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

promised 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 priests 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 morning 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 yogurts, and meat is served at the other meals. Coture 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. And the heart behind this could be good, but we'll see over time how

these fences began to be treated like they were the law itself, instead of a man-made attempt to protect the law.

In the laws for the sabbatical year, we see God's heart toward the poor on display again.

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