Dr Paul Allen

Laws That Sound Strange to Us Many readers view several laws in the Pentateuch as obscure, strange, and sometimes impossible to understand. Specialised vocabulary and ritualistic concepts make them difficult to translate for the ears of modern readers. However, we must take great care to read each law within its given context instead of ignoring or reading our own mindset into the text. Get clarity on some of these laws from Biblical scholars who have dedicated their lives to discerning their meaning. All content is adapted from the ESV Expository Commentary . “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk.” —Ex. 23:19b Exodus 23:19b relates to the Lord’s proper worship. Boiling appears to have been a common way to prepare sacrificial meat (Lev. 6:28–29; 1 Sam. 2:13; Zech. 14:21), which would have been done during three festivals mentioned earlier in chapter 23: the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Harvest, and the Feast of Ingathering. Why such meat should not be boiled...

You’ve been there. You start the new year with the lofty goal of reading through the entire Bible before the next new year and…you run into Leviticus. Then your wonderful plans get derailed because…well because reading chapter after chapter of the Old Testament Law seems—if you’re being honest—boring and irrelevant. Yet these laws are in our Bibles. That means they are God’s holy, inspired words. So what do we do with the Old Testament Law? On top of this question, there’s another complication. It seems to be fairly common these days for people to point to the laws God gave Israel in order to discredit Christianity. Here is one such accusation: Murray McCoy I am pretty confident every Christian pick and chooses which scriptures they choose to follow and ignore. The same Leviticus that condemns homosexuals also says Christians can't eat prawns nor can they touch or eat pork. Pretty sure I've had hot dogs at every church fundraiser with pork, as a kid. The difference...