Hebrew Voices #132 – Boiling a Kid in its Mother’s Milk

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #132 - Boiling a Kid in its Mother’s Milk

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: One of those pieces of pushback I get from Orthodox Jews is, “Well, if it doesn’t mean ‘don’t eat chicken and cheese together,’ then what a weird commandment, ‘Don’t boil a kid in its mother’s milk.’ Why would God command us such a thing?”

Announcement: Welcome to the Be One Radio Show. Here are your hosts, Jeff and Sherry Friedlander.

Jeff: We have a biblical scholar with us, our friend, Nehemia Gordon is with us this morning, and we’re so thankful for him. Nehemia holds a master’s degree in Biblical Studies and has a bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He also worked as a translator as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls project, and has been researching and deciphering ancient Hebrew manuscripts for what must be decades now. And he’s not only incredibly wise and well-studied, but just a great all-round fellow, and we are thankful, and Nehemia, are you there?

Nehemia: I’m here, Jeff. How are you doing? Good morning.

Jeff: Good morning. Welcome, welcome. Thanks for taking time this morning to be with us. Our audience certainly appreciates that, and we’re grateful. I love your work. I’m on your Support Team of your website. For those of you that want to join, you can go to nehemiaswall.com, and he has a Support Team. There are tons of free resources there, lots of teaching, lots of information. You can learn so much from the website. But if you join the Support Team, there’s all kinds of other stuff beyond the scenes that gets in-depth, and it’s wonderful information, so I want to encourage all our listeners to go out to nehemiaswall.com and research it for yourself, and take a look at it.

Now Nehemia, for our audience that is new and that doesn’t know who you are, kind of give them a little background of you. You are a practicing Karaite Jew. Kind of describe a little bit about that, of who you are, for our audience.

Nehemia: Well, my father was an Orthodox rabbi, and I was raised, essentially, as a modern-day Pharisee. Orthodox Judaism is a continuation of the ancient movement of the Pharisees, and they have a core doctrine which I was taught as a young boy, which is that when Moses went up to Mount Sinai, he received two separate and distinct revelations. One was the written Torah, that is the Five Books of Moses, and the other was what they call the Oral Torah, and everything in the written Torah has to be interpreted through the Oral Torah. I was taught this, sitting on my father’s knee, when I was three years old.