Note 60 — VII. TERTULLIAN. 160–240 (?) A.D.

Usque ad choleram ortygometras cruditando. In the present case it seems that the wanderers in the Arabian deserts were not so much clamorous for flesh as for some kind of sustenance, or rather for something more than the manna with which they were supplied; since the late Egyptian slaves are reported to have said, “We remember the fish that we did eat in Egypt freely—the cucumbers, the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic; but now our soul is dried away: there is nothing at all besides this manna before our eyes.”

We may here take occasion to observe that the fact of the existence of sacrifice throughout their history necessarily involves the practice of flesh-eating—indeed, the two practices are, historically, clearly connected. What, however, we may fairly deduce from their simple and frugal living in the Egyptian slavery, lasting, as it did, through several centuries, during which period they must have been weaned from the gross living of their previous barbarous pastoral life, is this—that but for the sacrificial rites (and, perhaps, the necessities of the desert) the Jews would have, like other Eastern peoples, probably adopted this frugal living—of cucumbers, melons, onions, &c.—in their new homes. Such, at least, seems to be a legitimate inference from the highly-significant fact that, throughout their sacred scriptures, not flesh-meats but corn, and oil, and honey, and pomegranates, and figs, and other vegetable products (in which their land originally abounded), are their highest dietary ideal—e.g., “O that my people would have hearkened to me; for if Israel had walked in my ways.... He should have fed them with the finest wheat flour: and with honey out of the stony rock should I have satisfied thee.” (Ps. lxxxi., 17; cf. also Ps. civ., 14, 15.) It is equally significant of the latent and secret consciousness of the unspiritual nature of the products of the Slaughter-House, even in the Western world, that in the liturgies or “public services” of the Christian churches, wherever food is prayed for or whenever thanks are returned for it, there is (as it seems) a natural shrinking from mention of that which is obtained only by cruelty and bloodshed, and it is “the kindly fruits of the earth” which represent the legitimate dietary wants of the petitioners.