109
Is it because flour is an incomplete and crude food? For neither has it remained what it was, wheat, nor has it become what it must become, bread; but it has both lost the germinative power of the seed and at the same time it has not attained to the usefulness of food. Wherefore also the Poet by a metaphor applied to barley-meal the epithet mylephatosas,Homer, Od. ii. 355: mill-slaughtered. if it were being killed or destroyed in the grinding.
109
Yeast is itself also the product of corruption, and produces corruption in the dough with which it is mixed: for the dough becomes flabby and inert, and altogether the process of leavening seems to be one of putrefaction Cf.Moralia, 659 b.; at any rate if it goes too far, it completely sours and spoils the flour.
110
Why is this priest also forbidden to touch raw flesh?
110
Is this custom intended to deter people completely from eating raw meat, or do they scrupulously repudiate flesh for the same reason as flour? For neither is it a living creature nor has it yet become a cooked food. Now boiling or roasting, being a sort of alteration and mutation, eliminates, the previous form; but fresh raw meat does not have a clean and unsullied appearance, but one that is repulsive, like a fresh wound.
111
Why did they bid the priest avoid the dog and the goat, neither touching them nor naming them?