Food Regulation in Biblical Law

Everyone needs to eat, yet most societies and many world religions limit the available food supply by practicing some form of dietary restriction. However, biblical law presents a special case because "few [societies] systematically define all animals as permitted or forbidden and invoke divine authority for the instructions." For at least two thousand years, people have wondered why such a complex and comprehensive system of food regulation as is found in biblical law would fail to offer any sort of explanation of its underlying purpose. None of the proposed answers to this question has gained uniform acceptance, and this paper will not attempt to solve this age old puzzle. Instead, I will describe the Bible's food laws and then discuss the various theories that try to answer the question of why these laws were created