by turning now their unabated bloodthirstiness unto animals, trading homicide with zoocide …

[The grim reality of the ever-continuous and ubiquitous human bloodshed] raises the question whether God’s green-lighting of meat for Noah was given merely on an ad hoc basis and hence has long expired. Indeed, the contemporary Orthodox Rabbi Avraham Stav raises the question whether God’s sanctioning of meat was eternal and unconditional and whether it should be reinterpreted in every generation.”

My book Taming the Beast… raises another significant question:  “What happened to human longevity between Noah and Abraham, a drop of 775 years, especially when we consider the immensely longer lifespans of the ten prediluvian generations that featured no real fluctuations in their longevity (5:5–32; 11:10–27, 32)? — Of course, this is only circumstantial evidence to explain the dramatic decline in man’s longevity that cascades steeply in the post-flood era. Yet, it is a likely signpost pointing to humanity’s falling lifespan that coincides with man’s turning to meat for food.”

Indeed, according to Taming the Beast… “meat was not a usual fare or commonly anticipated as a daily meal; it took a special occasion to offer and eat meat.” We see evidence of that when Abraham invited three “wayfarers” (who were God’s messengers) to his desert tent; “the Torah tells us that Abraham rushed to prepare a special beef meal in their honor. By the same token, when Isaac had sought to confer on his eldest son Esau the birthright blessing, he asked his hunter son to celebrate the special event with meat ‘delicacies such as I love . . . so that my soul may bless you before I die’ (27:4).

And [then once again] when Jacob and Laban, his father-in-law, entered a mutual treaty vow of stretching a borderline between them at the Gilead Mountain; [to enact the pact] Jacob slaughtered animals for the ceremonial feast.” Had meat featured commonly in one’s diet, the Torah would not occupy itself with making mention of meat at such momentous events; by noting out the presence of meat in those instances, the Torah thickly implied how special an event had to be in order to warrant the offering of meat to its attendees.

And last but not least, that the Torah did not hold meat in high esteem can be deduced from Moses’ associating the eating of meat with one’s ‘appetite craving’ (if not lusting for it – Deut 12:15, 20, Num 11:34). “Craving” is the very word that appears in the Decalogue as a prohibition against becoming obsessive with “the house of your neighbor, his field, or his servant, or his maid, his ox or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor!” (Deut 5:18.]

Taming the Beast … sums up: “The Talmud agrees that what stood behind the permission for the Israelites to eat secularly slaughtered meat was the people’s ‘evil impulse,’ and that a total taboo on meat was impractical due to humans’ craving for it. Hence, it was a concession to wean them from eating the flesh of an animal carcass” (b. Qidd. 21b).