“Better a Meal of Vegetables with Love”: The Symbolic Meaning of Vegetables in Rabbinic and Post-Rabbinic Midrash on Proverbs 15.17

Though classical Jewish tradition and cuisine look meat-centered at first sight, there is a strong vegetarian undercurrent that stretches back to the garden, the Garden of Eden. Then, according to the Torah, human beings and animals coexisted harmoniously, and man had “every seed-bearing plant . . . upon the earth . . . and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit . . . all the green plants for food” (Gen 1.29–30). Only after the Flood did God grant to humans the right to consume meat: “every creature that lives shall be yours to eat, as with the green grasses” (Gen 9.3).¹ There has been a revival of interest in early dietary myth especially among contemporary Jewish activists concerned about the environment, food resources, social justice, and personal health (among them Richard Schwartz, Robert Kalechofsky, Arthur Green, and many of the contributors to the web blog The Jew and the Carrot).² They advocate a modern Jewish vegetarianism, or an “eco-kashrut” that more or less subscribes to Michael Pollan’s ecotarian mantra “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”³ Modern Jewish vegetarianism has its roots in the meatless utopian visions of a messianic future and Edenic past in the Bible, early and medieval rabbinic literature, and the first chief rabbi of Israel, Rav Kook.⁴ This longing to go “back to the garden” is also hinted at in several of the postbiblical interpretations of the “meal of vegetables” in Prov 15.17: “Better a meal of vegetables where there is love, than a fattened bull where there is hate.” Thus, the medieval Spanish Jewish biblical exegete Rabbenu Bahya ben Asher infers from this verse that “it is human nature to want small and light portions of food, such as ‘a meal of vegetables’ or something similar in the company of friends, rather than fattened bulls in the company of enemies.”⁵ Granted R. Bahya’s main emphasis here is the contrast between meals in the company of friends versus those in the company of enemies, experiences of concord rather than discord. But, in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, when there was concord between man and woman, between human beings and God, and between human beings and animals, the diet of all God’s creatures was “meals of vegetables.” After the Fall, relations broke down between human beings and God, and even between human beings and animals. Permission to indulge in a new meat diet now characterized this discord—friends became food. If it is our human nature to be satisfied with vegetables, it is nature from which we have now fallen.

What is the nature of the relationship between Proverbs’ “meal of vegetables (yerakot)” and the company of one’s friends? Taken in apposition to the syntactically parallel verse immediately preceding it: “Better a little with fear of the Lord, than great wealth with confusion” (Prov 15.16), it seems the small quantity of the “meal of vegetables” is contrasted to the substantial meal of “fattened bull.” On the other hand, the term yerakot, literally, “greens,” calls attention to their appearance—what they look like, and perhaps by implication, their taste, smell, and feel. According to Yehuda Feliks, a leading authority on plants in the Bible and rabbinic literature, the greens in Prov 15.17 probably refer to edible wild herbs gathered in the field, what the Mishnah later calls “field vegetables,” as opposed to those cultivated in gardens (“garden vegetables”).⁶ They might be mallow leaves (Heb., ḥalamut), orach (Heb., maluoḥ, for its salty taste), rocket (Heb., orot), or maror (an edible weed that in Feliks’s addendum to a modern commentary on the mishnaic order of Seeds [Zera‘im] looks like dandelion greens, as well as the generic term for any bitter herb suitable for the Passover rite).⁷ This reinforces the connotation of the “meal of greens” as a low-status food of poor people, since anyone can gather “field vegetables” freely in the wild, even in times of famine.⁸ That...