Cooking a Kid in its Mother's Milk

Exodus 23:19 states that "You shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk."

The rabbis explain that this means that one cannot you cannot cook any milk and any meat together, you cannot eat milk and meat together, and you cannot derive benefit from milk and meat which have been cooked together.

However, there is a passage in the Shuhchan Aruch describing a situation in Jewish Law.

In Yoreh Deah, 87:9, it states: "Chalav found in the kaiva (stomach) of an animal 24) is not chalav and it is mutar to cook with basar even if it is tzalul (liquid)"

Translated into English, this states that milk found in the stomach of an animal is not considered milk, and therefore is allowed to be cooked and eaten with meat, even if this not digested.

This leads to an interesting hypothetical situation. According to the rabbis, it is permissible on a biblical level to feed a young goat its mother's milk, kill the goat, and then cook the goat's meat in the milk taken from the stomach of the goat.

While the Rama states that the rabbis have a custom not to allow this, they say that it is biblically permissible, in this situation, to literally boil a young goat in its mother's milk!

You'd think if there were one thing that this passage would not permit, it's boiling a young goat in its mother's milk. But rabbinic tradition does not really follow the original intent of the text. Archaeologists have discovered that an ancient Canaanite fertility ritual was to boil a young goat in it's mother's milk. The rabbis, not knowing the original context, not only reinterpreted the text so that it prohibited an entirely different kind of activity, but also in a way that allowed a Jew to do the very thing that the text is forbidding in the first place.

Don't ever let a rabbi say to you: "We go with the Bible. We do what the Bible says." The rabbis do not care what the Bible says. They only care about what tradition says that the Bible says, turning the text into putty, which the rabbis can mold into whatever form they desire.