Sam Harris

mesomorph - 24 September 2008 08:37 AM

Iisbliss - 23 September 2008 10:43 PM

Is this somehow related to the prohibition against pork we find in the Bible and later in Islam?

The Jews would first have had to cook both people and pigs to make the comparison, wouldn’t they? I don’t think it’s that.

The ancient Egyptian priests had strict dietary rules which included abstention from the flesh of swine. Moses was in all probability brought up in familiarity with Egyptian priestly principles and adopted many of them for his new religion. Moses was very likely schooled as an Egyptian monotheist, as he lived around the time of Akhenaton*, so that would explain the central feature of Mosaic doctrine.

At any rate if you look at the iconography you will see many obvious parallels between Egyptian religion and early Judaism.

*Gary Greenberg The Moses Mystery: The Egyptian origins of the Jewish People or have a look here

I’ve long thought the Moses myth of being found by Pharoah’s daughter in a reed basked was a version of the Osiris myth and a Jewish claim that the true Egyptian transmission was through Moses.

burt - 24 September 2008 03:46 PM

I’ve long thought the Moses myth of being found by Pharoah’s daughter in a reed basked was a version of the Osiris myth and a Jewish claim that the true Egyptian transmission was through Moses.

As was of course the adoption of the Dionysus/Horus/Mithras god-man myth by the Christians. Fascinatingly, and as I’m sure you know, the suffix -moses, -meses or -mose has the meaning ‘born of’ in Egyptian and is appended to the name of a god, so Moses was probably Ammon-mose(s), Aten-mose(s) or something similar. The biblical explanation of the name Moses as connected with being drawn from the water - “mi’shi’ti’hu” (“I drew him”) - is a bit of a stretch.

“Long Pig” is Polynesian pidgin for human meat. Supposedly the two taste quite similar.

When William Seabrook traveled in West Africa he asked to sit in on a cannibal dinner. The meat he was fed tasted like veal. Afterwards someone told him they’d slipped him gorilla cutlets instead. When he ate human flesh in Paris years later he said it tasted like pork.

Gorillas and calves are vegetarian. Pigs and people are omnivorous. If what you eat affects how you taste it makes sense that the meat would reflect this. After all, seabirds taste a lot like fish.