What Archaeology Tells Us About the Ancient History of Eating Kosher

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2021-05-27 06:00:07

In 2017, archaeologist Yonatan Adler and friends paid tribute to a retiring colleague with speeches about how their respective work in the field of archaeology was influenced by each other. After Adler spoke about his research on the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, Omri Lernau—senior research fellow at Haifa University and Israel’s top authority on all things fish—spoke about remains of aquatic creatures unearthed in ancient Judean settlements. He mentioned catfish, skate and shark.

Adler, who works at Israel’s Ariel University, was instantly intrigued. According to the Jewish laws of kashrut—the set of rules written in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible, that outline foods suitable for human consumption—these species are deemed non-kosher, and therefore unfit to eat. So why were the ancient Judeans eating them? Did they not yet know these rules? To Adler’s knowledge, no one in archaeology had tried to analyze why remains of the non-kosher fish existed at the ancient Judean settlements. So when Lernau finished his speech, Adler approached Lernau and expressed his interest in the tantalizing relics. The pair agreed to take a deeper dive into where and when the non-kosher fish were being eaten. “I knew it was going to be an interesting subject,” Lernau says.

Now, in a study published today in the journal Tel Aviv, the pair reveals that ancient Judeans, in a period that spans throughout much of the first millennium B.C., enjoyed a diet that didn’t fully adhere to Jewish kosher laws. According to the study, archaeologists have found the remains of three non-kosher species in the two ancients Judean settlements—the Kingdom of Israel in the region’s north and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. Judah residents in particular ate a lot of catfish. These findings help scientists and historians build a more complete picture of how the ancient Judean cultures developed and adopted these rules.