The Claim
Most churches teach that the food instructions in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 were done away with in the days of the apostles. A long list of passages gets brought out to prove it — Genesis 9, Mark 7, Acts 10, Romans 14, First Corinthians 8 and 10, First Timothy 4, Titus 1, Hebrews 13. The list is long, and a long list sounds convincing.
The list is not as strong as it looks. Nearly every passage on it depends on one Greek word, and it is not the word the Torah uses for unclean. Once those two words are told apart, most of these passages turn out to be about something else entirely.
The Short Version
- Greek has two different words. English hides the difference.
- One word means common — something clean that got dirtied. The other means unclean — something that was never food to begin with.
- The passages people quote use the first word. Leviticus 11 uses the second.
- They are answering two different questions, and only one of them is about the dinner table.
Two Words That Are Not the Same
Everything in this study rests on keeping these two words apart, so it is worth taking them slowly.
The first word: koinos (G2839), common
Koinos means shared. Ordinary. Something everyone handles. There is nothing bad about the word by itself. Luke uses it for the believers in Jerusalem who held everything in common (Acts 2:44; 4:32), and Jude uses it for the deliverance believers share together (Jude 3).
The important thing is this. A clean thing becomes koinos. It gets that way by being touched, used, or kept in the wrong company. And because something made it that way, something can undo it.
There is a verb that goes with it, koinoo (G2840), meaning to make a thing common, to dirty it by contact. That is the word for what unwashed hands were believed to do to a man’s bread.
The second word: akathartos (G169), unclean
This is the word the Greek Old Testament uses in every place Leviticus 11 says unclean. It stands for the Hebrew word tame (H2931).
Akathartos does not describe something that happened to a creature. It describes what the creature is. A pig does not become unclean. It is unclean. Washing does not change that, waiting does not change that, and keeping better company does not change that.
The two side by side
- Common is something a clean thing can become.
- Unclean is what a thing already was, from the beginning.
- A clean animal can be made common. An unclean animal was never in the conversation at all.
Leviticus 11 Does Not Ban Foods. It Says What Food Is.
This point is easy to walk past, and it changes everything that follows.
Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are not a list of foods a person is not allowed to eat. They are the definition of what food is. The text never calls the swine an unclean food. It says the swine is not to be eaten. The swine was never placed inside the food category in the first place.
And the line was drawn before Israel existed. Noah was told to bring clean animals onto the ark by sevens and unclean animals by twos (Genesis 7:2). That is centuries before Sinai, before there was a Hebrew nation and before there was a covenant to give one. Nobody stopped to explain the words to Noah, because Noah already knew what they meant.
These are the beasts which ye shall eat among all the beasts that are on the earth.
— Leviticus 11:2
Something given before the covenant is not a rule of the covenant. It does not expire when the priesthood changes.
The Word “Food” Already Has the Answer Inside It
The Greek word for food is broma (G1033), with brosis (G1035) beside it. Both simply mean what is eaten. Every passage in the apostles’ writings that talks about foods uses one of these two words, and each one carries the meaning the word already had.
Here is why that matters so much. When a writer says all foods, the word food has already left out anything that was never food.
Picture a man who says, “Every vehicle in my garage is red.” He has said nothing at all about the bicycle leaning against the wall, because he does not count a bicycle as a vehicle. He was not making a ruling about the bicycle. His sentence never reached it.
That gives the simplest answer to the verse that sounds strongest in this whole debate. All food is clean. Agreed. Being clean is what makes a thing food to begin with. The sentence is perfectly true, and it changes nothing, because the question was settled long before anyone said it.
For the modern teaching to work, the word food has to be given a meaning the apostles never gave it, and then that larger meaning has to be read back into their sentences.
Before Sinai
One passage comes from outside the apostles’ writings, and it is the oldest verse non-Torah teaching reaches for. After the flood, Noah is told that every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for him (Genesis 9:3).
That verse is answering whether man may eat flesh at all. Before the flood the food given to man was plants (Genesis 1:29), and Genesis 9 is where meat enters. It is handed over on the same terms the plants were — even as the green herb — and the grant of plants was never a licence to eat every plant on earth. On top of that, the same story had already sorted the animals into clean and unclean two chapters earlier. The verse opens the door to flesh. It does not set the table. Genesis 9:3 has a study of its own.
Both Words in One Breath
The clearest proof that these are two different words comes from a man who used them both in the same sentence.
Not so, Yahuah; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean.
— Acts 10:14
In Greek that is koinon kai akatharton. If the two words meant the same thing, Peter has simply said the same word twice, and Luke has written it down that way three separate times (10:14; 10:28; 11:8). People reach for two words because they mean two things.
That is what this sentence is doing here, and it is all it is doing here. What the vision meant, and what Peter said it meant, belong to the Acts 10 testimony.
The Torah Already Kept Two Lines Apart
Peter did not invent the difference between common and unclean. The Torah drew two separate lines long before he spoke, and it told the priests to keep them apart.
And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean.
— Leviticus 10:10
That verse holds two pairs, not one. The first pair, holy and unholy, is about what belongs to the altar of Yahuah and what is ordinary. The Hebrew word for unholy is chol (H2455), and it means common in the plain sense: not set apart, everyday. The second pair, unclean and clean, is the line of Leviticus 11. A thing can be common and still clean. Most of the food on any table in Israel was exactly that.
Deuteronomy 12 shows both lines working at the same table. Once Israel spread across the land, a family living far from the altar was allowed to kill an ox, a sheep, or a goat at home for an ordinary meal (Deuteronomy 12:20–21). That meat was never offered. It was common. And the verse that follows says who may eat it.
Even as the roebuck and the hart is eaten, so thou shalt eat them: the unclean and the clean shall eat of them alike.
— Deuteronomy 12:22
The “unclean” in that verse is a person, not an animal. A man who had buried his father, for example, was ritually unclean for a time, and that state barred him from eating holy meat from the altar (Leviticus 7:20). But home-killed meat was not holy, so he could eat it with his family. The animal itself still had to be a clean kind, and the blood was still poured out on the ground (Deuteronomy 12:23–24). Deuteronomy 15:22 gives the same ruling for a blemished firstborn that could not go on the altar.
Here is the whole matter in one passage. Common meat, from a clean animal, eaten by a person who might be unclean — and not one of those facts erased another. Common never meant unclean, and an unclean person at the table never made a pig into food. The Law kept every line in its place at the same meal.
One honest note. The Greek Old Testament does not use koinos in Leviticus 10:10, so this is a match of categories, not of vocabulary. The point does not need the word to match. It needs only what the Torah plainly says: common and unclean were two different things from the beginning, and the passages quoted against Leviticus 11 are dealing with the first, not the second.
What Did Change
Something real did change in the book of Acts, and saying exactly what it was keeps anyone from having to overstate the case.
- Who may come to the table changed. The nations were welcomed in (Acts 10:28; Ephesians 2:12–13). That is the change Acts 10 was given to announce.
- The rules about ritual contact that belonged to the temple and the priesthood lost the setting they worked in when the earthly service ended.
- The definition of food did not change. No passage revises it, and no writer claims to.
The Prophets Still Use the Words at the End
If these categories had been dissolved in the first century, the prophets would not still be using them when they describe the end of all things.
They that sanctify themselves, and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith Yahuah.
— Isaiah 66:17
Two verses later, the same chapter has all flesh coming to worship from one new moon to another and from one Sabbath to another. The appointed times and the table are standing side by side in the same passage, at the same point on the timeline, long after the tree.
The Verdict
The modern case does not rest on a passage that redefines food. There is no such passage. It rests on one Greek word being quietly swapped for another, often enough and long enough that nobody checks anymore.
Give the two words back their own meanings and each passage returns to its own subject. Those passages are answered one at a time in the testimonies that rest on this foundation.
Scripture says what food is in Leviticus 11. No later text takes that back. Anyone is free to ask where it was taken back, and the question has never been answered from the text.