Many people seem to assume that the Israelites began as nomads

>>1638607

It's very likely they accumulated those taboos along the way.

>>1638607

The opposite, in fact. Heavy discussion of dairy and meat implies that they were pastoral, wheras the much less treatment that cereals and vegetables get in the dietary laws implies that there wasn't as much contact.

Plus, think of your biblical stories. Cain and Abel right off the bat has the "Good shepherd, bad farmer", and almost all of the major Israelites who start from the bottom are shepherds at some point. Abraham has flocks, and his dispute with Lot over grazing is what leads him to kicking his nephew out. Jacob works as a shepherd for 20 years. Saul runs into Samuel while looking for some stray sheep, and David too, is the youngest in his family of shepherds.

They were almost certainly pastoral people who later came into contact with settled agricultural ones.

>>1638607
>assume

Why is /his/ so shit?

>>1638637
Many of the godly men of the past were shepherds, yes, but Saul was not among them. He was being disciplined for not killing all the sheep and all the cattle during that encounter.

>>1638689

>He was being disciplined for not killing all the sheep and all the cattle during that encounter.

No, that is after he's king, not his first meeting with Samuel.

>Many of the godly men of the past were shepherds, yes, but Saul was not among them.

Oh, my mistake, they were donkeys, not sheep. But his first meeting with Samuel is in 1 Samuel 9, and he is definitely consulting the prophet looking for lost animals. He (or at least his father) was another herdsmen.

>>1638637
Why don't any modern pastoralists herd sheep, anyway?

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>>1639295
It's done in Somalia, but sheep and goats belong to the women.

>>1638607
>Many people seem to assume that the Israelites began as nomads like the Bedouin, but doesn't the modest use of dairy in their foods (including numerous restrictions on when to eat it) combined with the heavy focus on agriculture in the Bible suggest otherwise?

WHAT IS IT THAT CONFOUNDS YOU, EXACTLY; THE FACT THAT THEY CONSUMED DAIRY PRODUCTS, OR THE FACT THAT THEY IMPLEMENTED AGRICULTURE?

>>1638712
Yeah, I really only remember him as being very tall and very shy at first. Forgot all about the looking for the donkeys that had already been found ruse God played on him.

>>1639514
What confounds me is why I haven't filtered you yet

>>1638637
What about the Seven Species? Wheat, barley, grape, fig, pomegranate, olive, and date

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>"Valley of the Cheesemakers" is in Jerusalem
>Levantine cheeses are just strained yogurt

>>1639548


That actually is a good point, I had forgotten about that. I forget, it the separate blessing for the special grains in the Pentateuch? I'm pretty sure that the actual eating dietary details for all 7 of them are just the same old "pretty much everything goes".

You'd also have the emphasis of bread as a national food; all the Pesach focus on bread and leavening.

>>1638637
The writer(s) of Genesis definitely has a very romantic view of Nomadic life, it can be argued that this is just stories left over from tradition pasted down from the Canaanites since El is depicted as a Nomad God living in a tent and this might be where the stories of Genesis developed from. Th dietary laws could've easily come after their Nomad lifestyle but they still had a soft spot for the previous life in their culture

The Epic of Gilgamesh has a similar parallel with Enkidu, dispute the story being about the greatness of civilization and was obviously written by someone living in a city there is great Romanticism on Enkidu's early days as a noble savage running among the beasts

>>1638607
A lot of pastoralist peoples in the area of the proposed Afro-Asiatic Urheimat have similar food taboos which would seem to indicate that those customs have roots in prehistory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_and_drink_prohibitions#Fish