“You Shall Not Boil a Kid in Its Mother’s Milk”

One of the oldest prohibitions in the entire Bible is the injunction against boiling a kid in the milk of its mother. It is repeated three times in identical words: “You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.”^a

From these words, the rabbis extrapolated a complex set of dietary laws, which to this day prohibit observant Jews from mixing foods containing milk or milk byproducts with foods containing meat.^b The prohibition against mixing milk and meat is an essential element of the dietary laws of kashrut; it is a significant part of what it means to “keep kosher.”^c

Yet the basis for the biblical prohibition itself is elusive. Why would the ancient Israelites even have contemplated boiling a kid in its mother’s milk?

The cognoscenti know how modern archaeology has solved the puzzle. It is a beautiful story, especially because the archaeological solution was presaged by a famous medieval Jewish exegete, Maimonides, who somehow managed to intuit from the text itself the same solution archaeology produced centuries later.

In 1195, Maimonides suggested: