In a 2025 article from Archaeology Magazine, Andrew Lawler suggests an interesting source of Jews’ cultural taboo about eating pork. He thinks it might have more to do with their hatred of the Roman Empire than anything else. The more I thought about this suggestion, the more plausible it sounded. Moreover, that same hatred might have inspired the entire birth of Christianity. Today, let’s explore this idea—and tackle its longer-term ramifications.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 9/16/2025. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: The possible secret origins of the Jewish taboo on eating pork
In the March/April issue of Archaeology Magazine, an article explores an ancient taboo against eating pork. First, its author, Andrew Lawler, traces the history of pigs in the Ancient Near East. Then, he describes how ancient writings go from constantly talking up pigs and pork to despising them. Finally, he suggests that maybe the pork taboo comes from ancient Jews’ identification of pigs as signs of pagan excess. He thinks that the pork taboo comes from maintaining a firm separation between Jewish and pagan cultures.
This explanation differs dramatically from Christian folklore, which holds that Yahweh forbade pork to his followers for health reasons, or to differentiate Hebrews from Philistines. For a long time, evangelicals themselves thought that Hebrew excavations never contained pig bones—or idols of non-Yahweh gods, though that’s beside today’s point. Neither claim is true, however. Archaeologists find both in Hebrew sites.
Lawler’s suggestion fits the data archaeologists have accumulated. But it also predicts something else. It hints at such a massive hatred for Romans that some of those Jews might have boomeranged themselves right out of Judaism into the ultimate pushback to Roman culture: A quirky new offshoot of Judaism that eventually became known as Christianity.
The history of pigs and pork in the Ancient Near East
Archaeologists have unearthed enough pig bones around Jerusalem to know that these animals were popular sources of meat from 3500 BCE at least. In other areas, like southeastern Anatolia, boar bones account for about 20% of animal remains in digs dating back to 10,000 BCE.
However, around 1600 BCE, pigs began to get a negative reputation around Anatolia at least. Archaeologists have found a far smaller percentage of pig bones in digs from that timeframe. They went from about 20% of animal bones to 5%. People began to see pigs as trash-eating hedonists.
Lawler asserts that the Old Testament was written between 600-300 BCE. Others argue that this process began around 1400-1200 BCE. Either way, that’s well after that 1600 BCE mark. Even the Philistines, who were ancient enemies to the Hebrews, didn’t eat much pork after settling in the area. By 900 BCE, pig bones account for 1% of animal bones there.
Pork consumption rose dramatically later on. By 586 BCE, pig bones account for about 8% of animal bones found in digs. As Lawler tells us, this proportion holds true even in the heart of Jerusalem itself. One archaeologist even says, “Every excavation in Jerusalem and Judah from the same period has found some pig bones.”
When I was Pentecostal, we sure didn’t think that. The accepted wisdom was that one could tell the difference between a Hebrew and non-Hebrew home by the presence or absence of pig bones. Whoops.
Pigs as symbols of sin and decadence
Despite that brief rise in pork consumption by 586 BCE, cultural shifts would set the stage for Jews to completely reject the meat.
In the 300s, Alexander the Great conquered Judea. From then until 63 BCE, the Seleucid Empire ruled Judea. Then, the empire collapsed into civil war and got absorbed by the Roman Republic. The next year, the Romans swept into Judea and ruled it until about 135 CE.
(Technically, they ruled it for much longer even than that. In response to various huge Jewish rebellions, in the 130s Roman rulers renamed the region to Syria Palaestina, established a new pagan colony right on top of the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, depopulated the entire region, and tried their best to prevent Jews from living in Jerusalem proper ever again. But that’s well after the time period we’re discussing here.)
Both the Hellenistic and Roman people loved pork. Naturally, then, this meat became a flashpoint symbol for rebellion. Rabbis in Jerusalem soon began symbolizing their overlords as pigs—and the overlords’ culture as piggish.
In rejecting pork, Jews rejected everything about their conquerors. Their new rulers didn’t hesitate, either, to weaponize pork consumption. In 2 Maccabees 7, a Hellenistic king, Antiochus (d. 164 BCE), tried to force Jews to eat pork. He even had a pig sacrificed on the main altar in Jerusalem!
His soldiers tortured and executed those who refused. But of special note, 2 Maccabees 7 describes how some of Antiochus’ victims responded to his demands:
“You order people around and make them obey you. But someday you will die. Don’t think God has turned his back on our nation. Just wait! God will use his mighty power to make you and your family suffer.” [2 Mac 7:16-17]
“We’re suffering all these terrible things because we have disobeyed our God. Now you’re fighting against God, so don’t think that you won’t be punished too.” [2 Mac 7:18]
“Because of your pride, God will judge you and punish you as you deserve. I am willing to die along with my brothers for the laws of our ancestors. [. . .] I also pray that he will punish you so severely that you will finally confess that the Lord alone is God.” [2 Mac 7:36-37]
2 Maccabees was written around 150-100 BCE. As you can see, Jews thought Yahweh allowed this abuse to teach them a lesson, but soon he’d relent. When he did, they would conquer and kill their enemies in turn. All they had to do was obey their god, and he’d give them revenge against these invaders who ate unclean pork.
Unfortunately, Yahweh did not relent.
Pork eating intensifies under Romans—and so does identification of pork as a Roman custom
Soon after the Greek empire collapsed, in came the Romans in 63 BCE.
The Romans liked pigs and pork even more than the Greeks had. At least one Roman legion even used the image of a boar as their symbol. Almost every Roman involved in farming raised pigs. Rumors abounded about Romans trying to force Jews to eat pork, just as the Greeks had.
As Jordan Rosenblum put it in 2010 in The Jewish Quarterly Review (p. 96 in the file, p. 2 in the PDF):
By refusing to eat pig, Jews are never able to ingest Romanness and thus can never truly become Roman. [. . .] [B]ecause Romans eat pig they are, as such, embodied as pigs.
[T]he ingestion of pig [is] a symbol for the Other and the noningestion of pig [is] a symbol for Self.
This symbol is so intense for observant Jews that they refuse to eat even vegan substitutes for pork. Another Jewish source, Chabad.org, claims that pigs became known as symbols of hypocrisy because they had cloven hooves but were still not clean—just like Romans acted like they valued justice, but were corrupt to the core. A Torah site echoes these opinions.
It seems clear, based on years of archaeological study, that Judeans in general abstained from pork as a protest against their Greek and Roman conquerors. But soon, an even more potent reaction to Roman culture would emerge in 1st-century Judea.
Romanes eunt domus! And take your damned pork with you!
The above Latin is incorrect, of course, as anyone who’s seen The Life of Brian would know. As John Cleese points out in the movie, it should read “Romani ite domum,” or Romans go home. However, I bring up this movie because it’s remarkably true to the period’s history. Judeans had nothing but hate for the occupying Romans! (BTW, we watched this movie a while back!)
With that much simmering rage and resentment built up over more than 200 years, something had to give.
In the wake of the Roman occupation, a slew of wild-eyed apocalypse-preaching Jews began running around all over Jerusalem. Each one was trying to capture a following. The situation reminds me very much of social media today, with influencers jockeying with each other to claim viewers’ attention. These were chaotic days for Jerusalem!
Josephus, who lived between 36CE-100 CE, wrote extensively about these Jewish rebels and rabble-rousers in his accounting of the First Jewish-Roman War (66CE-135 CE). His work makes clear that anti-Rome preaching was a cultural practice by the time the first books of the New Testament were getting written.
One of those aspiring influencers in Judea peddled a very weird combination sect indeed: Hellenism, mystery religions, and Judaism itself. It caught on with just enough people to outlast its competitors, likely because it was the polar opposite of Rome.
The anti-Rome religion
Anti-Rome eating was already well-established in the pork taboo. But some people wanted to go further with their anti-Rome identity. And this new, scrappy little sect offered them a potent solution.
Where Romans enjoyed earthly victory with earthly weapons and tried-and-true battle tactics, 1st-century Jewish converts to this sect looked forward to heavenly victory with spiritual weapons and divine tactics. Where Romans indulged in every pleasure of their time, these Jewish converts denied themselves almost all pleasures. And where Romans tried to force religious obedience to their way of life in Jerusalem, these converts obeyed their religious leaders (who they thought spoke for their god) even through torture and death.
Jews saw Romans as profane, degenerate, and thoroughly debauched. They were repulsed by every single aspect of Roman culture. When we look at New Testament passages about the virtues and habits that early Christian leaders wanted their followers to cultivate, we can see a huge disparity between the perceived hedonism and cruelty of Rome and the purity and holiness of proto-Christianity.
At first, the Jewish converts to proto-Christianity were certain that Yahweh and Jesus would avenge all the wrongs that Rome had committed against them. Their god would free Jerusalem at last. That was the initial big promise of this newbie religion, and even the Gospels version of Jesus seems to agree at times.
As the decades passed, though, Rome kept on winning. By the 60s, it became obvious that Jews would need to take matters into their own hands. And that’s what they did.
Contemporary writers don’t say much about Christian activity during the Jewish-Roman Wars because Christians at the time were barely a blip in the cultural radar. They weren’t a concern for either Jews or Romans. Their ideas got completely lost amid all the other revolution-related chatter going on around the entire 1st century CE. Even the one mention Josephus makes of Christians at all in his work, the supposed Testimony of Josephus, is likely just a later forgery—an addition inserted by opportunistic Christian leaders.
(See also: Josephus and the lies Christians tell about him.)
And those leaders needed all the help they could get. Their religion was already struggling hard to keep its few converts. Even their deeply anti-Roman, countercultural message just wasn’t very appealing to many Jews.
And now here we are again, just this time with pork on the menu
That’s the situation as it stood until Christian leaders opened the playing field to gentiles, then finally got their grabby hands on temporal power. At that point, the entire game plan changed. Instead of standing completely counter to the dominant culture in their world, Christian leaders actively tried to assimilate local converts’ customs into their religious practices. And they sure didn’t mind becoming the dominant culture themselves.
That’s how the Celtic goddess of fire, healing, and livestock, Brigid, became Saint Brigid once Christians successfully forced their religion onto the Irish. Christianity became syncretistic instead of countercultural.
Even the ascetic movement and women’s constant attempts to join holy orders can be seen through this anti-Rome, countercultural lens. Instead of seeking to be wealthy and powerful, ascetics lived lives of almost complete self-denial. Instead of becoming the beloved matriarchs of their homes, women sought vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience only to their religious leaders.
(And the Catholic church of their day did not like that idea much. Women’s convents always occupied second-citizen status, with their inhabitants forced to support themselves or draw upon their families to pay their way. Speaking as someone with nuns and priests alike in her family, I can attest that nuns have always gotten short shrift from their Mother Church.)
But a funny thing happened on the way to the baptismal font.
In the past 50ish years, Christian leaders finally began losing their long-held temporal power. As Christians’ coercive powers have waned, their religion has begun looking and acting more and more like its pre-dominance self. Religion-wise, people can come or go as they please almost anywhere in the West. Unless a given church contains very powerful members in their own right, people don’t gain much wealth or power by joining and supporting one.
Countercultural, just without the counterculture stuff
Is it any surprise that we’re hearing so much more these days about the supposed countercultural message of modern Christianity? No, it is not. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.
Ancient Jews used their pork taboo to establish a clear boundary line between themselves and the foreigners who ruled their land. Modern Christians try their best to seem very different from secular culture for the same reason. They push very hard on how utterly different they are, especially nowadays as their religion continues to decline.
But that’s harder to accomplish in practice than in theory.
David Platt and Sean McDowell stressed how countercultural Christianity is in 2020. Of course, in 2021 another Christian site warned believers that they needed to be “countercultural but not counter culture.” In 2023, Crossway offered advice for “living a countercultural life.” That same year, another Christian warned that being countercultural required believers to “always be on guard” against ickie secular behavior and thinking—and The Gospel Coalition insisted that “true blessing” could only flow to those who were adequately countercultural. In 2024, an Anglican leader dreamed of religious persecution as a sign of both Jesus’ approval and Christians’ countercultural nature.
They want so desperately to be countercultural—to be the anti-culture that the earliest Christians tried to be, to symbolize in their lives a complete rejection of the prevailing culture.
Maybe there’s one thing that’s new under the sun
But in a world that increasingly values cooperation, charity, and compassion, what exactly makes any Christians look like they reject the dominant culture around them? That’s been really hard for them to figure out.
Plenty of people in and out of Christianity abstain from the same activities and pleasures, after all. (You could have knocked me over with a feather the first time I heard non-Christians talking about “NoFap November.”) There’s no visual or behavioral sign marking Christians apart from heathens, save for adornments, clothes, or body markings, either. And they all eat the same foods.
They want to look and act really different, but there’s not really a way to do it.
Christianity began by trying to make itself as anti-Roman as it possibly could. But these days, Christians are all too often the modern equivalent of Romans. In the first century, the values that went into Christianity were considered rarities. Nowadays, they’re just normal life. I’m not sure what anyone expects other than exactly what’s happening:
A religion flailing to find relevance but failing to secure a foothold in a new culture that finds nothing interesting about it.
Maybe they should establish some weird food rules. I hear that works sometimes.
NEXT UP: A new Rapture prediction! What do you have planned for the certain disappearance of all 5 TRUE CHRISTIANS™ from the Earth? Also: Watch Party time! We’re checking out the next Alpha Course videos on 9/20, 6pm PT in the Discord (invite code: 8pkasaySuD). See you soon! <3
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A Maccabøøse once bit my sister. No realli! She was Karving her initials øn the Maccabøøse with the sharpened end of an interspace tøøthbrush given her by Svenge – her brother-in-law – an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian møvies: “The Høt Hands of an Oslo Dentist”, “Fillings of Passion”, “The Huge Mølars of Horst Nordfink”…Mynd you, Maccabøøse bites Kan be pretty nasti… [With deepest apologies to Monty Python.]
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