Like Adam, Cain is sent away from Yahweh’s presence, and away from the soil he tills, to scratch an existence from the uncultivated, unyielding dust at the ends of the earth (Genesis 4.1–16). By contrast, Abel sacrifices the cream of his crop: ‘the firstlings of his flock, their fatty parts’ (Genesis 4.3–4). The pieces he particularly liked were their ‘fatty parts’ – the succulent slipperiness coating the intestines, kidneys and liver, plus the spongy thickness of the lamb’s tail. Yahweh’s preference for particular portions was not only a matter of divine taste, but a mark of godly distinction.

YHWH and mortals both ate, and in the cult place they ate together, but the exclusive allocation of the firstborn, first fruits and fatty parts to the deity drew on the essential primacy of food to materialize and mark the fundamental difference between gods and mortals – the difference between who was a god, and who was not (Yvonne Sherwood, ‘Cutting Up “Life”: Sacrifice as a Device for Clarifying – and Tormenting – Fundamental Distinctions between Human, Animal and Divine’, in Jennifer L. Koosed (ed.), The Bible and Posthumanism (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), pp. 247–97). As one Hittite priest put it, in the thirteenth century BCE, ‘Is the mind of man and those of the gods somehow different? No! The mind is indeed one and the same . . . [the priest] gives his master something to eat or he gives him something to drink. And since he, his master, eats and drinks, he is of a tranquil state, and he is therefore attached to him’ (Translated by Jared L. Miller, Royal Hittite Instructions and Related Administrative Texts (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013), pp. 244–65). A later version in the Epic of Gilgamesh names the hero as Utnapishtim, who adds aromatic incense to his post-diluvial sacrifice. Again, the gods ‘gather like flies’, but this time they swarm about the ‘one who had made the sacrifice’, emphasizing the social function of the feast COS 1.130 and 1.132 (both translated by Benjamin R. Foster). A millennium or so later, in the book of Genesis, it is Noah who emerges from the ark to offer a grateful sacrifice. The smoky scent of animal sacrifice not only draws God to Noah’s newly built altar, but triggers his change of heart towards all mortal creatures: ‘When Yahweh smelled the pleasing odour, Yahweh said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind . . . nor will I ever again destroy every living creature”’ (Genesis 8.20–21).

In Ezekiel 8.16, God had complained about idolatrous worshippers facing away from him as they bowed down to the rising sun outside his temple in Jerusalem, raising their buttocks towards his house. God did not want to see backsides, whether clothed or exposed, the rabbis decided. Consequently, good Jews across and beyond Palestine were encouraged to orient their bodies in spatial relation to the Jerusalem temple when urinating or defecating – even though the building itself had been destroyed back in 70 CE. Assuming (of course) male anatomy, rabbis decreed that people were to turn their backs to the direction of the temple when urinating, shielding God from their penises, and face the direction of the temple when defecating, so as to hide their buttocks (Rachel Neis, ‘ “Their Backs toward the Temple, and their Faces toward the East”: The Temple and Toilet Practices in Rabbinic Palestine and Babylonia’, in Journal for the Study of Judaism 43(3), 2012, pp. 328–68).

Debates on whether or not Jesus ate, defecated, drank etc:

According to the Gospels, Jesus had made a point of eating and drinking with his followers – both before his death and after his resurrection. But missing from these stories was any clear steer from the Saviour as to whether or not he actually digested his food and defecated. For many in the earliest centuries of the faith, it was a worrying theological lacuna in their most authoritative religious texts. After all, this was a time in which Christian leaders of all stripes were fiercely debating the question of Christ’s humanity and his relationship to God. Was he a mortal so pure he was granted divinity? Or was he an angelic being? Was he a divine being clothed in the body of a mortal? Or a human who sensed and suffered like others? Was he an offshoot of God? A second, lesser god? Or was he one and the same as God – as would eventually be doctrinally decreed? Whatever he was, the question of whether or not Christ digested and defecated was loaded with theological ramifications, for it impacted ideas about his ‘true’ nature. Most agreed that Christ ate and drank. This was important proof of his fleshy mortality, which was itself essential to his salvific death. But could God-asJesus really have had an ordinary body ‘stuffed with excrement’, as the second-century Christian thinker Marcion objected? Would digesting corruptible, decaying matter render Christ a ‘shit-eating’ god, as the philosopher Celsus scandalously observed? Marcion’s words are reported in Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem, 3.10.1. I borrow Jaraslov Pelikan’s translation in The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, vol. 1 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1971), p. 75. Celsus’ frank critique has reached us via Origen, Contra Celsum, 7.13, available in Henry Chadwick (trans.), Origen: Contra Celsum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). In his translation, Chadwick politely sanitizes the term skatophagein (‘shit-eating’) as ‘eating filth’ (p. 405). One way around the problem, as Clement of Alexandria saw it, was to suppose that Christ’s body did not process food and drink in the usual way. Instead, Clement declared, it was sustained and nourished by the Holy Spirit; Christ ate and drank only to dispel future accusations that his perfect human body was a phantasm (Clement, Stromateis, 6.71.2, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (eds.) The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1885). ‘Jesus performed divinity: he ate and drank in his own way, without defecating’, the highly influential second-century theologian Valentinus is reported to have written. ‘Such was the power of self-control in him’, Valentinus continued, ‘that the nourishment in him did not become waste, since he did not possess corruption’ (Valentinus, fragment 3 in Geoffrey S. Smith (trans. and ed.), Valentinian Christianity: Texts and Translations (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020), p. 13. For fourth-century claims that Christ remained excrement-free, see Kelley Spoerl’s articles ‘Eustathius of Antioch on Jesus’ Digestion’, in Studia Patristica 74, 2016, pp. 147–57; ‘Epiphanius on Jesus’ Digestion’, in Studia Patristica 96, 2017, pp. 3–10).