The Origin of the Mosaic Prohibition Against Cooking the Suckling in its Mother's Milk

A paper by M. Woolf (1945) that appeared in this that appeared in this JOURNAL treated in the most interesting and vivid way the theme of the Jewish prohibition against drinking milk and eating meat at the same time. Two forces that have been important in the history of civilization were described in the author's exposition, and to these the present writer can assent without reservation; first, the derivation of the prohibition from the conflicts between the matrilinear and the patrilinear forms of human society, and, second, the stratification, the gradual supersession of earlier by later cultural usages, which, in accordance with the interpretations and explanations appropriate to later religious requirements, have gradually become more and more sublimated.

On the other hand Woolf's contribution contains many untenable propositions and conclusions which will only too easily expose to superficial criticism his fundamental idea, sound though it be, that this prohibition and the Jewish Passover ritual which he treats in connexion with it are both founded on archaic phantasies. His views will be attacked by those archæologists, pre-historians, mythologists and theologists who miss no chance of emphasizing the weakness of the 'capricious arguments' of Freud and his school which they do not even wish to take seriously. These men's attitude would excite among the convinced supporters of Freud's teachings only a pitying smile, were they not able to rely upon arguments—in themselves of slight importance and irrelevant to the point at issue—which the hasty and ill-considered arguments of analysts working in these scientists' own field make them a present of.

One of Woolf's plainly mistaken premises is his statement that the Ugarite El was a Semitic Sun-and-Fire God who, as he has described in connexion with the Passover Ritual, demanded on the one hand human sacrifice (the sacrifice of the male first-born) and on the other hand the smearing of the door-posts of the house w