This is one of the many Torah laws which appear in our game and have made readers of the Bible scratch their heads asking, "why is it in the Bible?"
Don't murder, don't steal your father's wife, don't grab a naked man by the penis when he's fighting another naked man (oh, we'll get to that one later): these are all in the Bible and make sense to us on the surface. But this one? And why is it repeated so often? This prohibition first shows up twice in Exodus (e.g.Exodus 23:19 and Exodus 34:26) before appearing in Deuteronomy. It seems like God really cares about this one. Why?
We would like to present three popular possibilities on why this prohibition exists.
1) The No! What is wrong with you? Why would you do that? Why would you even want to do that!? That's just sick and wrong! You gonna make the mother goat watch you do that to her kid and then feed her the remains afterward too? Damn. No. Just no. Don't. Bad! Argument.
Nuff said.
2) The Sexy Canaanite Argument
Some scholars argue that this specific act was an element of a Canaanite fertility ritual. Apparently, despite His many similarities to El and Ba'al Hadad, Israel's YHWH is not aroused to grant sexual favors to human servants who present Him with such offerings.
3) The Sanctity of Life Argument
As with many of the Hebraic laws, there is a definitive requirement for things to be in their place without mixing. No mixing fibers, foods, or fellowship with certain people is present through the Torah's prohibitions. Scholars argue over the significance of this ad nauseum providing religious, medical, social, and ethical reasons for each.
On this law, one rabbi suggests that it is simply a matter of keeping kosher, as meat and dairy should not be mixed, but this does not get to the apparent emphasis of the relationship between the goats: they are mother and child in the text and this seems significant to the law. It seems rather personal. Other scholars advance another interesting thought, one of life and death.
The Torah is concerned with life — how we ought to live physically, emotionally, spiritually — so much so that arguably, even the cases of the death penalty called forth in the Torah are only discussed in moments where the concern for the life of an individual or the community has been placed in danger in some way.
Mother's milk is a life giving fluid. Beyond the mixing of meat and dairy, to boil a kid in its mother's milk is to use the fluid created by a life-giving deity to sustain life, as the means to kill the creature whose life was to be sustained. It doesn't get more messed up than that, and serves as another picture of Torah design.
So perhaps the first argument was right after all.
Perhaps this law is a microcosm of the idea that the God of the Hebrew Bible cares deeply for life, even for those who say, "I'm a good Christian who doesn't understand the Old Testament, and didn't Jesus do away with all this legal code nonsense anyway?"
Perhaps this is another picture, among the many in the Hebrew Bible, which displays how the people were to be mindful of how life and death should not be so easily mixed.
An idea, perhaps, we should heed.
But what do we know: we made this game and you probably think we're going to hell.
