GEN186 A careful reading of the Bible suggests that God’s ideal diet for human beings is vegetarian, not carnivorous.  (But see also comment Genesis 4:4).  Adam and Eve, the first human beings, are commanded by God to limit their eating to vegetables and fruit.  Generations later, after the sins of lawlessness and violence committed during the time of Noah Genesis 6:11-13, followed by the devastating flood God wreaks on the world, God permits human beings to eat animals Genesis 9:3.  The Bible never explains why God now permits the eating of animals.  Perhaps He was convinced that a vegetarian diet would be too difficult nutritionally for most people to observe, or perhaps He felt that people would not observe it since meat eating is a strong desire.  The late Bible scholar Nechama Leibowitz--summarizing an argument offered by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook--explained that the permission to eat meat had less to do with nutrition than with humanity’s propensity for violence: “…after the deluge, the descendants of Noah, that is, all mankind, were permitted to be carnivorous.  Since the land had become filled with violence and man had given free rein to his worst instincts, man was no longer required to make the supreme moral exertions required to forgo the slaughter of animals. It was far more important that he should, at least, utilize what moral fiber he still possessed to refrain from killing his own kind and respecting the life of his neighbor.” (Studies in Bereshit/Genesis, page 77).  Thus it should be viewed as no coincidence that immediately following the permission to eat meat is the law ordaining capital punishment for murders: “Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed” Genesis 9:6.  On the other hand, the fifteenth century Spanish rabbi Joseph Albo argued that the slaughtering of animals was deleterious to man’s character development: “In the killing of animals there is cruelty and aggression and the ingraining in men of the negative trait of spilling innocent blood…” Sefer Ha-Ikkarim 3:15.  TELVOL 2:331