The Laws of Ritual Slaughter

In his autobiographical account (see “Account of His Travels”), the mysterious figure Eldad ha-Dani claimed to be a descendant of the tribe of Dan, living under the rule of a Jewish king in a country near Ethiopia. He also described some laws, excerpted here, said to have been transmitted to Moses by God and passed on to Joshua ben Nun, many of which deal with the production of kosher meat. He often refers to the biblical text, tending to link ritual slaughter in the post-Temple period with the animal sacrifices performed in the Temple. Some of these laws are similar to talmudic law, others to proto-Karaite law, and others to Islamic law, while yet others have no discernible parallels. Recent scholarship has suggested that Eldad may have represented the last vestiges of nonrabbinic traditions that were being overwhelmed by the spread of talmudic Judaism. Despite Eldad’s tenuous connections to rabbinic Judaism, some medieval talmudists cited these texts as authoritative.