Wallener

It's not really that complicated: the key is "in its mother's milk" - ie, don't eat the kid until it has weaned. Multiple reasons: if you force-wean it by killing it, you get less milk from your goat, and you get less meat from the kid. The fence built around this, however, is a little more difficult to explain.

Toto

1. It's not legally relevant.

2. Maybe because the explanation is too long for their readers' attention spans?

3. I think some have, but they have been drowned out by soundbites. Here's one try.

4. Maybe a few somewhere, but they seem to deconvert after they read it.

andrewcriddle

This may have been a pagan ritual which the Israelites were to renounce.

Andrew Criddle

Anat

Other possible explanations I have heard for the milk/meat separation:
-mystical/spiritual reasons: milk represents birth, meat represents death.
-social control: setting limitations on social mingling between Israelites and others (goes with the prohibition against consumption of wine that had been handled by Gentiles in its production)
-self-control reasons: practical commandments ruling everyday activities teach self-discipline (without negating basic needs).
-religious reasons: practical commandments involving everyday activities give the believer daily opportunities for acts of worship

Anat

From the article linked by Toto:

gregor2

Andrew

Could it have been a practice of the Isralites that was criminalized by Judah?

Could it have been a practice like worship in the high places for Judah that priests decided to criminalize?

And would these be in pre-exilic times?

J-D

Because, if you look in a Jewish prayerbook, you will find that the Ten Commandments listed there are not the ones shown in Exodus 34, but the ones from Exodus 32 (repeated with slight variations in Deuteronomy 5).

coloradoatheist

The whole story is very poorly written and confusing if by one author. It makes sense if written from multiple authors with multiple traditions but let's look at the sequence

Exodus 20 Moses gives out the ten commandments which we know today to the people and then goes on a lists a whole bunch of other commandments.

Exodus 32 The tablets are broken and God says go back up Mt Sinai

Exodus 34:1 It says God will write on the tablets what was on there before

exodus 34:12 Starts with another lists of ten commandments

Exodus 34:28 says Moses wrote them down which makes God a liar in 34:1

How can anybody keep this story with a straight face?


Mike

Anat

Barry L. Bandstra in Reading the Old Testament has a proposed reconstruction of the three sources that may have formed the Sinai story as we have it:
Yahwist version with the commandments of Exodus 34:10-26
Elohist version with the commandments of Exodus 20 (as well as additional commandments from the book of the covenant, the story of the golden calf, breaking the tablets and rewriting them)
Priestly version, whose laws deal almost only with the tabernacle and the priesthood (except for the laws of Shabbat in 31:12-17)

Note the similarity between the laws in 34:10-26 and those in 23:12-33 (as part of the book of the covenant: both contain laws about Shabbat, holidays, pilgrimages as well as total destruction of the peoples of Canaan and their religious symbols. I suspect the original commandments, as remembered by Israelites/Judahites were something along those lines, and the Exodus 20 version a later addition. The Shabbat laws in the Priestly version may also be a remnant of yet another version of the same set of commandments.

Malachi151

The sad thing is, that as a piece of ancient history the Bible/Torah is an amazing work, and an importnat part of our understanding of human social development. Its creation myths are on par with those of other tribal groups and other civilizations and are equally as interesting as those of the Greeks and Indians (from India) and Chinese, etc.

Its amazing in that it as s text it has survived so well to today.

So, from a historical perspective its a very respectable and interesing part of our body of knowledge of humanity.

As a literal piece of work that is supposedly the exact word of God, the text becomes an aomination and a joke, something that becomes the object of much hate and confusion.

The literalists really do no one any good, and not even their own cause by holding to such foolish claims as saying that this work is the literal word of "God" and was origionally meant as a timeless work.

The Biblicists really are ruining the imiage of a work, that if viewed objectively, can be seen as an important historical document, if for no other reason than the completeness of the image it gives us of life so long ago.