and they pronounced a ban upon anyone who might add so much as a single word, so the book remained limited to that fixed quantity. (1)

In those two works their jurists further decreed that it was forbidden for them to share a meal with anyone outside their own community, and they barred them from eating meat slaughtered by people who did not belong to their religion. They knew full well that, living in humiliation and subjugation under the dominance of other nations, their faith could only survive if they cut their followers off from mixing with outsiders. To that end they also prohibited intermarriage with them and the consumption of their slaughtered animals—yet they could achieve this only by inventing a pretext of their own making and falsely attributing it to God.

The Torah itself had merely forbidden them to marry people of other nations lest they be drawn after their spouses into idol-worship and disbelief in God. Likewise, it had only prohibited them from eating the sacrifices of those nations that were presented to idols, because a name other than God’s was invoked over them. As for animals over which God’s name was pronounced and which were slaughtered for His sake, the Torah never declared them unlawful at all; on the contrary, it explicitly permitted them to eat food received from the hands of other peoples.

Thus Moses forbade them solely from marrying idol-worshippers and from eating what those idol-worshippers sacrificed in the name of their idols.

They object, “The Torah has forbidden us to eat the ṭarīfā (meat torn by a predator).” It is said to them: the ṭarīfā is the carcass snatched by a lion, a wolf, or some other beast of prey, just as the Torah says: “And meat in the wilderness, torn by beasts, you shall not eat; cast it to the dog.” (2)