Discovery BoxDeuteronomy 14:21 
Context14:21 You may not eat any corpse, though you may give it to the resident foreigner who is living in your villages 1 and he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner. You are a people holy to the Lord your God. Do not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. 2
Deuteronomy 17:8
Context17:8 If a matter is too difficult for you to judge – bloodshed, 3 legal claim, 4 or assault 5 – matters of controversy in your villages 6 – you must leave there and go up to the place the Lord your God chooses. 7
1 tn Heb “gates” (also in vv. 27, 28, 29).
2 sn Do not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. This strange prohibition – one whose rationale is unclear but probably related to pagan ritual – may seem out of place here but actually is not for the following reasons: (1) the passage as a whole opens with a prohibition against heathen mourning rites (i.e., death, vv. 1-2) and closes with what appear to be birth and infancy rites. (2) In the other two places where the stipulation occurs (Exod 23:19 and Exod 34:26) it similarly concludes major sections. (3) Whatever the practice signified it clearly was abhorrent to the
3 tn Heb “between blood and blood.”
4 tn Heb “between claim and claim.”
5 tn Heb “between blow and blow.”
6 tn Heb “gates.”
7 tc Several Greek recensions add “to place his name there,” thus completing the usual formula to describe the central sanctuary (cf. Deut 12:5, 11, 14, 18; 16:6). However, the context suggests that the local Levitical towns, and not the central sanctuary, are in mind.
