ABSTRACT
The ethical significance of the common meal can be most adequately illustrated from Arabian usage, but it was not confined to the Arabs. The Old Testament records many cases where a covenant was sealed by the parties eating and drinking together. Conversely, every slaughter was a clan sacrifice, that is, a domestic animal was not slain except to procure the material for a public meal of kinsmen. This last proposition seems startling, but it is confirmed by the direct evidence of Nilus as to the habits of the Arabs of the Sinaitic desert towards the close of the fourth Christian century. Early man had certainly no conception of the sacredness of animal life as such, but neither had he any conception of the sacredness of human life as such. The life of his clansman was sacred to him, not because he was a man, but because he was a kinsman; and, in like manner, the life of an animal of his totem kind is sacred to the savage, not because it is animate, but because he and it are sprung from the same stock and are cousins to one another.
