Main news for 7 April 2019

King James Version (en)

Exodus, Chapter 34, verse 26

¹⁰ God maketh a covenant with them, repeating certain duties of the first table

²⁶The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

NOTES

Closeness to God transforms everything. Moses spent forty days and nights in communion with God, and during all that time he neither ate nor drank. And he did not grow weak, but...

After the story of the golden calf, God concludes a new union-covenant with Moses, as if renewing the one concluded at Sinai with the whole people. Now it is...

After the story of the golden calf, God concludes a new union-covenant with Moses, as if renewing the one concluded at Sinai with the whole people. Now it is again a covenant with Moses, and here a certain rollback is evident. Indeed, the meaning of the Sinai covenant consisted in large measure precisely in this: that each person would establish his own relationship with God and would answer for it himself.

If this had become possible, if the people had decided to live this way, their whole history, beginning at Sinai, would have been different. In reality everything went as it went: the people proved unready for a new quality of relationship with God, did not dare to take responsibility on themselves, again expecting wonders from leaders, and now the renewal of the union-covenant concerns only one leader, one Moses.

On the other hand, it was Moses who begged God to continue carrying out His previous plan, not to abandon the people, not to create a new one in place of the old, and now that same Moses had to take responsibility for leadership in the new-old situation, in a situation where he would have to answer for the people alone, as in the days of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No spiritual maturity was to be expected from the people, at least from the generation that came out of Egypt: no one sought it or wanted it. It is no accident that, at the renewal of the union, at the confirmation of the covenant, so much attention is given to things that we today perceive as ritual.

There is the Sabbath, and certain matters connected with the redemption of the firstborn, about which something had already been said in Egypt, and the need to cleanse without fail the land God had appointed for His people from pagan altars. In fact, not only the ritual aspect is present here, but God certainly draws Moses' special attention to this external, ritual side. And this is understandable: the people have already shown that the external side, the religious shell of spiritual life, everything connected with worship, rite, and ritual, is absolutely necessary for them.

After the story with the calf it became clear that everything listed is not simply extremely important for the people. Without it spiritual breakdowns are inevitable, and to avoid them a special emphasis will have to be placed on observing ritual prescriptions and in general on the external side of spiritual life, on its religious shell. If so, the essential things must be singled out: refusal to participate in pagan worship, strict observance of the Sabbath, obligatory dedication of the firstborn to God. Not the best beginning for a spiritual path, but what can be done if for now the people are capable of no more.

The prohibition against boiling a young goat in its mother's milk became the basis for many norms of kashrut in Judaism, in particular those connected with the ban on mixing meat dishes with dairy. Yet the point here is not meat and not milk. This is indicated, among other things, by the very form of the corresponding legal norm: on the one hand, it mentions the need to consecrate the first fruits, and on the other...

In reality there is a connection, though it is not so obvious. The point is that, judging by the data that have reached us concerning the religious practice of a number of Near Eastern peoples, including the Jews' closest neighbors, a young goat boiled in goat's milk was a ritual dish, probably connected with the cult of the Great Goddess, patroness of fertility and childbirth, whose cult was widespread throughout the Near East. She was worshiped in the cities of Galilee, in Judea, and in the Samaritan steppe, and she was worshiped long before Abraham migrated to Palestine.

After the Jews conquered the land promised to them by God, the cult of the Great Goddess spread rather widely among them. As is known, paganism flourished luxuriantly among the people of God, provoking the denunciations of the prophets, who saw the greatest threat to Yahwism precisely in "the Astartes and the Baals." But the Great Goddess, that same "Astarte," did not attract the attention of the recent nomads by accident: they wanted to receive support from above and a blessing for their new settled, agricultural life, and it seemed to many that Yahweh would be no help here, since He was the God of the wilderness and the steppe, the God of nomads, not of settled farmers.

And so in the Torah there appear at the same time a ban on participating in the cult of the Great Goddess and a requirement to dedicate the first fruits to God, to that same Yahweh who, as it turns out, will support His people not only in the wilderness and the steppe, but also in the field, in the garden, and in the vineyard. If, of course, the people themselves want this. And if, with their needs, they turn not to "the Astartes and the Baals," but to the God who not only brought them out of Egypt and led them through the wilderness, but also brought them to that land where, of course, He will not leave them without help and support.

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