Significance

Cows: a source of both meat and dairyThe Bible offers absolutely no reason or explanation whatsoever for the commandment not to "boil a young goat in its mother's milk." We are naturally curious as to the significance of this mysterious commandment. However, if our goal is to stay biblical, we must recognize that any explanation for the restriction is human in origin, and it probably falls short of the complete truth. If we mistakenly believe that we know the reason for a commandment, then we will be tempted to break it.

Consider this illustration: a teenage son asks his father if he can take the family car. The father replies, "No," offering no further explanation. The son reasons that he was not given permission to use the car because someone else would need to use it soon. This was a perfectly reasonable inference, which perhaps had even been true in the past. With that in mind, he figures that it should be fine to use it for a quick errand, so he takes it for a spin anyway. But this time, the actual reason his father refused was because the car had faulty brakes that needed immediate repair.

A Pagan Fertility Ritual?

One common idea is that the prohibition is related to Canaanite ritual practices. This idea was suggested by Rambam in the twelfth century:

Meat in milk is undoubtedly gross food, and makes overfull; but I think that most probably it is also prohibited because it is somehow connected with idolatry, forming perhaps part of the service, or being used on some festival of the heathen. I find a support for this view in the circumstance that the Law mentions the prohibition twice after the commandment given concerning the festivals "Three times in the year all thy males shall appear before the Lord God" (Exodus 23:17, and 34:73), as if to say, "When you come before me on your festivals, do not seethe your food in the manner as the heathen used to do." This I consider as the best reason for the prohibition: but as far as I have seen the books on Sabean rites, nothing is mentioned of this custom.1

Thus, Rambam weakly offers this explanation, even though he finds no support for this in his knowledge of pagan ritual. Notably, Rambam does not specifically identify the potential pagan practice as "boiling a young goat in its mother's milk," but just the general idea of "meat in milk."

Baal: an image found at Ras Shamra (Ugarit)In 1929, a Ugaritic2 text was discovered that appeared to support this theory. A scholar reconstructed one damaged line in the text to say, "cook a kid in milk, and a lamb in butter." This reconstructed text quickly permeated scholarship and made its way into many commentaries. It is notable that it does not speak of "its mother's milk," only "milk." The inclusion of lamb and butter is also remarkable, since it would suggest that the supposed pagan practice extended to other combinations of meat and dairy. However, recent scholarship has completely shattered the originally reconstructed reading, rendering all of that irrelevant. The actual reading is probably speaking of herbs, rather than "kid" and "lamb." Jack Sasson explains:

The connection has proven too good to be true. With a better grasp of how Ugaritic poetry works, it is now understood that the string of letters involved contains parts of different phrases, resulting in a passage about pleasing voices that chant about coriander in milk. There’s no mention of a goat at all.3

To this date, although claims abound, real evidence of a pagan Canaanite ritual is non-existent.4

But suppose Rambam was correct that meat with milk was a Canaanite ritual. Does that make it acceptable, just because it is a pagan custom?

Plenty of Other Explanations

And yet, this is not the only reasonable explanation of the prohibition. Others have suggested that it is meant as a sustainable farming practice (not killing the offspring at too young an age), to avoid something that might be perceived as cruel or inhumane, or as a discreet way of speaking against incest.

The most common view in Judaism today is that milk, which sustains the life of a young animal, is a symbol for life. Meat, on the other hand, can only be procured by killing an animal, so it is a symbol of death. If we consider how it is the nature of God to separate things (light from darkness, the waters below from the waters above, the dry land from the seas, each plant and each animal according to its kind, etc.) and the commandments about separation (an ox and a donkey plowing together, two kinds of seed in a field, wool and linen in the same garment, etc.), then perhaps the separation of meat from dairy is along the same lines. But again, this explanation is not made explicit in the biblical text.

1. 1. Rambam, Friedländer (translator), Guide to the Perplexed 3:48. Note: the original translation began "Meat boiled in milk," but the term "boiled" is supplied by the translator, so I have removed it here to avoid confusion. Rambam just says "meat in milk" (basar bechalav).
2. 2. Ugarit is the site of an ancient city-state located on the Mediterranean coast.
3. 3. Jack M. Sasson. "Should Cheeseburgers Be Kosher?." Bible Review, Dec 2003. http://www.basarchive.org/sample/bswbBrowse.asp?PubID=BSBR&Volume=19&Iss...(accessed 11/9/2009)
4. 4. See Milgrom, Jacob. "You Shall Not Boil A Kid In Its Mother's Milk" Bible Review Fall, 1985.