Fishy business
Last week, a study came out called "The Pentateuchal Dietary Proscription against Finless and Scaleless Aquatic Species in Light of Ancient Fish Remains" by Dr. Yonatan Adler and Prof. Omri Lernau, both Israeli archeologists. Naturally, the world was shaken to its core from their conclusion that ancient Israelites and even later Jews did not, it seems, adhere to fish kashrut laws.
I read the study a couple of times and thought I'd put down my thoughts on the matter. But beforehand, I'd like to know how much of the conclusions of the study were written by Dr. Adler. Adler is a religious Jew who works in the University of Ariel, not necessarily one of those Tel Aviv minimalists. However, the study includes arguing for a Hellenistic dating of Nechemiah. What. Huh? C'mon...we're talking about a book that has plenty of Persian and Aramaic, but no Greek. Puh-lease! Doesn't really seem like something a learned religious Jew would spout. But never mind that. I come off as biased and uneducated.
Actually, it was only after reading the study twice that I even bothered to look at the names of the authors...probably not very professional of me. But I'm not a professional, so I guess I'm in the clear.
Anyway, points I wanted to make:
a. It seems that archeologists believe that any fish that is unpunctured - puncturing points (pun unintended) to its usage as jewelry - is thought to have been consumed. This seems like a wild assumption! Fish were used as tools, and at the same time, we could also say that the fish were not consumed for some other reason! Either option is equally viable.
b. The scholars did not specifically say that all bones that took part in the study were unpunctured ones. I think that's an important bit of info that's missing. Right now, we don't know which bones they studied.
c. The scholars chose to include in the survey sites that they themselves admit are accepted as Plishti sites - Ekron, Ashkelon and Timna - i.e. non-Jewish sites - yet do not explain the purpose of including them in the study. Furthermore, they include in the subgroup of the Roman era study sites that were mostly un-Jewish in that specific period, such as Caesarea and Yerushalayim. Why? This information is never divulged.
d. Despite admitting that there are too few findings from the Kingdom of Israel (AKA "The Northern Kingdom"), the scholars conclude that there is no reason to believe that fish consumption habits between the two kingdoms were any different. The logic appears to be an ages-old assumption that every single site in Israel developed and evolved culturally at the same rate as the other sites. This is incredibly flawed logic that has already been disproven within the archeological world a number of times. For this reason, it was believed for many years that proto-Hebrew (Phoenician) evolved from proto-Canaanite and simultaneously all Davidic or Solomonic sites adopted the Phoenician writing. As I wrote about in this post, this has been disproven upon the discovery of proto-Canaanite texts dated to the 10th and 9th centuries, a time that was seemingly entirely Phoenician already. Similarly, it was widely believed that all Canaanite towns moved from bronze tools to iron ones simultaneously. Again, findings do not match the assumption. The entirety of Israel did not develop in the same manner. This is a flawed model pushed by archeologists from the USA and Europe who lacked an understanding of the history and geography of the region (as noted by Dr. Chagai Misgav). Why continue adhering to the flawed model?
e. The scholars note that hardly any to no scaleless fishbones were found in Tel Mikne (Ekron) and Tel Rechov, but this fact, apparently, is not evidence of any social fish taboo in those places. Why? Seriously, where does this assumption come from? Should the same be said of the widely-accepted pig taboo? "Lack of pig bones don't point to a pig-eating taboo"?
f. Conflating questionable theories of Biblical Criticism while ignoring other aspects of the Tanach, all within a study that is supposed to present the seemingly objective results of the study seems not very objective at all.
And now for the apologetics:
g. The conclusion of the study of course ignores the many sins that the Israelites are said to have committed. That they might not have kept kashrut exactly as outlined in the Torah isn't such a wild thought. Perhaps people don't usually think about it, but snooze we lose, I guess.
h. How the heck do archeologists know who ate these fish? I mean, there were none-Israelites in Israel, too! Amalekites, Canaanites, Gibeonites and Plishtim, just to name a few.
(image taken from here)
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