During the postexilic period, as God’s word came to be increasingly concentrated in the law, so food law came to represent the whole law. In this context, gluttony came to epitomize all dangerously unlawful behavior, and as explanation for why the Lord’s first commandments to the Israelites concerned food, Philo developed a three-part theory of the soul: reason centered in the head, high spirit in the chest, and desire, in the space around the naval and diaphragm. Moses, foregoing this breakdown of the soul, symbolized passion as “that one whose field of activity is the belly.” Moses thus first sought to admonish gluttony, and this way the way in which early Christians were viewed. The Christians, far from believing their behavior to be one of apostasy, used the law to establish a new covenant, conveyed through the language of food and establishing a new understanding concerning their meal. Jesus’ use of bread and wine in the last supper as a means of commemorating his passion is therefore seen as similar to the way in which Passover used bitter herbs and haroseth to represent enslavement and liberation. Throughout this religious establishment, food has been a means of translation of the Lord’s words into something tangible and meaningful for believers.
