by Dror Ben Ami

Created on: November 03, 2009

Introduction:

a) This article will be dealing only with the issue of Abraham serving milk and meat together and its relationship to our understanding of kosher laws.

b) This article is a little long, however, when one thinks of the billions, not millions, but billions of dollars wasted each year, not each decade, but each year enforcing a misinterpretation of a single sentence in the Old Testament, I think it is worth a few extra minutes of reading time to carefully examine the issues involved.

c) I am not: "a Christian" or: "a Karaite" or: "whatever". My ideas are based on those of Maurice Nicole, who wrote several books, about 60 years ago, outlining his belief in: "a secret language" of metaphors which existed in ancient times. While I agree with the basic thrust of Dr. Nicoles' ideas, my interpretations of the individual metaphors is different than his (Basically he based his work on Greek texts and I have based mine on Hebrew texts).

d) It is my belief that the authors of the New Testament were trying to convince the Jews that Jesus was the messiah. Whether one agrees with them or not is irrelevant for the purposes of this article. The relevant point here is that in their arguments these authors would have used language, imagery and symbols that were well known 2,000 years ago amongst the Hebrews, otherwise they would have had no chance what so ever of convincing them that their ideas were correct. Their ideas were radical enough in themselves to create resistance: Why would they complicate matters even further by introducing metaphors that no one had ever heard of before? Yet, even amongst the Christians themselves there were misunderstandings and the Christian belief that: "Jesus declared all foods to be clean" is in my opinion incorrect because Simon/Peter in the Book of Acts clearly states that, even after the death of Jesus, he was still keeping a kosher diet. Basically, what Jesus said was that "bad fruit" is a metaphor for: "false teachings". Thus, in his comments about: "what goes in the mouth and what comes out" he was trying to explain that when we: "digest false teachings" this does not affect the "purity" of our beliefs (the term: "un-clean" is a mistranslation from the Hebrew), if we eventually reject these teachings and remove them from our: "body of knowledge". If, however, we incorporate these false beliefs into our body of knowledge and then begin to teach these false beliefs to others, then, of course, the purity of our status as teachers

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