I was indeed going off the premise that there was a scientific reason behind the dietary laws.
Purely cultural reasons are plausible but pork is a staple meat in all cultures where it is allowed. It would be an inordinate sacrifice to make for tradition alone.
If differentiation was the motivation, couldn't they make laws against eating peas or some other inconsequential crop?
In context, pork was only one of many forbidden foods. Certain kinds of locusts being allowed while others not, certain kinds of seafood being allowed while others not.
They have been debunked as being good heuristics for food safety with 21st century knowledge but that doesn't mean they didn't stem from observations of poison, parasites, etc.
You could apply the same reasoning to the Jewish culture of cleanliness in general. It certainly differentiated them from many other contemporaneous cultures, but why would they wash themselves in the first place?
What do you mean by "inordinate"? Reason as a main source of social norms is a much later ideological invention, usually considered a result of the dominance of the roman catholic church and its adoption of aristotelian philosophy.
You're still defending possibility as such, and not arguing for relative likelihood. I find the lack of anchoring in early judaic society suspicious.
If you read the Torah you'll find that it is not a collection of argumentative texts. To the extent that Leviticus makes an argument it stops at two criteria, cloven hoofs and rumination, without further explanation. This is also how more well-known early judaic legal norms were communicated, e.g. the noahide laws and the decalogue are presented as is without further argument.
The context of early judaism was also quite deadly in itself, people died all the time from a variety of opaque reasons. Figuring out that someone died due to some meat-transmitted parasite rather than a disgruntled shedim wasn't very likely.
The Torah is quite unconcerned with things like health or actions that are supposed to result in a long life, insisting instead that these things are decided by G-d. Dying isn't given a very prominent place in this early theology either, it just kind of shrugs it off with a vague idea about Sheol as a container for souls, in case they just don't stick around like some ancestral ghosts or something.
Pork was widely eaten at the time, so the "good heuristics for food safety" thing seems entirely useless to me. People already knew how to prepare pork and did it, and pork isn't particularly insidious, if kept in a warm environment it'll ward off your nose and taste buds in no time. Beef (and mutton) is more likely to trick you into eating it even though it has gone bad, and it also carries a risk of giving you parasitical or bacterial infections.
I am not going to win in an argument about ancient religious texts.
Personally, even rejecting the food poisoning mechanic, it still rings more likely to me that some more superficial heuristic like "pigs and eels revel in the mud thus they are unclean" existed before religious and/or cultural significance("these beasts are unclean and I'm the Rabbi") was attached to it, rather than the wish for differentiation from other peoples appearing first("the enemy drinks water, henceforth we shall only drink beer").
But perhaps you're right and my mind can't wrap around that of those people from three thousand years ago.
Sheep usually have fecal matter in their rear wool, and pigs aren't the only animals that enjoy a bath in mud or muddy water when it's hot.
I suspect the ancient jewish idea of cultic purity had less to do with washed skin and hair, and more to do with behaviour and discipline. It's much harder to ritually slaughter a pig than a sheep or cow, and perhaps this was associated with rumination by the early jews.
Purely cultural reasons are plausible but pork is a staple meat in all cultures where it is allowed. It would be an inordinate sacrifice to make for tradition alone.
If differentiation was the motivation, couldn't they make laws against eating peas or some other inconsequential crop?
In context, pork was only one of many forbidden foods. Certain kinds of locusts being allowed while others not, certain kinds of seafood being allowed while others not.
They have been debunked as being good heuristics for food safety with 21st century knowledge but that doesn't mean they didn't stem from observations of poison, parasites, etc.
You could apply the same reasoning to the Jewish culture of cleanliness in general. It certainly differentiated them from many other contemporaneous cultures, but why would they wash themselves in the first place?