why don't witnesses ban eating pork?!?
-and do you think they want to serve ribeye steaks at Bethel for dinner- lox and kippers at breakfast? Holy-moly, it would blow the $3.00 day/person Bethel food budget!
smiles,
Moshe
Wait a minute!!!!!!
by joelbear 13 Replies latest jw friends
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RunningMan
Boy, these are a couple of good points. But, Elsewhere, you missed the obvious solution. The swine didn't fall into the Mediteranian Sea (50 miles). They probably fell into the dead sea (a mere 35 miles).
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LittleToe
Allegedly they were visiting a city on the shores of the sea of Galilee. The way the narrative is stitched together involves a boat to and from the city in question.
It wasn't uncommon to have a few cities with the same name, bearing in mind that some "cities" weren't really much more than a village or a street in the middle of nowhere.
But as for the pork, that is a puzzle. Evidently that can't have been too uncommon away from Jerusalem, either, since Jesus is alleged to have used a parable about the prodigal son becoming a swineherd in a far land.
They must have known what pigs were, to avoid eating them, hence there must have been some around. Maybe they use them to hunt for truffles
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undercover
This is one of those things that makes that bible look bad. According the the account the pigs jumped into the sea, however the city of Gerasa is about 50 miles inland from the Mediterranean Sea.
OK, I'm gonna play Devil's advocate...
Mark 5:1,2 says: Well, they got to the other side of the sea into the country of the Ger´a·senes. And immediately after he got out of the boat a man under the power of an unclean spirit met him from among the memorial tombs.
So, according to this scripture its possible that they weren't in the city og Gerasa but just in the land of the Gerasenes.
Verse 11-13: Now a great herd of swine was there at the mountain feeding. So they entreated him, saying: “Send us into the swine, that we may enter into them.” And he permitted them. With that the unclean spirits came out and entered into the swine; and the herd rushed over the precipice into the sea, about two thousand of them, and they drowned one after another in the sea.
I don't know the geography of the area, but is it possible that some mountainous region is near the sea?
As for why Jews had pigs, I'm sure that there were some non-jews in the area that owned pigs. It seems like I remember the prodigal son took a job herding pigs for someone, which in the parable was depicting just how low the young man had fallen...to herding unclean animals for a non-Jew.