Which flying creeping things may we eat?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Two dietary laws disagree about winged insects. Deuteronomy 14:19 is flat: "every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they shall not be eaten." Leviticus 11:21-23 carves out an explicit exception: among the flying creeping things that go on all fours, those "which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth"—locusts, bald locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers "after their kind"—may be eaten, while "all other flying creeping things" remain an abomination. Deuteronomy excludes what Leviticus permits.

The apologetic resolution—Kaiser, Craigie, Merrill—proposes that the two texts use a narrower and a broader category. The Hebrew sheretz ha-of ("swarming/creeping thing that flies") in Deuteronomy 14:19 supposedly denotes only the crawling winged insects that Leviticus also forbids, while the jumping locusts of Leviticus 11:21-23 form a separate sub-class that Deuteronomy is not addressing. The reading has real exegetical support from within Leviticus itself: Leviticus 11:20 first declares "all fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination," and only then (vv. 21-23) excepts the leaping insects—so Leviticus does treat jumpers as a distinguished sub-category with their saltatorial hind legs as the marker. If Deuteronomy 14:19 is using sheretz ha-of in that restricted Levitical sense, the laws need not conflict.

The weakness is that this requires Deuteronomy to silently deploy the same technical taxonomy as the Priestly source while omitting the very exception that taxonomy exists to specify. Deuteronomy's dietary code (14:3-21) is conspicuously simpler and broader than Leviticus 11—it lists clean and unclean quadrupeds and the fish criterion, names forbidden birds, and then dismisses winged insects in a single sweeping clause with no jumping-insect carve-out. Tigay's JPS commentary notes precisely this: Deuteronomy's list streamlines the Priestly system and drops categories. The omission is significant, because eating locusts was a real and enduring practice—attested across the ancient Near East, presupposed in Leviticus' own exception, and reflected later in the Gospel notice that John the Baptist ate "locusts and wild honey" (Mark 1:6; Matt 3:4). A law that forbade all flying insects without exception would be at odds with a known and permitted food.

The more economical reading is that Deuteronomy 14 is a Deuteronomistic simplification of the dietary laws, derived from but not identical to Leviticus 11. Weinfeld, Tigay, and Wright treat Deuteronomy 14:3-21 as a D recension of the purity system that did not preserve every Priestly subdivision. Mary Douglas and Walter Houston situate both lists within the broader logic of Israelite classification, but neither erases the difference in scope between the two codes.

The reception history confirms the texts were not trivially compatible. A community holding only Deuteronomy would naturally conclude that all flying insects were forbidden; one holding only Leviticus would know the locust exception. The Mishnah (m. Hullin 3:7) had to specify the marks of a kosher locust to coordinate the canon's two voices—harmonizing labor that would be unnecessary had the texts plainly agreed.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable but overstated as a flat contradiction. The narrow-category reading is grammatically possible and is anchored in Leviticus 11:20-23's own sub-classification, so a harmonizing reader can hold the laws together; but it must read Deuteronomy's silence as tacit agreement with a Priestly taxonomy Deuteronomy nowhere states, and source criticism more simply explains the difference as a Deuteronomic streamlining of the Levitical dietary code.