Clean and Unclean Animals before the Torah

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One of the most fascinating books to read in the Bible will always be Genesis. Most scholars would agree that the earliest time this book could have been written among the Hebrew people would have been in the time of Moses. Before Moses? It was mostly oral tradition being passed down to the ancestors of the Jewish people before it possibly could have first been written. This can cause people to wonder just how true some of the stories of Genesis are. Here in the Bible Belt (my neck of the woods) people always have questions for their Sunday School teacher. I thought I would simply throw out one of those kind of questions in this blog. What is the reference to clean and unclean animals supposed to mean if there was no Mosaic law to distinguish between the two?

This question really makes me wonder about how accurate were the writers of Genesis at this time? Were they writing a historical event with precise ideas in mind or were they writing in the realm of mythology passed down by their ancestors? There are historical civilizations with their mythologies on a world consuming flood, so what makes us sure that Genesis is right? Well the first thing to do is to come up with a viable explanation to the story of the flood in Genesis. It all comes down to interpretation in the end. I've seen in many churches where people aren't often allowed to ask questions because it might risk the border. This never made sense to me, because if Christians want to claim the bible is the inerrant Word of God then they should be willing to listen to criticism and trust the same Holy Spirit that inspired the writings of this book. As a Christian I think it is always good to meditate and weigh in on different theories and objections to the Bible. So with that said, let me share some awesome theories about the Flood that help shape and understand what the author may have meant in writing down the clean and unclean animals part.

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The first theory (or to some people fact) that I discovered was that there might have been two different narratives in the flood story. These are called the P & J narratives in the study guide I found from the Yale University Divinity Professors. I noticed in Genesis that in one part of Genesis there is a raven released into the waters from the flood before the dove (which is so elegantly drawn in our picture bibles rather than the raven). They make good arguments about the logical readings of Genesis though. Another key point is also the "be fruitful and multiply" command God gives creation and then Noah goes and kills an animal as a sacrifice to the Lord. This would explain the part where God originally tells Noah to get two of each kind but then says get 7 of the clean and 2 of the unclean. The theorist could say that one author is being literal and the other is being theological or something like that. The dual narrative argument does seem to provide a solid answer to the clean and unclean part, right? An objection I had to this theory is that before the flood narrative comes in, the author(s) mentions of sacrifices/devotions to God from Cain and Abel. Sacrificing seemed to be something already instilled according the Hebrew people before Noah did it as soon as he came off the ark. So maybe there could be a natural inclination to sacrifice certain kinds of animals. Possibly distinguishing them as clean and unclean?

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Mark F.Rooker makes (in my mind) a better case that mankind may have had a set inclination to understand what animals were clean and what animals were unclean. This would also make sense to the passage because it would make Noah's job easier to bring in the clean and unclean animals. The only objection I have to this is what would that inclination be? Could that inclination not be subjective? All throughout the world we see people eat things that other cultures would and wouldn't eat because they are seen as "clean and unclean" so if there was a natural inclination to this thinking process of animals how do we explain the different cultures and subjective perceptions of this process?




N.T. Wright and the scholars at BioLogos offer the most intriguing argument I've heard from a logical and historical look at Genesis. Their argument is that the Flood (and the first 11 chapters of Genesis) are not meant to be read as literal facts of history but rather as theological/mythological origin narratives trying to give a rough-edged theme that sin and God don't mix at all. They talk about the cosmic astrology that the ancient people at that time had and how "world" meant what they had known at that time in the sense of borders. They talk about how in ancient literature, religious explanations for the origins of the world were usually written in this kind of context. Seems to make sense right? After all, if this is the way it was written then you could just say that the clean and unclean reference from God was for a point in the theological narrative. So that must be the conclusion. Not so fast. I have another objection. The Hebrew people were not just a theological people, but also a historic people. They were known for keeping very detailed genealogies of their own people's history. These genealogies can seem to be traced back all the way to Adam (so roughly 6,500 years of history). So if Genesis was written in these genealogies, then why include in the sense of a theological/mythological narrative? That would only confuse the reader (which I know, the Old Testament is very confusing).  So that only creates more confusion on my question of how God told Noah to get clean and unclean animals.

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In the end, my answer is.....I don't know. I can't really give the exact answer to how one should interpret the first 11 chapters of Genesis, so I can't really explain the whole clean and unclean thing. There are much smarter people out there than me though, so go check out their stuff. I promise, they can make much better arguments than me.