Holy Men and Torn Meat Text: Exodus 22:31
Introduction: The Worldview in Your Kitchen
We live in an age that prides itself on its pragmatism. We want life hacks, efficiency, and laws that make "common sense." When a modern Christian comes to a passage like the one before us, the temptation is to see it as an ancient public health directive, or perhaps a quaint and arbitrary rule that has long since been superseded. But this is to read the Bible with secular glasses. It is to assume that God thinks like a 21st-century bureaucrat. He does not.
The laws God gave to Israel in the wilderness, particularly here in what is called the Book of the Covenant, were never merely about practicalities. They were about pedagogy. They were object lessons. Every statute, from the grandest moral command to the most peculiar dietary restriction, was designed to shape a worldview. God was teaching His people a new way to see everything, from their neighbors' ox to the meat on their table. He was training them to think His thoughts after Him. This was a totalizing vision for life, one that stood in stark, glaring contrast to the paganism of Egypt behind them and the paganism of Canaan before them.
The pagan world was a world of chaos, where life and death, sacred and profane, clean and unclean, all bled into one another in a confusing, violent, and bloody mess. Their gods were capricious, their rituals were debased, and their ethics were fluid. Into this world, God speaks His law, and His law creates distinctions. It separates light from darkness, clean from unclean, life from death, and Israel from the nations. This single verse about what to do with a torn carcass found in a field is a potent lesson in covenant identity. It teaches us about holiness, separation, and our duty as God's people to represent His created order in the midst of a fallen and disordered world.
The Text
"You shall be holy men to Me, therefore you shall not eat any flesh torn to pieces in the field; you shall throw it to the dogs."
(Exodus 22:31 LSB)
The Foundation of the Command: Covenant Identity (v. 31a)
The verse begins not with the prohibition, but with the principle that undergirds the prohibition.
"You shall be holy men to Me..." (Exodus 22:31a)
This is the foundation. This is the indicative upon which the imperative rests. Before God tells them what to do, He reminds them of who they are. They are "holy men." The word for holy, qadosh, means to be set apart, dedicated, consecrated for a special purpose. It does not primarily mean sinless perfection, though it certainly includes moral purity. Its core meaning is to be distinguished from the common and profane, to be pulled from general circulation and set aside for God's exclusive use. Israel was God's holy nation, His treasured possession (Ex. 19:5-6). They were His, and their lives, down to the smallest detail, were to reflect that glorious reality.
Notice the personal nature of it: "holy men to Me." Their holiness was not an abstract philosophical state. It was relational. They were set apart for God. Their entire existence was to be a testimony to the character of the God who had redeemed them from bondage. As He is holy, so they were to be holy (Lev. 19:2). This calling was a grace. It was not a burden they had to carry to earn God's favor, but rather a glorious identity they were called to live out because they already had His favor. Because God had separated them from Egypt by blood and water, they were now to live as a separated people. This is the root of all the case laws that follow. They are practical applications of this foundational identity.
The Prohibition: Rejecting Disorder (v. 31b)
Because they are holy men, a certain kind of behavior logically follows.
"...therefore you shall not eat any flesh torn to pieces in the field..." (Exodus 22:31b)
The word for "torn to pieces" is terephah. It refers to an animal that has been killed by a predator, a wild beast. This is not an animal that has been carefully and lawfully slaughtered according to God's instructions. In a lawful slaughter, the animal was to be killed quickly, and its blood, which represents its life, was to be drained out (Lev. 17:11-14). This was a picture of order, of life being given back to God in a prescribed way. It was a clean and controlled process.
But terephah meat is the opposite. It is the product of violence, chaos, and the curse. It is an animal whose blood has been spilled on the ground and consumed by a predator. It represents death in its raw, untamed, and disordered state. For a holy person, one set apart for the God of life and order, to eat such meat would be to symbolically ingest the chaos of the fallen world. It would be to blur the line between the camp of God's people and the wilderness of the beasts. It would be a failure to make a distinction where God had made one. It was not primarily a matter of hygiene; it was a matter of theology. Holy people do not consume that which is a picture of violent, bloody disorder.
The Disposal: Maintaining Distinction (v. 31c)
So what is to be done with this unclean meat? It is not to be wasted, but it must be properly assigned. It must be put in its proper place.
"...you shall throw it to the dogs." (Exodus 22:31c)
In the biblical world, dogs were not pampered pets. They were scavengers, unclean animals that roamed outside the camp and ate refuse. They were associated with Gentiles and outsiders. Think of the Canaanite woman who said, "even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table" (Matt. 15:27). She was acknowledging her status as an outsider. Or think of Goliath's insult to David: "Am I a dog, that you come to me with sticks?" (1 Sam. 17:43).
Most pointedly, remember God's promise during the final plague in Egypt. He said that against the Israelites, "not a dog shall move his tongue" (Ex. 11:7). The silence of the dogs was a supernatural sign of the great distinction God was making between His people and the Egyptians. The dogs knew who belonged and who did not.
Therefore, to throw this torn, disordered meat to the dogs was a powerful symbolic act. It was a declaration: "This does not belong inside the holy community. This is unclean. This belongs outside, with the scavengers, with those who are not part of the covenant." Every time an Israelite found a torn carcass and threw it to the dogs, he was preaching a sermon to himself and his family. He was reinforcing the boundary between the holy and the profane, the clean and the unclean, Israel and the nations. He was acting out his covenant identity.
The General Equity for Us
Now, as New Covenant believers, we are not under the ceremonial particulars of the Mosaic law. Christ is the fulfillment of all these shadows. He has declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and Peter's vision in Acts 10 broke down the dietary wall that separated Jew and Gentile. We are free to eat a steak, whether it was killed by a butcher or, theoretically, by a mountain lion. So, is this verse just a dead letter for us?
Not at all. We must apply the general equity of the law. The underlying principle, the moral foundation, is eternal because it is rooted in the character of God. The foundational statement, "You shall be holy men to Me," is repeated and amplified in the New Testament. "As he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct" (1 Peter 1:15). We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession (1 Peter 2:9).
Our identity has not changed, but the application of that identity has. We are no longer required to make a distinction between beef and pork, but we are most certainly required to make a distinction between truth and error, righteousness and sin, wisdom and folly. The world is full of "torn meat." Our culture is constantly serving up philosophies, ideologies, entertainments, and habits that have been mangled by the predators of unbelief, rebellion, and perversion. These things are spiritually terephah. They are disordered, bloody, and unclean.
The Christian who consumes the world's torn meat, who uncritically ingests the chaos of godless ideologies on sexuality, meaning, and morality, is blurring the lines. He is forgetting his identity as a holy man or woman set apart for God. He is eating what should be thrown outside the camp.
Our task is to be discerning. We are to reject the torn meat of the world's thinking and instead feast on the pure, life-giving Word of God. We are to recognize that which is disordered and profane and assign it to its proper place, outside the realm of our minds and homes. This is not about a physical withdrawal from the world, but a spiritual and intellectual separation. We are in the world, but not of it. We are to be a distinct people, a holy nation, whose entire lives testify to the beautiful order and life-giving truth of the God who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light. That is how we, today, throw the torn meat to the dogs.