Leviticus 17:15

Regulations for Eating Carcasses

17:15 “‘Any person ¹  who eats an animal that has died of natural causes ²  or an animal torn by beasts, whether a native citizen or a foreigner, ³  must wash his clothes, bathe in water, and be unclean until evening; then he becomes clean.

Leviticus 22:8

22:8 He must not eat an animal that has died of natural causes ⁴  or an animal torn by beasts and thus become unclean by it. I am the Lord.

Exodus 22:31

22:31 “You will be holy ⁵  people to me; you must not eat any meat torn by animals in the field. ⁶  You must throw it to the dogs.

Deuteronomy 14:21

14:21 You may not eat any corpse, though you may give it to the resident foreigner who is living in your villages ⁷  and he may eat it, or you may sell it to a foreigner. You are a people holy to the Lord your God. Do not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. ⁸ 

Ezekiel 4:14

4:14 And I said, “Ah, sovereign Lord, I have never been ceremonially defiled before. I have never eaten a carcass or an animal torn by wild beasts; from my youth up, unclean meat ⁹  has never entered my mouth.”

Ezekiel 44:31

44:31 The priests will not eat any bird or animal that has died a natural death or was torn to pieces by a wild animal. ¹⁰ 

¹ tn Heb “And any soul” (נֶפֶשׁ, nefesh).

² tn Heb “carcass,” referring to the carcass of an animal that has died on its own, not the carcass of an animal slaughtered for sacrifice or killed by wild beasts. This has been clarified in the translation by supplying the phrase “of natural causes”; cf. NAB “that died of itself”; TEV “that has died a natural death.”

³ tn Heb “in the native or in the sojourner.”

⁴ tn Heb “a carcass,” referring to the carcass of an animal that has died on its own, not the carcass of an animal slaughtered for sacrifice or killed by wild beasts. This has been clarified in the translation by supplying the phrase “of natural causes”; cf. NAB “that has died of itself”; TEV “that has died a natural death.”

⁵ sn The use of this word here has to do with the laws of the sanctuary and not some advanced view of holiness. The ritual holiness at the sanctuary would prohibit eating anything torn to pieces.

⁶ tn Or “by wild animals.”

⁷ tn Heb “gates” (also in vv. 27, 28, 29).

⁸ sn Do not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk. This strange prohibition – one whose rationale is unclear but probably related to pagan ritual – may seem out of place here but actually is not for the following reasons: (1) the passage as a whole opens with a prohibition against heathen mourning rites (i.e., death, vv. 1-2) and closes with what appear to be birth and infancy rites. (2) In the other two places where the stipulation occurs (Exod 23:19 and Exod 34:26) it similarly concludes major sections. (3) Whatever the practice signified it clearly was abhorrent to the Lord and fittingly concludes the topic of various breaches of purity and holiness as represented by the ingestion of unclean animals (vv. 3-21). See C. M. Carmichael, “On Separating Life and Death: An Explanation of Some Biblical Laws,” HTR 69 (1976): 1-7; J. Milgrom, “You Shall Not Boil a Kid In Its Mother’s Milk,” BRev 1 (1985): 48-55; R. J. Ratner and B. Zuckerman, “In Rereading the ‘Kid in Milk’ Inscriptions,” BRev 1 (1985): 56-58; and M. Haran, “Seething a Kid in its Mother’s Milk,” JJS 30 (1979): 23-35.

⁹ tn The Hebrew term refers to sacrificial meat not eaten by the appropriate time (Lev 7:18; 19:7).

¹⁰ tn The words “by a wild animal” are not in the Hebrew text, but have been supplied in the translation as a clarification of the circumstances.