Deuteronomy14chapter 14

Deuteronomy 14:1-3

The ban on cutting the flesh and shaving the head for the dead is grounded in sonship, since the reason given first is that Israel belongs to God as children. Leviticus 21:5 laid that rule on the priests and Leviticus 19:28 on the people, and here the whole nation is addressed as sons before it is told to keep it. Peculiar people is the phrase of Exodus 19:5, and Titus 2:14 and 1 Peter 2:9 take it up for the church. 1 Kings 18:28 shows the prophets of Baal cutting themselves, and Jeremiah 16:6 and 41:5 show Israelites doing it anyway.

Deuteronomy 14:4-8

Leviticus 11:2-8 gave the two tests and named only the camel, the coney, the hare and the swine among the animals that fail them. Deuteronomy names ten clean beasts outright and seven of them are wild game, which fits the permission at 12:15 to kill and eat the hart and the roebuck at home. Verse 6 states the hoof test in a fuller form, cleaveth the cleft into two claws, where Leviticus 11:3 says clovenfooted and stops. The camel, the hare and the coney are all said to chew the cud, and readers have differed over the words, some holding that they report what a herdsman watching the animal sees rather than describing its stomach.

Deuteronomy 14:9-20

Water creatures get a test and no list, fins and scales, so the rule reaches species nobody has named. The birds are handled the other way, by naming what is forbidden and leaving all the rest clean, and this list runs to twenty one where Leviticus 11:13-19 gives twenty, the glede being the addition. The bat closes the list of fowls, since the grouping follows how a creature moves rather than how it is built. Leviticus 11:21-22 allowed four kinds of leaping insect, the locust among them, and verse 19 forbids every creeping thing that flieth without repeating that exception, which the Targum of Jonathan and Aben Ezra supply from the earlier text.

Deuteronomy 14:21

One verse carries three rules and ties them together with the reason that Israel is a holy people. What died of itself may be given to the stranger in thy gates or sold to an alien, while Leviticus 17:15 puts washing and uncleanness on the home born and the stranger alike, and both accounts stand in the canon. The kid boiled in its mother's milk is forbidden here for the third time, after Exodus 23:19 and Exodus 34:26, and none of the three gives a reason, so the later separation of meat from milk in Jewish practice rests on the repetition. Clarke passes on Calmet's reading that the rule concerns the offering rather than ordinary cooking.

Deuteronomy 14:22-27

Numbers 18:21 gave the tithe to the Levites, and the tithe here is eaten by the man who brings it, at the place the Lord shall choose to place his name. Readers have taken that two ways: the older Jewish reckoning, which Josephus and Clarke follow, counts a second tithe distinct from the Levites' tenth, while others read one tithe described from another angle in another book. When the road is long the produce may be sold, the money bound up in the hand and carried, and spent at the sanctuary on oxen, sheep, wine or strong drink, whatsoever thy soul desireth. The reason attached to the meal is that thou mayest learn to fear the Lord thy God always, which makes the feast itself the lesson.

Deuteronomy 14:28-29

Every third year the tithe stays home and is laid up within thy gates, and 26:12 calls that year the year of tithing. The four who come and eat are the Levite, the stranger, the fatherless and the widow, and those same four stand together again at 16:11, 16:14 and 26:12-13. The Levite is listed with the poor because he has no part nor inheritance, so the man who serves the sanctuary eats from the provision that feeds the widow. James 1:27 keeps the fatherless and the widow at the centre of what God counts as religion.