Clean Food, Tithes, and the Poor

"Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead." Clean animals are listed: the ox, sheep and goat, the deer and gazelle, any animal that parts the hoof and chews the cud. Fish with fins and scales. A list of forbidden birds. "Ye shall not eat of any thing that dieth of itself: thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates… or thou mayest sell it unto an alien." "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk."

"Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed." The tithe is eaten "before the LORD thy God, in the place which he shall choose." If the road is long, sell it, carry the money, "and bestow that money for whatsoever thy soul lusteth after, for oxen, or for sheep, or for wine, or for strong drink… and thou shalt eat there before the LORD thy God, and thou shalt rejoice, thou, and thine household, And the Levite."

"At the end of three years thou shalt bring forth all the tithe of thine increase the same year, and shalt lay it up within thy gates: And the Levite… and the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow, which are within thy gates, shall come, and shall eat and be satisfied."

Deuteronomy 14 and Leviticus 11

The two lists of clean and unclean animals overlap closely; Deuteronomy adds a list of permitted wild animals (deer, gazelle, roebuck, wild goat, ibex, antelope, mountain sheep) and is shorter on insects. Many of the bird and wild-animal names are uncertain, and ancient translations disagree. Archaeozoology shows pig bones are rare at Iron Age highland sites associated with Israel and more common at Philistine sites, though the pattern has exceptions and its meaning is debated.

A kid in its mother's milk

The command appears three times (Exodus 23:19; 34:26; Deuteronomy 14:21). It was once explained by a Ugaritic text thought to describe cooking a kid in milk as a Canaanite rite; later readings of that tablet (KTU 1.23) have undermined the claim. Philo and others read it as compassion; rabbinic law expanded it into the complete separation of meat and dairy. The original reason is not stated.

Selling to the foreigner

Meat of an animal that died naturally may be given to the resident "stranger" (ger) or sold to the "alien" (nokhri). Leviticus 17:15 applies purity rules to both native and ger. The difference reflects which holiness rules applied to which group, not a claim that the foreigner's life mattered less: the same chapter feeds the ger from the tithe.

How many tithes?

Numbers 18 gives the tithe to the Levites; Deuteronomy 14 has the farmer eat it at the sanctuary and give every third year's to the poor; Leviticus 27 calls it "holy unto the LORD." Later Jewish practice counted separate tithes; many scholars see different stages of legislation. The Numbers lesson on tithes compares the three laws.