Commentary - Leviticus 11:13-19

Bird's-eye view

Here in the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, God is giving His people a course in applied holiness. This is not a biology textbook, nor is it a manual on public health, though there are certainly health benefits to following God's wisdom. No, this is first and foremost a theological lesson, an object lesson given through the ordinary means of their dinner table. God is teaching Israel what it means to be set apart. Just as He chose them out from among the nations, so also they must learn to distinguish between the clean and the unclean in their daily lives. This list of unclean birds is a picture book for a redeemed people, training their minds and disciplining their appetites to love what God loves and to detest what He detests. The principles behind these distinctions point us to the nature of sin, the reality of the curse, and ultimately to the person and work of Jesus Christ, who came to cleanse the unclean once and for all.

Outline

Context In Leviticus

Leviticus is the great book of worship. Situated right after God has delivered His people from Egypt and given them the law at Sinai, this book answers the question, "How can a sinful people live in the presence of a holy God?" The answer involves sacrifice, priesthood, and a life of ordered holiness. Chapter 11 is part of a larger section on purity laws (chapters 11-15) that define what is clean and unclean. These laws are not arbitrary. They are designed to make Israel a peculiar people, a nation of priests whose entire lives, down to the food they eat, are a testimony to the holiness of the God who dwells in their midst. This chapter sets the stage for the Day of Atonement in chapter 16, where the problem of uncleanness is ultimately dealt with through substitutionary sacrifice, a clear foreshadowing of the cross.

Key Issues

Commentary

13 ‘These, moreover, you shall detest among the birds; they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle and the vulture and the buzzard,

The instruction begins not with a simple prohibition, but with a command to the heart. They are to detest these creatures. The word is strong; it means to abominate, to loathe. God is not just regulating behavior; He is training the affections. He wants His people's stomachs to turn at the thought of eating what He has declared unclean. This is because holiness is not simply a matter of external compliance. It is an internal orientation of the soul. We are to love righteousness and hate wickedness. Here, that hatred of wickedness is being taught through the gut. The list begins with birds of prey, birds that live by violence and bloodshed. The eagle, the vulture, the buzzard, these are masters of the sky, but they live by tearing flesh. They are a picture of the fallen world, a world of predation and death. God's people were not to ingest this principle of violence. They were to be a people of life, a people of the Lamb, not a people of the raptor.

14 and the kite and the falcon in its kind,

The list of predators continues. The phrase in its kind is significant. This is not an exhaustive, scientific list of every single species. It is a list of representative types. God is establishing categories. Anything that belongs to the "falcon kind" is out. This teaches the Israelites to think in terms of principles, not just particulars. The principle here is clear: creatures that live by shedding blood are not suitable food for the people of God, whose own sins would have to be covered by the shedding of blood in sacrifice. To eat a predator is to identify with the predator. But Israel was to identify with the sacrifice.

15 every raven in its kind,

The raven is a scavenger. It is known for eating carrion, the flesh of dead animals. It traffics in death and decay. Remember that touching a dead body rendered an Israelite ceremonially unclean. God is the God of the living, not the dead. His people were to be oriented toward life. Therefore, an animal that feeds on death is an abomination to them. This is a powerful picture of sin. We are not to feed our souls on the dead works of the flesh, on the carrion of worldly philosophies, gossip, or bitterness. We are to feed on that which gives life.

16 and the ostrich and the owl and the gull and the hawk in its kind,

Here we have a mixed bag, but the principles remain. The owl is a creature of the night. It operates in darkness. God is light, and His people are children of the light. We are to do our work in the daytime. Darkness in Scripture is consistently a metaphor for sin, ignorance, and rebellion. To eat a creature of the night is to ingest a symbol of that darkness. The gull can be a predator and a scavenger, fitting the established categories. The hawk is another bird of prey. The ostrich is a bit of an outlier, but it is an inhabitant of desolate places, a bird of the wilderness, which is often a symbol of curse and judgment in the Old Testament.

17 and the little owl and the cormorant and the great owl,

More creatures of the night and desolation. The repetition of owls underscores the point about darkness. The cormorant is a water bird known for its voracious appetite. The lesson is being driven home from multiple angles. The world is full of things that represent violence, death, and darkness, and God's people are to make careful distinctions. They are to be a discerning people.

18 and the white owl and the pelican and the carrion vulture,

Again, we see the owl, a creature of the night. The pelican is associated with the wilderness (Psalm 102:6). And the carrion vulture is perhaps the most explicit scavenger of all, a bird that lives entirely on the dead and decaying things of the world. There is no ambiguity here. God's people are to have nothing to do with the culture of death.

19 and the stork, the heron in its kinds, and the hoopoe, and the bat.

The list concludes with a few more examples. The stork and heron are wading birds, creatures of the marshy borders. And then we have the bat. From a modern scientific perspective, a bat is a mammal, not a bird. But the Bible is not written in the language of Linnaean taxonomy. It is written in the language of ordinary observation. A bat is a creature that flies in the air, so it is grouped here with the "flying things." But it is a profound anomaly. It has fur, not feathers. It has teeth, not a beak. It is a creature of the twilight, blurring the lines between day and night, bird and beast. The dietary laws consistently forbid creatures that blur the categories of God's creation (e.g., sea creatures without fins and scales). Why? Because holiness involves maintaining God's created distinctions. When man blurs the lines God has drawn, chaos and uncleanness are the result. The bat is the perfect capstone to this list of abominations.

Application

So what does a 21st-century Christian do with a list of unclean birds? Do we shun the local zoo? No. We must understand that these laws have been fulfilled in Christ. In Mark 7, Jesus declared all foods clean. In Acts 10, God gave Peter a vision of a sheet full of unclean animals and told him to "kill and eat," a lesson that was not ultimately about food, but about people. The gospel was now to go to the Gentiles, those who were formerly considered "unclean."

The ceremonial law has been fulfilled, but the moral principle it taught remains. The shadow is gone because the reality has come. We are no longer required to distinguish between clean and unclean foods, but we are most certainly required to distinguish between clean and unclean living. We are not to be predators in our business dealings. We are not to be scavengers, feeding our minds on the garbage of the internet or the gossip of the break room. We are not to be creatures of the night, indulging in secret sins when we think no one is watching. We are not to be bats, blurring the clear lines God has drawn between righteousness and unrighteousness, between man and woman, between the church and the world.

The ultimate point of the dietary laws was to teach Israel that they were what they ate. In the New Covenant, this is profoundly true for us. Our food is Jesus Christ. He is the Bread of Life that came down from Heaven. We feast on Him by faith. And as we partake of Him, we are made clean. We become like Him. The Lord's Supper is the new covenant meal, where we are reminded that our holiness comes not from what we avoid, but from the One we receive.