Deuteronomy 14:1-21

You are children of the Lord your God.¹ You must not lacerate yourselves or shave your forelocks for the dead.² For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; it is you the Lord has chosen out of all the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession.

You shall not eat any abhorrent³ thing. These are the animals you may eat: the ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, the gazelle, the roebuck, the wild goat, the ibex, the antelope, and the mountain-sheep. Any animal that divides the hoof and has the hoof cloven in two, and chews the cud,⁴ among the animals, you may eat. Yet of those that chew the cud or have the hoof cloven you shall not eat these: the camel, the hare, and the rock-badger,⁵ because they chew the cud but do not divide the hoof; they are unclean for you. And the pig, because it divides the hoof but does not chew the cud, is unclean for you. You shall not eat their meat, and you shall not touch their carcasses.⁶

Of all that live in water you may eat these: whatever has fins and scales⁷ you may eat. And whatever does not have fins and scales you shall not eat; it is unclean for you.

You may eat any clean birds. But these are the ones that you shall not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the osprey, the buzzard, the kite of any kind; every raven of any kind; the ostrich, the nighthawk, the seagull, the hawk of any kind; the little owl and the great owl, the water-henand the desert-owl, the carrion vulture and the cormorant, the stork, the heron of any kind; the hoopoe and the bat. And all winged insects⁸ are unclean for you; they shall not be eaten. You may eat any clean winged creature.

You shall not eat anything that dies of itself;⁹ you may give it to aliens residing in your towns for them to eat, or you may sell it to a foreigner. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God.¹⁰

You shall not boil a kid in its mother’s milk.¹¹

1 “You are children of YHWH your God” - setting up that this passage will cover cultural distinctives which will set them apart from other people.

2 Apparently pagan practices, which the Israelites were not to associate themselves with. My Study Bible points out that there could be additional emphasis on the separation between “life” and “death”, and so practices which treated the dead in this sort of way were inappropriate.

3 Is “abhorrent” thing simply circular – that which God commands one not to eat is therefore abhorrent? The more time I spend around pigs, the easier it is to see why a people would think of them as disgusting, dirty, and not to be eaten; but I am not sure how the other animals should or shouldn't fit on to this list. The New Testament and Jesus, of course, declare all foods clean. Like the previous lines, the cultural distinctives maintained by stick dietary restrictions are probably the most important element of the passage.

4 These two requirements seem arbitrary to us. Why not eat rabbits, for example?

5 The rock badger (hyrax), interestingly, does not actually chew its cud, but was thought to do so by the people at the time.

6 Even just touching their dead bodies will be bad enough.

7 Helpfully weeds out shellfish from the diet, which can be a source of serious disease.

8 Including locusts?

9 Once again the taboo against things that are dead.

10 As with the rest of the passage, it is maintaining cultural distinctives from the pagans around them that is most important. Something that has already died on its own can still be eaten, just not by YHWH's people.

11 A surprising edict to end the passage. A friend of mine believes this is a mark of compassion, as the idea of boiling an animal's meat in what should have been the nourishing, life-giving milk of its mother seemed offensive or unsympathetic. The Study Bible states that it is another example of not allowing “death” (the dead kid) to be mixed with “life” (the mother's milk).

Take-home: The importance of the Israelites maintaining cultural distinctives from the people around them is emphasized. In this passage, those distinctives focus on eating restrictions and taboos surrounding death.