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• ܚܙܺܝܪܳܐ
• χοῖρος
• חֲזִיר

(חֲזַיר, chazir; Sept. υς, ὕειος, σῦς; New Test. χοῖρος ). Allusion will be found in the Bible to these animals, both in their domestic and in their wild state. See Tristram, Nat. Hist. of the Bible, p. 145; Wood, Bible Animals, p. 292.

1. The flesh of swine was forbidden as food by the Levitical law (Leviticus 11:7; Deuteronomy 14:8). The abhorrence which the Jews as a nation had of it may be inferred from Isaiah 65:4, where some of the idolatrous people are represented as "eating swine's flesh," and as having the "broth of abominable things in their vessels;" see also 66:3, 17, and 2 Maccabees 6:18-19, in which passage we read that Eleazar, an aged scribe, when compelled by Antiochus to receive in his mouth swine's flesh, "spit it forth, choosing rather to die gloriously than to live stained with such an abomination." The use of swine's flesh was forbidden to the Egyptian priests, to whom, says Sir G. Wilkinson (Anc. Egypt. 1, 322), "above all meats it was particularly obnoxious" (see Herodotus, 2, 47; Elian, De Nat. Anim. 10:16; Josephus, Apion, 2, 14), though it was occasionally eaten by the people. The Arabians also were disallowed the use of swine's flesh (see Pliny, H. N. 8:52; Koran, 2, 175), as were also the Phoenicians, Ethiopians, and other nations of the East.

No other reason for the command to abstain from swine's flesh is given in the law of Moses beyond the general one which forbade any of the mammalians food which did not literally fulfill the terms of the definition of a "clean animal," viz. that it was to be a cloven-footed ruminant. The pig, therefore, though it divides the hoof, but does no