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On Separating Life and Death: An Explanation of Some Biblical Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

Calum M. Carmichael
Calum M. Carmichael
Affiliation:
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853
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Extract

Certain biblical laws can be satisfactorily explained only on the basis of their concern to avoid a blurring of the two opposites, life and death. The famous prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother's milk (Exod 23:19; 34:26; Deut 14:21b) is to be explained in this way. In cases where the mother's milk was so used, an ancient observer must have noted that the milk that is naturally associated with the life of the animal was given a reverse role and was now applied to the dead animal. The law represents a reaction against the uncomfortable position of having to juxtapose the natural state of life before death with the unnatural state of “life” after death.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 69 , Issue 1-2 , April 1976 , pp. 1 - 7
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1976

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References

1 Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Dutton, 1910) Part III, ch. 48.Google Scholar See also Kosmala, H., “The So-called Ritual Decalogue,” Swedish Theological Institute Annual 1 (1962) 50–56Google Scholar; Rylaarsdam, J. C., Exodus, Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1952) 1.1013,14Google Scholar; Cassuto, U., Exodus (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1967) 305.Google Scholar

2 Ch. Virolleaud, “La naissance des dieux gracieux et beaux,” Syria 14 (1933) 132, 133, 140Google Scholar, first published the text with a translation. Cf. Driver, G. R., Canaanite Myths and Legends (Edinburgh: Clark, 1956) 121.Google Scholar

3 Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969) 389, note 2a.Google Scholar

4 Myth 253.

5 Gaster (Myth 256–58) adduces examples of various tribes that abstain from drinking milk when there has been death in the family. He can find no satisfactory motive for the prohibition, but the association of milk with life and its avoidance in a time of death are probably pertinent. He dismisses as fanciful the explanation offered by Arab women in Egypt that the whiteness of the milk is incompatible with the blackness of their sorrow. But surely at a psychological level such a way of expressing their thoughts about life and death and the way in which both are sometimes brought together makes sense.

6 A modern parallel came to my attention recently. My teaching assistant at Cornell had purchased from a commune a live sow which was reared for him by its members. On the occasion of its slaughter the viscera were cut out and thrown to its young who proceeded to eat them. He was still squeamish a few days later in recounting the incident.

7 De Virt. 143, 144 (LCL 8).

8 On Philo's interest in Heraclitus' theory, see Wolfson, H. A., Philo, Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1947) 1.332–47.Google Scholar

9 Similar notions of life are ascribed to the firstfruits of the ground and the agricultural triennial tithe because of their intimate association with life in the new land. It is noteworthy that in Exod 23:19 and 34:26 the command to dedicate the firstfruits and the prohibition against boiling a kid in its mother's milk are set down together. In regard to the triennial tithe it is similarly noteworthy that the one dedicating the tithe has to declare that it has not been consumed while mourning the dead or offered to the dead for their consumption (Deut 26:14).

10 Deuteronomy (ICC; 3d ed.; Edinburgh: Clark, 1902) 165.Google ScholarPubMed He notes that the corresponding law in Lev 17:15, 16 is placed immediately after the prohibition against eating blood.

11 Wright, G. E., Deuteronomy, Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1953) 2.42.Google Scholar

12 C. M. Carmichael, Laws 78–80.

13 Deuteronomy, 156. In our culture a person inflicting cuts on his body is almost always an indication of self-destruction. One reason why someone's suicide causes us such discomfort is that we observe a living person consciously close the gap between life and death.

14 This is best brought out in the case of the birds. Leviticus 11 contains lists similar to those in Deuteronomy 14. The additional material in Lev 11:29, 30 cites creatures that feed on other living creatures. Snaith, N. H. (Leviticus and Numbers, Century Bible [London: Nelson, 1967] 86)Google Scholar states that it is the shedding of blood among these creatures that is decisive in proclaiming them unclean to eat.

15 Douglas, M. (Purity and Danger [London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970])Google Scholar undertakes a major attempt from the viewpoint of structural anthropology to make sense of the lists of clean and unclean meats. She thinks the starting-point for any discussion is to assume that the lists represent generalizations of the habits of the Israelites (p. 69). She is then able to present some convincing observations about the criteria for these generalizations, criteria that reveal much systematic reflection on the part of those producing them. What she signally fails to do is to consider the factors that might have determined the people's habits in the first place, and one such factor must have been the universal repugnance at eating creatures that had eaten other creatures. She thinks that, because the lists do not mention criteria for uncleanness (such as preying or scavenging habits), these are irrelevant. Daube, D. (“The Self-Understood in Legal History,” Juridical Review 85 [1973] 126–34)Google Scholar has demonstrated conclusively that the nonmention in legal texts of certain matters, often of a basic kind, is no argument that these were not of fundamental importance. Indeed, the omission of the unclean animals together with an explanation is an indication that the entire matter was so well understood that there was no reflection on it or reference to it.

16 The subject is enormous. Jokes, ghosts, and the practice of medicine provide fertile fields of enquiry. Jokes relieve our discomfort when things become topsyturvy, and often the joke will deliberately blur the distinction between two opposites. It is told that when Stalin was dying, a telegram was sent to some doctors who had reason to hate him: “Stalin at death's door, come at once, and pull him through.” Ghosts, by definition, inhabit the zone between life and death. Macbeth, oppressed by Banquo's ghost, declares, “The times have been/ That, when the brains were out, the man would die/ And there an end; but now they rise again” (Act 3, Sc. 4, lines 77–79). In modern medicine, because of transplants, the definition of death has become problematic, the concern being that “Death must not only be done, but be seen to be done.”

17 Salmond, S. D. F. (Dictionary of the Bible [ed. J. Hastings; New York: Scribner, 1902] “Hell” 345, 346)Google Scholar approaches this topic when dealing with some texts (Pss. Sol. 3:13; 9:9; 12:8; 13:10; 15:13; 1 Enoch 99:11) that imply an ultimate extinction of being for the wicked.

18 Carmichael, C. M., “A Time for War and a Time for Peace: The Influence of the Distinction upon some Legal and Literary Material,” in Studies in Jewish Legal History in Honour of David Daube, ed. B. S. Jackson, JJS, Special Issue, 25 (1974) 58–63.Google Scholar

19 On the theme of life and death in the Joseph narrative in Genesis and the Succession narrative in 2 Samuel and 1 Kings, see Brueggemann, W., “Life and Death in Tenth Century Israel,” JAAR 40 (1972) 96–109.Google Scholar