Fragment of a tile stamped with the seal of Legio X Fretensis, featuring a wild boar. Yoav dothan / Wikimedia
Why Rome Is Likened to a Boar
The Romans were baffled as to why Jews would not eat pork, an idiosyncrasy that became the subject of speculation as well as ethnic humor. In response, Jewish texts highlight the way the hated Romans remind the rabbis of pigs and wild boars.
Published: March 28, 2019
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
See, Brian Hesse and Paula Wapnish “Can Pig Remains Be Used for Ethnic Diagnosis in the Ancient Near East?,” in Archaeology of Israel: Constructing the Past, Interpreting the Present, ed., Neil A. Silberman and David Small, JSOTSup 237 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic 1997), 238–270; Avraham Faust and Justin Lev-Tov, “The Construction of Philistine Identity: Ethnic Dynamics in 12th–10th Centuries Philistia,” Oxford Journal of Archaeology 30 (2011): 13–31. For a somewhat different interpretation of the data, see, Lidar Sapir-Hen, Guy Bar-Oz, Yuval Gadot, and Israel Finkelstein, “Pig Husbandry in Iron Age Israel and Judah: New Insights Regarding the Origin of the ‘Taboo,’” ZDPV 129.1 (2013): 1–20.
Meirav Meiri, Dorothée Huchon, Guy Bar-Oz, Elisabetta Boaretto, Liora Kolska Horwitz, Aren M. Maier, Lidar Sapir-Hen, Geger Larson, Steve Weiner, and Israel Finkelstein,“Ancient DNA and Population Turnover in Southern Levantine Pigs—Signature of the Sea Peoples Migration?” Nature-Scientific Reports 3 (2013): #3035. Liora K. Horwitz, Armelle Gardeisen, Aren Maier, and Louise Hitchcock, “A Contribution to the Iron Age Philistine Pig Debate,” in The Wide Lens in Archaeology: Honoring Brian Hesse’s Contributions to Anthropological Archaeology, ed., Justin Lev-Tov, Paula Hesse, and Allan Gilbert, Archaeobiology 2 (Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2017) 93–116.
Justin Lev-Tov, “A Plebeian Perspective on Empire Economies: Faunal Remains from Tel Miqne-Ekron, Israel,” in Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology: Colonialism, Complexity and Animal Transformations, ed., D. Campana, A. Choyke, P. Crabtree, S. D. deFrance, and Justin Lev-Tov (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 90–104.
See Peter Schäfer, “Abstinence from Pork,” chap. 3 in Judeophobia: Attitudes Toward the Jews in the Ancient World(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages (New York: Routledge, 2007), 30–33.
Philo, Embassy to Gaius, 361.
Tacitus, Historiae 5:4.1–2, trans. in Menahem Stern, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1980), 2:25 [§281]. On skin disease as the Jewish reason for abstention from pork, see also Plutarch, De Superstitione 5.3
Arrianus, Dissertationes, 1.22.4, trans. in Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 1:542 [§253].
For more on this, see Jordan D. Rosenblum, The Jewish Dietary Laws in the Ancient World (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 35–38.
Recorded in Macrobius, Saturnalia, 2:4.11.
[10] The Latin is “Melius est Herodis porcum esse quam filium.” Obviously, porcum (pig) and filium (son) do not have the same element of verbal pun. The Greek would have read, κρεῖσσον Ἡρῴδου ὗα εἶναι, ἢ υἷα.
See discussion in Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 2:665–666, [§543].
Juvenal, Saturae, 6:160, Ramsay translation. See Stern, Greek and Latin Authors, 2:99–100 [§298].
On meat-eating practices in Rome and how these practices relate to Jewish life in the Roman empire, see Jordan D. Rosenblum’s “‘Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?’: Jews, Food, and Identity in Roman Palestine,” JQR 100.1 (2010): 95–110.
Richard Gottheil, M. Seligsohn, “Edom, Idumea,” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906).
For a detailed discussion of the development of this trope in rabbinic literature, see Misgav Har-Peled, Har-Peled, The Dialogical Beast: The Identification of Rome With the Pig in Early Rabbinic Literature,Ph.D. Dissertation, (Johns Hopkins University, 2013).
בראשית כו:לד וַיְהִי עֵשָׂו בֶּן אַרְבָּעִים שָׁנָה וַיִּקַּח אִשָּׁה אֶת יְהוּדִית בַּת בְּאֵרִי הַחִתִּי וְאֶת בָּשְׂמַת בַּת אֵילֹן הַחִתִּי.
Gen 26:34 When Esau was forty years old, he took to wife Judith daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath daughter of Elon the Hittite.
By doing this, the rabbis paint Rome not as a late-coming conqueror, but as an ancient, intimate, and permanent antagonist. For a discussion of how this association of Rome with Edom took place, see Malka Z. Simkovich, “Esau the Ancestor of Rome,” TheTorah (2018).
An earlier possible example of connecting Rome with this verse appears in the third century Tannaitic midrash, Sifrei Deuteronomy (317):
דבר אחר: “ירכיבהו על במתי ארץ”—זה העולם (הזה) שנאמר: “יכרסמנה חזיר מיער.”
Another interpretation: “He made him ride on the high places of the earth” (Deut 32:13) – this refers to [the] (this) world, as it is said, “The boar out of the wood doth ravage it,” [that which moveth in the field feedeth on it] (Ps. 80:14)
As the midrash seems to be explaining why Israel is downtrodden in the times of the darshan, the boar is likely Rome, but the text does not say this explicitly. It is very possible that the darshan is already working with an identification of Rome with the boar/pig, but this is uncertain. See discussion in, Har-Peled, The Dialogical Beast, 185–187.
The psalm, which depicts a ravaged Israel, may have been composed in the wake of the destruction of the First Temple by the Babylonians.
The connection between this legion's emblem and the fact that the legion was involved in putting down the Jewish rebellion was first suggested in Théodore Reinach, “Mon nom est Légion,” Revue des études juives 47 (1903): 172–178.
For an analysis of this midrash as an anti-Christian polemic, see Jacob Neusner, Judaism and Christianity in the Age of Constantine: History, Messiah, Israel, and the Initial Confrontation, Chicago Studies in the History of Judaism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 102–106; Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem Against Rome, trans. Robyn Fréchet (Leuven: Peeters, 2005), 413–416; trans. of, Jérusalem contre Rome (Paris: Cerf, 2003).
Both derashot begin with the same opening:
ר’ פינחס ור’ חלקיה בש’ ר’ סימון מכל הנביאים לא פירסמוה אלא שנים, אסף ומשה, אסף אמ’ יכרסמנה חזיר מיער (תהלים פ, יד). משה אמ’ ואת החזיר.
R. Pinchas, R. Hilkiah in the name of R. Simon: “Out of all the prophets, only two publicized this, Asaf (=the author of Psalm 80) and Moses. Asaf [said]: “a boar from the forest ravages it” and Moses said (Lev 11:7): “The pig.”
למה נמשלה בחזיר, לומר לך מה חזיר הזה בשעה שהוא רבוץ ומוציא טלפיו ואומר ראו שאנו טהור, כך היתה מלכות הרשעה הזו מתגאה וחומסת וגוזלת ונראת כילו שהיא מצעת בימה.
Why is [the fourth nation] being compared to a pig? To teach you that just as a pig when he lies down, displays his cloven hooves as if to say, “I’m ritually clean,” so this wicked kingdom acts haughtily, committing violence and stealing, yet it appears as if they establish courts of law.
The main difference in presentation is that Leviticus Rabbah makes no mention of Esau and his story because the context is different. In Genesis Rabbah, the homily is meant to gloss a verse about Esau, in Leviticus Rabbah, it glosses the verse forbidding pig consumption. It seems likely that the Leviticus verse is the original context and the Genesis Rabbah version an adaptation, since both versions include the verse from Leviticus, and the Esau connection is a stretch.
This is not the obvious meaning of the verse, which is actually positive, “Whom else have I in heaven? And having You, I want no one on earth.” Nevertheless, the rabbis understand this verse as being recited by Esau and interpret it negatively.
