Whoever asks the Bible about food immediately faces the question that determines everything else. It is the key that opens every door or slams it shut: Old Covenant or New Covenant?
Almost all misunderstandings around biblical eating come from mixing these two covenants. Some read the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 and turn them into binding law for Christians. Others read Paul’s words of freedom and act as if the commandments had never existed. Both camps tear apart what belongs together, because they do not take the decisive turning point seriously enough: the cross.
The Old Covenant: God’s covenant with Israel
At Sinai, God made a covenant with the people of Israel. He gave them the law, the Torah, as a comprehensive order for life. Included in it: the dietary laws. Leviticus 11 defines with clear criteria which animals Israel was allowed to eat and which not. Land animals needed split hooves and had to chew the cud. Water creatures needed fins and scales. Birds of prey, scavengers, creeping things: all unclean.
These commandments were binding. Not a recommendation, not a flexible guideline. They were law for the covenant people. Their purpose was not hygiene but holiness: “You shall be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). The dietary laws set Israel apart from the nations. They made the table a place of distinction.
Yet the law was never the goal. It was a shadow. Paul writes in Colossians 2:17: the dietary laws, the feast days, the new moons, even the Sabbath were “a shadow of the things to come, but the body is Christ.” A shadow shows that something real is there and casts its outline ahead. But the shadow is not the person. The shadow was the Old Covenant. The person is Christ.
Jesus before the cross: under the law
This is an often overlooked point, and it is decisive. Jesus of Nazareth was born a Jew, “born under the law” (Galatians 4:4). He kept the Torah. He ate kosher. He taught and acted before his death on the cross, that is, under the Mosaic law. He would not have abolished the dietary laws in the middle of his earthly ministry, for that would have meant breaking the very law under which he himself stood. He says it himself: “I have not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets, but to fulfill them” (Matthew 5:17).
That means: everything Jesus said and did before the cross happened under the conditions of the Old Covenant. His disciples ate no pork. They distinguished clean from unclean. Whoever ignores this time frame reads the Gospels wrongly.
The turning point: the cross
The cross changes everything. With Jesus’ death and resurrection, the New Covenant begins. What was shadow before now finds its fulfillment in Christ. The shadow gives way to reality. The dietary laws, the feasts, the Sabbath: all foreshadowings that receive their substance in Christ.
The letter to the Hebrews unfolds this with the Sabbath: there is a rest that God has held ready since the foundation of the world. The weekly Sabbath was only a pointer. The true Sabbath rest is Christ himself (Hebrews 4:1-11). Whoever is in Christ rests every day. The same with the dietary laws: they were a finger pointing to something greater. Now that the greater is here, the pointing finger has done its work.
Mark 7:19: the verse both sides read wrongly
Mark 7:19 is the most quoted, most misused verse in this question. The dispute in Mark 7 is about ritual handwashing, a Pharisaic tradition. It is not about Leviticus 11. Jesus teaches: what truly defiles comes from within, from the heart, not from the plate. Then follows, set in parentheses in most modern translations: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”
This parenthesis is a comment by the evangelist Mark, who writes his Gospel after the cross. He looks back and interprets. It is not a literal quotation of Jesus in the moment of the dispute. Jesus still stood before the cross, under the law, and ate kosher. The insertion “all foods clean” is a post-Easter interpretation by Mark, written from the perspective of the New Covenant. Before the cross is not after the cross. Whoever does not separate these mixes the covenants and loses the thread.
The New Covenant: freedom, not law
After the cross, freedom is proclaimed loudly and in many voices. A broad chorus, not a single verse.
In Acts 10, Peter sees a vision on the roof in Joppa: a sheet full of animals, clean and unclean mixed together. A voice says: “Rise, Peter, kill and eat!” Peter refuses. The voice comes again: “What God has declared clean, do not call unclean.” Three times. The dietary laws of the Old Covenant no longer apply in the New Covenant.
Paul confirms this repeatedly. Romans 14: the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. Colossians 2:16: let no one judge you in matters of food or drink. 1 Timothy 4:4, the summary: “Everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving.” That is freedom. No new law. No new list. The dietary laws were a shadow. Christ is the reality.
Wisdom, not law: what this means for bible-diet
This distinction between Old and New Covenant is the lens through which we read everything at bible-diet: Eden, the dietary laws, Peter’s vision, Paul’s words of freedom. Every text is read at its place in salvation history and interpreted from there.
The creation order of Eden remains valuable. The original plan, the plant-based first diet, the principle of seed and fruit: all of that is wisdom that invites. But never binding law for the Christian. We do not read Eden to crawl back under a commandment. We read Eden to understand how God thought when he made the world. That is a difference.
We read the dietary laws of Leviticus 11 as what they are: binding instruction for Israel under the Old Covenant, a shadow of what was to come. Today a source of deep insight into God’s thinking about clean and unclean, about order and distinction. But not a rule for a Christian’s table.
Freedom in the New Covenant does not mean anything goes. It means: no legalism, no guilt, no compulsion. Whoever chooses a certain way of eating out of wisdom does so in freedom. Whoever eats differently, likewise. No one judges the other. Everything rests in the Agape of the Father. Abba carries the table. Not the law.
Christ is the fulfillment. The shadow has passed. What remains is sonship, not slavery. Heart, not plate. Whoever understands this reads the Bible from the first page to the last in the right light.
Read on
The Dietary Laws: What Leviticus 11 Really Says
Freedom in the New Covenant: Received with Thanks