524 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



no more civil right to punish law-breakers than any other 

 strangers. 



In my turn, however, I may remark that there is a " point " 

 which appears to have escaped Mr. Gladstone's notice. And 

 that is somewhat unfortunate, because his whole argument turns 

 upon it. Mr. Gladstone assumes, as a matter of course, that pig- 

 keeping was an offense against the " law of Moses " ; and, there- 

 fore, that Jews who kept pigs were as much liable to legal pains 

 and penalties as Englishmen who smuggle brandy (Impregnable 

 Rock, p. 274). 



There can be no doubt that, according to the law, as it is 

 defined in the Pentateuch, the pig was an " unclean " animal, and 

 that pork was a forbidden article of diet. Moreover, since pigs 

 are hardly likely to be kept for the mere love of those unsavory 

 animals, pig-owning, or swineherding, must have been, and evi- 

 dently was, regarded as a suspicious and degrading occupation 

 by strict Jews, in the first century A. D. But I should like to 

 know on what provision of the Mosaic law, as it is laid down in 

 the Pentateuch, Mr. Gladstone bases the assumption, which is 

 essential to his case, that the possession of pigs and the calling 

 of a swineherd were actually illegal ? The inquiry was put to 

 me the other day ; and, as I could not answer it, I turned up 

 the article " Schwein " in Riehm's standard Handworterbuch, 

 for help out of my difficulty ; but unfortunately without suc- 

 cess. After speaking of the martyrdom which the Jews, under 

 Antiochus Epiphanes, preferred to eating pork, the writer pro- 

 ceeds : 



It may be, nevertheless, that the practice of keeping pigs may have found its 

 way into Palestine in the Graeco-Roman time, in consequence of the great increase 

 of the non-Jewish population ; yet there is no evidence of it in the New Testa- 

 ment ; the great herd of swine, two thousand in number, mentioned in the narra- 

 tived of the possessed, was feeding in the territory of Gadara, which belonged to 

 the Decapolis ; aud the prodigal son became a swineherd with the native of a far 

 country into which he had wandered ; in neither of these cases is there reason 

 for thinking that the possessors of these herds were Jews.* 



Having failed in my search, so far, I took up the next work of 

 reference at hand, Kitto's Cyclopaedia (vol. iii, 1876). There, 

 under " Swine," the writer, Colonel Hamilton Smith, seemed at 

 first to give me what I wanted, as he says that swine " appear 

 to have been repeatedly introduced and reared by the Hebrew 



* I may call attention, in passing, to the fact that this; authority, at any rate, has no 

 sort of doubt of the fact that Jewish law did not rule in Gadara (indeed, under the head 

 of " Gadara," in the same work, it is expressly stated that the population of the place con- 

 sisted " predominantly of heathens "), and that he scouts the notion that the Gadarene 

 swineherds were Jews. 



