Some OT laws are easy to ridicule because at this distance they seem arbitrary and preposterous. A classic example is the prohibition against boiling a kid [goat] in its mother's milk.
Interestingly, this is not an incidental reference but is explicitly repeated three times in the Mosaic law (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21), with another allusion in Amos 6:4.
The passage has baffled rabbis as well as modern-day OT scholars. What's the rationale? We lost the key.
So we can only speculate. But hypothetically speaking, there's nothing intrinsically ludicrous about the prohibition. Perhaps that's a forbidden activity because it had associations with pagan rituals in the ancient Near East.
To take a comparison, suppose I ware a swastika armband into a synagogue. That would certainly send a message.
Now the swastika has no intrinsic meaning. It's an arbitrary emblem. The symbolism is culturally assigned. That doesn't change the fact that its historical associations with the Final Solution would make it outrageous or even sacrilegious to wear in a synagogue or yeshivah, although it would be appropriate for an actor to wear a swastika if he plays a Nazi soldier in a WWII movie.
Dr. Paul Copan actually talks about boiling a kid in its mother's milk being associated with Pagan rituals in his book is God a moral monster.
ReplyDeleteI think the following from one of Kevin DeYoung’s sermon is a good explanation:
ReplyDelete“Flip the page to the end of this section. Exodus 23:19: “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” This actually shows up three times in the Pentateuch—twice in Exodus, and once in Deuteronomy—so there was something important about this. You can read whole articles (and probably whole dissertations) written about this verse. What does it mean?
Let me give you the two most plausible explanations, which may not be mutually exclusive. The first is that this was common in some of the Canaanite religions. Why would this be a religious practice? Some evidence suggests that they thought it stirred up fertility among their flocks. In other words, if you sacrificed your goat, and you boiled it in the mother’s milk, since mother’s milk is a sign of reproduction, life, and fertility, they thought that this would somehow stimulate their own flocks and herds to reproduce—that the gods would see this and give blessings, and their flocks would grow abundantly. God is saying, “Look, have nothing to do with that sort of magic, superstition, sorcery, and the occult. That’s not how you worship me. Don’t boil a young goat in it’s mother’s milk.”
The other explanation (which has always come to my mind) is that you should not use that which was meant for life to accomplish death. The mother’s milk is to provide sustenance, strength, and nourishment to her young kid, and you don’t use what was meant for life to produce death. If that’s the argument (and it could be both of these), then there’s a kind of natural law argument about function, or “telos”, embedded in this. Telos is a Greek word that philosophers use, which means “end goal” or “purpose”. What is the function, the end goal, or the telos of mother’s milk? It is to give strength, life, health, and nourishment. Don’t use it for the opposite end goal—that is, death.
These same kinds of natural law functionality arguments show up elsewhere—in Romans 1, for example, when Paul talks about sexuality, and about how God made man to be with a woman, because the function of the bodily organs was meant for each other. You do not put an organ that is meant to produce life into a place or cavity that expels death. So… The argument would be one of function—of telos—and one of idolatry. It’s all the same here.”