Cheese has become such a staple, and often also a delicacy (when curdled with exquisitivity).

For many, it’s a healthy choice (calcium).

Others avoid it like venom (cholesterol).

For certain, it occupies prominent shelf space in most supermarkets, which offer everything from basic cheddar and mozzarella to artisanal varieties like aged gouda and creamy brie. There’s the classic grilled cheese sandwich; there’s pizza, with various cheeses atop; there’s the crafting of elaborate charcuterie boards.

It’s a notable in just about all restaurants, including some of the priciest.

Where once there was the simple hamburger, now, when one orders a “hamburger,” one must make sure they are not automatically topping it with cheese.

It is everywhere—cheese.

Yet curiously, it’s not very everywhere in the Bible. In fact, it’s hardly anywhere.

You will find it here: 1 Samuel 17:18, and 29 and Job 10:10.

“Bring also these ten cuts of cheese to the commander of their thousand, and look into the welfare of your brothers, and bring back news of them.”

“Did You not pour me out like milk; And curdle me like cheese.”

But that’s about it.

Bread, wine, and oil, yes; they’re through the Good Book; but not mozzarella.

Was it that the simplicity of the ancient diet meant less emphasis on processed or aged foods like cheese, or is it because the Bible often uses food symbolically to convey spiritual messages and cheese bore no such message?

Bread, for instance, represents sustenance and God’s provision, while wine signifies joy and covenant.

Cheese, lacking deep symbolic ties in biblical culture, may not have been as thematically significant.

And when cheese was made in ancient Israel and around the Mediterranean, what kind was it? Perhaps a mature sheep’s cheese (something like the Pecorino cheeses of modern-day Italy)?

An interesting little musing, valued especially because a discussion thereof seems not to provoke controversy.

[resources: The God of Healing]