You shall bring the first of the first fruits of your ground into the house of Yahweh your God. “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.
Not to cook a kid in its mother's milk
The cited verse
The Hebrew (Masoretic Text)
לֹא־תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ
In Maimonides’ words
How Maimonides defines this commandment in his Sefer HaMitzvot — his own words, shown as a primary source.
הזהירנו מלבשל בשר בחלב. והוא אמרו לא תבשל גדי בחלב אמו. ומי שבשלו לוקה אף על פי שלא אכל כמו שהתבאר במקומות מהתלמוד. (משפטים, שם פ"ט):
He prohibited us from cooking meat with milk. And that is His saying, "you shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk" (Exodus 23:19). And one who cooks it is lashed, even though he did not eat [it] - as is explained in [several] places in the Talmud. (See Parashat Mishpatim; Mishneh Torah, Forbidden Foods 9.)
Hebrew: Sefer HaMitzvot, Warsaw 1883 (public domain). English: Sefaria Edition, trans. Rabbi Francis Nataf, 2021 (CC0). Via Sefaria; translator’s footnotes omitted.
Literary form: a prohibition
Applicability
How the catalog describes where and when this commandment applies. These are independent descriptions, not a verdict on which laws still count.
- Recorded as practiced today
Classical halakhic consequences
The consequences the classical halakhah attaches to this commandment, grouped by who imposes them. Where a category has none recorded, that absence is itself meaningful.
Imposed by a court
- Lashes (malkot)
At the hands of Heaven
No divinely-imposed consequence is recorded.
Ritual remedy
No ritual remedy is recorded.
How the streams of Judaism treat this commandment
The streams of Judaism read the same commandment differently — an ongoing plurality, not a ranking. Each position below is reported as the catalog records it; none is presented as the correct one.
- Orthodox Binding
- Conservative Binding
- Reform Not binding
- Reconstructionist Not binding
- Karaite As the catalog records it: restricted literal reading
24 of 613 commandments have been examined in depth so far — this one is queued.
How later traditions received this commandment
How later traditions read or reworked this commandment, each attributed to its own voice. The catalog’s own classification of each reception is shown as it records it, never adopted as GEBible’s.
Philo of Alexandria
- De Virtutibus 142-144 rationalized it
Beside the older legal codes of its world
The commandment set beside the ancient Near-Eastern legal collections scholars compare it to — a descriptive comparison, not a claim of dependence.
- ugaritic texts the line was initially read by Virolleaud (1933) as describing the boiling of a kid in milk as part of a Canaanite fertility ritual; subsequent reassessment by Pardee, Levine, and Ratner-Zuckerman has largely discredited this reading, making the supposed parallel a contested and probably invalid basis for explaining the biblical prohibition Relationship to the parallel: apparent borrowing direction uncertain KTU 1.23 (Birth of the Gracious Gods), line 14 Pardee, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (SBL, 2002); Ratner and Zuckerman, HUCA 57 (1986)
Where this commandment meets modern human-rights frameworks
One modern normative lens, attributed to it — not GEBible’s assessment. Each row names the framework it measures against and the catalog’s own classification of the relation.
This framework catalogues tensions; it records agreement in only one of its entries. The near-total tension rate is the shape of the instrument, not a finding.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
The commandment prescribes flogging (malkot) for cooking a young animal in its mother's milk; post-Enlightenment norms treat corporal punishment as an incompatible method.
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Article 7
This framework classifies the relation as an incompatible method.
Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment; the imposition of thirty-nine lashes for a cooking act — combining a kid's meat with its mother's milk — falls within the class of physical punishments that international human-rights law designates as degrading treatment.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as a direct contradiction.
Modern penal proportionality doctrine holds that punishment must be commensurate with the harm caused; corporal punishment for the culinary act of cooking meat in milk exceeds any proportionate response under contemporary penal theory.
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general principle
This framework classifies the relation as abrogated in practice.
Rabbinic tradition holds that lashes may only be imposed by a Sanhedrin of twenty-three judges, an institution that has not functioned since the destruction of the Second Temple; the malkot sanction is therefore de jure but not de facto enforceable.