The Old Testament laws concerning food directly or indirectly are often misunderstood. They’re not just about keeping people safe directly. They’re a blend of:

1. Preventing disease directly from food (i.e., not eating pigs, which even today are much more prone to disease in the wild than other game animals like deer)
2. Preventing disease directly from water (i.e., bans on eating fish with no scales that, like catfish, help clean the water from large decaying debris)
3. Preventing disease in land ecosystems (i.e., bans on eating numerous flying and crawling scavenging species that help clean up the land)
4. Keeping the ecosystem productive from direct laws against waste, even under extreme circumstances (i.e., laws about not chopping down fruit-bearing trees while laying siege to a city)
5. Keeping the ecosystem flourishing, including keeping safe sources of food that are productive  & vital to the ecosystem, with severe consequences if overharvested (i.e., bans on eating oysters and other mollusks that help clean the water)
6. Limiting cruelty to animals, which is both bad stewardship & also impacts how people treat people (i.e., not boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk)
7. Laws that would limit poverty (i.e., rights of redemption of land to grow crops outside of cities & the years of jubilee every 50 years, where debts are forgiven)
8. Providing options for the poor to have enough to eat while stimulating the need to do some work, not take advantage of others, & not causing undue hardship (i.e. laws about not harvesting the corners of fields that Ruth used to survive)

In some cases, laws have multiple goals that are blended, such as with shellfish. This article seeks to catalog some of the laws, how uncommonly practiced many of these laws were outside of ancient Judah & Israel, and how the positive benefits of these laws point both to God’s love towards His people as well as the divinely inspired nature of the Old Testament.