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Welcome to Times Will Tell, the weekly podcast from The Times of Israel. This week a crazy interesting study was published in the Tel Aviv archaeological journal called “The Pentateuchal Dietary Proscription against Finless and Scaleless Aquatic Species in Light of Ancient Fish Remains.” You can read all about it in this Times of Israel article.
It was co-authored by Ariel University’s Dr. Yonatan Adler, whom we’re speaking with on the podcast, and the University of Haifa’s Prof. Omri Lernau, a retired MD whose “hobby” of examining ancient fish remains has turned him into the country’s foremost expert.
Amanda Borschel-Dan is The Times of Israel s Jewish World and Archaeology editor.
Sharks swimming in the shark aquarium in the southern Israeli city of Eilat. October 7, 2014. (FLASH90/File)
A ray swims at the Israel Aquarium in Jerusalem, on September 5, 2017. (Isaac Harari/Flash90)
Catfish swim in Ein Afek Nature Reserve, east of Kiryat Bialik, Israel, on April 24, 2015. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
A new study scrutinizing 2,000 years of fish consumption in the ancient holy land has found that despite clear Torah prohibitions non-kosher finless and scaleless fish were generally eaten by all peoples, regardless of ethnic and religious affiliation.
The requirement to eat only fish that has both fins and scales is found twice in the Bible: in Leviticus 11: 9–12 and in Deuteronomy 14: 9–10. In both cases, the proscription follows the more widely known prohibition against eating pig. Indeed, as one might infer from the Bible, there is scant archaeological evidence of pork consump