"Do not boil a kid in its mother's milk" bans a known Canaanite fertility ritual

Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26, and Deuteronomy 14:21 all give the same unexplained command: don't boil a young goat in its mother's milk. The popular answer for decades has been that Canaanites boiled a kid in milk as a fertility rite and sprinkled it on their fields, known from a tablet discovered at Ras Shamra (ancient Ugarit): a specific, citable, archaeological-sounding explanation that shows up in study Bible margins and commentaries to this day.

The whole parallel rests on one broken line, KTU 1.23.14, where a word was reconstructed as "kid" (Hebrew gədî). But the word actually there is gd, and Hebrew גַּד means coriander: the same word used for the seed manna is compared to in Exodus 16:31. A second Ugaritic occurrence puts gdm in a line about fragrance, "the fragrance of coriander and purple snails," which only makes sense as a spice, not a goat. Mark S. Smith's standard scholarly edition of the Ugaritic Baal Cycle names the kid-reading as the position scholars "formerly" held before the correction. The whole fertility-ritual explanation rests on a single misread Hebrew letter, a yod that was never actually in the text.

That leaves the command's real rationale genuinely open, and it's fine to say so. It may be about not turning the milk that sustains life into the medium of a creature's death, it may be a rabbinic-style fence that hardened later into the kosher meat-and-dairy separation, or it may simply be a law the text never explains. What isn't true anymore is the specific, confident, footnoted Canaanite-ritual story: the scholars who read the actual tablet retired that reading a generation ago.