Disquisitio philol. de Iudaeorum odio et abstinentia a porcina, eiusque c ausis

the violent ejection of them and their leader from Egypt—all these, I say, came from Egypt, or from Egyptian writers, or from those who were in Egypt, and this calumny was drawn from there. They seem to have arisen from the Ten Egyptian Plagues and especially the pestilence and scabies or pustules, but the Egyptians strove to deflect this reproach from themselves, whence these calumnies were born and distorted onto the wretched Jews.

Having dismissed the Gentiles, we pass to the Christians, who have fluctuated in various ways in this doubtful and uncertain matter, and have struggled anxiously in this arena with unequal success.

7. The opinion of CUNAUS, THYSIUS, and others in SPENCER, page 134, is physical: namely, that leprosy was a pestilence as if proper to the Jewish race, and that a similar disease, scabies and filth, exists in pigs.

8. The opinion is of those who flee to a symbolic reason, and judge that God for that reason prohibited the eating of the pig to His people, so that under the figure of a most impure animal He might call the people away from all impurity of morals, as NOVATIAN and LACTANTIUS judged in SPENCER loc. cit.

9. Spencer added the opinion of others, who cut the knot, saying that the Jews were not led by any reason, but by superstition alone, and dragged the pig and even the name into hatred, but he added no patron for this opinion.

10. Bochart mentions that there are also those who wish the balsams and other aromatics to have been consulted for this reason, which this animal would have devastated, and would have dug up with its snout, if it had had free access in Judea.

11. G. J. VOSSIUS, in his most learned book On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, Book III, chap. 66, p. 538, brings forward three reasons why pork was forbidden to the Jews: (1) Because the animal does not abstain from human flesh. (2) Because this animal delights in wallowing in mud. (3) Because the eating of pork would induce leprosy and vitiligo. To which join the famous M. LEY-