Deuteronomy 14:9-20. Some rules about what the Israelites could and could not eat. Here, God covers things of the sea, birds, and winged insects. Of the sea, the Jews may eat anything with fins and scales but anything without fins and scales is prohibited as being unclean. Of birds, the ones they cannot eat are the following: the nighthawk, the seagull, the hawk, the little owl and the great owl, the waterhen, the pelican, the carrion vulture, the cormorant, the stork, the heron, the hoopoe, and the bat. All winged insects are also forbidden to be eaten.

I often wonder about all of these rules about what can and cannot be eaten - there must have been a reason that the things that were unclean were prohibited. Without doing a lot (by which I mean any 🙂) of research, I just don't know if any of the things prohibited here carry diseases (like pigs with trichinosis), or are poisonous, or if there's some other reason that we now know of why some of them should not be consumed.

But it does strike me that we still do not consume most of these things. It's amazing how God's Word works its way into our hearts and minds almost creating a kind of muscle memory, we don't really know why we're doing the things that we're doing anymore. I never really read and studied this list, but I never would think of eating most of the things on here. In fact, for the most part, none of these things would ever be offered to me to eat, nor have they been.

In a world that has become so secular, it's kind of amusing to see the many things that we still do and don't do because God told us. If only we realized why we were doing them, we could give proper praise to him.