Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Moses is still giving his final speech to the Israelites before he dies and they enter the

promise land. He starts with some peculiar commands about haircuts.

Back in the day, one of the way pagans grieved was by shaving their heads, and Moses was outlawing

this because it was pagan adjacent.

This law had already been given to the priest back in Leviticus 21, but here Moses gives it to all the Israelites who were supposed to look and live differently than their neighbors.

Pagans were also known to cut themselves as a part of their ritual mourning practices, and Moses forbids that too.

He also covers some dietary laws, much of which we've seen before.

One of the interesting ones here that carries a lot of

weight in keeping kosher comes from 1421, the command not to boil a goat in its mother's milk.

Over the years, many rabbis have debated over what all the laws mean and how to apply them.

They often extend the boundaries of what is unacceptable to make sure they don't get anywhere

close to breaking the actual law. They call this

building a fence around the law. One of the things the rabbis deduced about this law

was that they should avoid mixing milk and meat. So today if you go to Israel you'll find that those two things

aren't served at the same meal for any place that keeps kosher. You can switch it up

however you like schedule-wise but typically dairy is served at breakfast, loads of cheeses and milks and

yogurt, and meat is served at the other meals.

Kosher households won't even use the same plates for meat and dairy.

And if you're a wealthy kosher family,

you probably even have two whole separate kitchens.

This is how far people would go to avoid breaking these laws.

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