This is the third in my wildly popular "WILD SPECULATION" series.
1. Did the Prophet Daniel commit SUICIDE?
and now....[drumroll]
3. INCEST: Boiling a kid in his mother's milk?
You may have heard this one before, so perhaps it doesn't qualify as WILD speculation.
There was a song by Paul Simon called "Mother and Child Reunion" which he admitted (in a Rolling Stone magazine interview) was inspired by a menu item at a Chinese restaurant. The item on the menu refers to a chicken and egg dish. ( verify at: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/mother.htm. ) As an aside, when I was a kid, we used to make up Greek and Latin fake expressions like "Greek, chronocide = killing time" and "chicken egg = Latin, poultrus cluckus abortus.' The latter was inspired after I heard about the meaning of Paul Simon's song.)
Kosher/Orthodox Jews won't eat a meat and cheese sandwich because of the prohibition against boiling a kid in his mother's milk. But, in fact, there are two or three OT laws which may have had a much deeper meaning. "Officially," no Jewish authorities will categorize them as speaking against incest, but I did find something close on a website:
10. Cf. the prohibition against taking the mother together with the young ones or the eggs from a bird's nest. Here the eggs are sufficient to represent the young ones, just as the milk represents the kid's mother (Deut. 22:6-7). See also the prohibition against sacrificing on the same day a cow or a ewe and her young (Lev. 22:28). Both of these acts might lead to culinary incest.
For now I only wanted to deal specifically with "boiling a kid (goat) in it's mother's milk" It is not difficult to find Biblical parallels where the goat image is chosen specifically to symbolize virility, manliness, sexual excess. Goats are even demonized in the Bible and elsewhere (horny devils). The most curious use of goats in the OT is on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), which I'll get to. (I'll bet you can't wait). Similacly, no one has to look to deeply to figure out that "milk and mama" go together like "mammals and mammaries." And most would stipulate that boiling (heat) and passion (fervor) go together. (Paul once said "It's better to marry than to boil." Will Young/The Doors/Jose Feliciano once said: "Come on baby light my fire.")
Maimonedes (1125 AD) thought it was to avoid imitating a Canaanite pagan ritual, Philo (45 AD) thought it meant don't sacrifice (boil) a baby goat that's still "in" or dependent on mother's milk (not for the sake of the baby kid but so that the mother goat doesn't get hardened teats when the little sucker is gone). The Canaanite idea caught on in all the Bible commentaries starting in the 1930's when a Ugaritic Canaanite tablet was found, but temporarily mistranslated. The fixed translation actually proved that initial translators held a lot of Bible-based prejudices against Canaanites; the actual meaning was completely unrelated, as has been proved since 1985.
Some commentators who have attempted to understand it along with the Canaanite and other ancient near-Eastern religions have seen it more as a command against co-mingling life and death. Don't mix things improperly, especially things which we realize can be symbols with important meanings. I personally prefer this explanation to the one about incest. It could extend to fit a lot of other laws which don't seem too important. (Like don't mix polyester () and wool in the same garment.) I have never seen it done yet in any Jewish commentary, but the logical extension would be NO ABORTION. It too closely co-mingles life and death in the same activity. (see, Necromancy.) (see, Mother and Child Reunion above.)
Whether this law should be extended to mean no abortion or no incest, I just thought it might interest some that symbolism might play a role in Jewish religion in the same way it may have played a role in old Babylonian, Canaanite, Hittite, Assyrian and Egyptian religions for example. I just ordered an interesting book called "The Savage In Judaism" which I haven't read yet but should cover similar issues, I hope.
Gamaliel