The language in 14:21 forbids mixing life and death. As a holy people set apart for worship at the tabernacle, the Israelites would approach the God of life. Outside Israel’s camp was the realm of death. Think about the logic of the language in 14:21. A young goat would need its mother’s milk for life. But the act of boiling is an act of death. To boil a young goat in its mother’s milk would be to cause the animal’s death with the very means that was designed to give it life!

Last week I discussed the unclean/clean food laws in Deuteronomy 14:1–21 (see “Eat This, Not That”), and today I want to zoom in on the final line of verse 21. Moses told the Israelites, “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk” (Deut. 14:21).
Have you seen that prohibition before? Maybe you’ve read it elsewhere. It appears in Exodus 23:19 and Exodus 34:26.
The Location of the Prohibition
Think about the command’s placement in Deuteronomy 14:1–21. It’s at the very end. The command follows a series of food regulations about clean and unclean animals. In verse 4, Moses starts listing the animals that the Israelites may eat, and in this verse we read the word “goat.” At the end of the food regulations (14:3–21), we again read the word “goat.” But this time a particular procedure is being forbidden.
Putting it another way: throughout 14:3–21, there are clean and unclean animals, but the final statement in verse 21 is not about a procedure, a manner of preparation. The Israelites can eat goat, but they are forbidden from preparing it by boiling it in its mother’s milk.
A Forbidden Pagan Practice?
When you consult commentaries about the prohibition in Deuteronomy 14:21, Old Testament scholars will often say that the forbidden practice was something which was practiced by the Canaanites. In keeping with the divine summons to live holy lives in the promised land, the Israelites were to avoid idolatrous activities. Perhaps the procedure (identified in 14:21) was such an activity and needed to be avoided.
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Sometime before 325, the now-Christian Roman emperor Constantine wrote Shapur a letter, in which he encouraged the young shah to embrace Christianity.9 Constantine pointed out the presence of many Christians in Persia and urged Shapur to treat them well: “Now, because your power is great, I commend these persons to your protection; because your piety is eminent, I commit them to your care. Cherish them with your wonted humanity and kindness; for by this proof of faith you will secure an immeasurable benefit both to yourself and us.”10 In the process of making these suggestions, Constantine inadvertently called the attention of Shapur’s advisers both to the presence of Christians in their midst and to the fact that Rome now favored followers of the new religion.

Abstract: Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the early fourth century brought an end to state-sponsored persecution in the Roman empire. Around the same time, however, the relatively peaceful Persian empire turned violently upon the church in its lands. Though the accurate number of martyrs remains difficult to assess, the most conservative estimates place the death toll in the Great Persian Persecution (339–379) far higher — even ten times higher — than the death toll in the worst Roman persecution. In response to such widespread assaults, many Persian Christians fled if they could. Many others, either unable or unwilling to flee, took courage from stories of faithful sufferers and stood firm. Today, their testimonies still give fresh courage to those who suffer for Christ.
When Western Protestants think of the persecution of early Christians, we often imagine believers being thrown to the lions in the Roman Colosseum. According to the story as we learned it in Sunday school and elsewhere, Christians were ruthlessly persecuted for their faith for three centuries, until Constantine’s dramatic conversion around the year 312 brought about a sea change in the Roman empire’s attitude toward Christianity.
This Sunday school version of the story, while not wrong, is both misleading and incomplete. It is misleading because it gives the impression that persecution in the Roman empire was continuous, when in fact it was sporadic, varying from nonexistent to severe, depending on where and when one lived. This story is also incomplete because it does not even acknowledge by far the worst persecution of Christians in the ancient world, the Great Persian Persecution instigated by Shah Shapur II in 339.1 Many Western Christians are not aware that Christianity quickly took root in Persia (approximately modern-day Iran and Iraq) in ancient times.2 A look at the differing fortunes of Christians in the Roman and Persian empires, as well as the ways they responded to persecution, yields important lessons for believers today.
Two Great Persecutions Compared
Persecution of Christians in the Roman empire was generally local in character, confined to a region based on the personal antipathy of the governor toward the faith. But there were two major periods of widespread persecution, encompassing most regions of the empire at the same time. These were a persecution under emperors Decius and Valerian in the 250s, and the Great Persecution under Emperor Diocletian, which began in 303 and lasted a couple of years in the western part of the empire and a couple of decades in the eastern part. It was during this Great Persecution that Constantine became a Christian and gained control over the entire Roman empire.
By carefully counting the martyr lists in given regions at given times, modern scholars can gain a general picture of the severity of the persecution and then extrapolate to arrive at guesses of how many believers were killed in total. An estimate that has gained scholarly acceptance is perhaps 3,000–3,500 deaths in all, of which maybe 500 happened in the west and 2,500–3,000 in the eastern parts of the empire.3 When we consider that in the early fourth century, the population of the Roman empire was between 60 and 75 million people, of whom perhaps 10 percent (or about 6–7 million) were Christians, we can see that the total death toll was relatively small.
In contrast, the Great Persian Persecution is traditionally regarded as having lasted forty years, from 339 until Shapur’s death in 379. In actuality, it was frightfully intense for a couple of decades and then ebbed and flowed until the early fifth century, well beyond the life span of Shapur himself. Estimating deaths from this persecution is much harder than in the case of Diocletian’s, but one of the earliest reports we have is sobering.
The church historian Sozomen, writing about 440, declares, “I shall simply state that the number of men and women whose names have been ascertained, and who were martyred at this period, have been computed to be sixteen thousand; while the multitude outside of these is beyond enumeration.”4 This statement, even if exaggerated, points to a huge death toll. Modern estimates have varied from as many as the eye-popping figure of 190,0005 down to a more “modest” figure of 35,000.6 Even the conservative estimate is ten times the number of Christians martyred in the Great Roman Persecution, although the Persian empire’s population (perhaps 18–35 million) was less than half that of the Roman, with a much smaller Christian population as well. By any estimate, the loss of life in the Great Persian Persecution was immeasurably greater than the death toll of the Great Roman Persecution a few decades earlier.
This staggering death toll is all the more surprising when we consider that prior to the fourth century, there had been no significant persecution of Christians in the Persian empire at all. Indeed, early in the fourth century, just as the Roman empire shifted from persecuting Christians (in varying degrees in different places and times) to favoring our faith, the Persian empire changed from basically ignoring Christians to unleashing a savage persecution on them. How did such a shocking change come about? To answer this question, we will need a brief overview of early Christianity in the Persian empire.
Treatment of Christians in the Persian Empire
The early Christian period took place during the long reigns of two great Persian dynasties: the Parthians, who ruled from 247 BC until AD 224, and the Sassanids, who reigned from 224 until they were conquered by the Arabs in 651. The Parthian period was one of relative peace in Persia, and there was essentially no state action against Christians, for several possible reasons.
First, the Parthian regime was benign and decentralized, with a great deal of provincial autonomy. There was little persecution of anyone for any reason. Second, the Romans were the major menace to Persia, and it was common for Persian rulers to take the opposite position on any matter that was important to Rome. Since the Romans were suspicious of their Christian population, the Persians tended to welcome them or at least to leave them alone. Third was the fact that Zoroastrianism, the dominant religion in Persia, was much closer to the Christian faith than Roman polytheism. Zoroastrianism was a dualistic religion focused on the conflict between good and evil, and there were superficial resemblances with Christianity, such as a belief in a coming messiah and judgment after death. As a result, Christians did not stand out in Persian society nearly to the degree they did in pagan Roman society.
The political situation of Persia changed dramatically in the early third century. Significant invasions from Roman forces fueled a popular rebellion against the peaceful Parthian dynasty. A much more authoritarian regime, the Sassanids, gained popular favor on a platform of keeping Persia safe from the Romans, and in 224, they took control. The Sassanids were strict Zoroastrians and made that religion the national faith of Persia.
This time period also saw the rise of Manichaeism, another form of dualism that was directly in competition with Zoroastrianism. Its prophet, Mani, combined many features of Zoroastrianism with some specifically Christian language (he even called himself a disciple of Jesus Christ), and Manichaeism spread like wildfire in Persia and beyond. It was clearly a threat to the national religion, and in the 270s Mani was executed by crucifixion.
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Despite knowing more today than many Christians in the past, we still need to be careful and humble when interpreting and applying Scripture. If we do not respect historical and cultural differences, we can inadvertently misread Scripture through our own modern cultural lenses. 

I vividly remember the time in my youth that I was in a Bible study with my pastor and we were looking at Luke 14:25-35. I got stuck on Jesus’ words in verse 26: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” I was a new believer, and it was the first time I had read that passage. I was horrified by the verb “hate,” which today means to intensely dislike something or someone. As an Asian youth steeped in a culture that almost idolizes respect for one’s parents, how could I hate my parents or my siblings? I loved them!
At the time, the Bible passage seemed clear to me: If I don’t hate my parents, I can’t follow Jesus.  But I could not choose between the seemingly irreconcilable options, and I began to weep. After realizing why I was crying, my pastor quickly reassured me that Jesus did not mean for us to literally hate our parents but simply that we must love Jesus more than anyone or anything else. It was hyperbole, he explained.
Of course, it was still a radical and, to some degree, offensive claim. But it became less harsh when understood not as disliking one’s parents, but as loving them less than one loves Jesus.
My youthful self read our modern understanding of “hate” back into Jesus’ use of the word, making his claim more offensive than it already was. I now know that people in Jesus’ ancient Middle Eastern culture often spoke with colorful hyperbole to make a point. This was their custom, and Jesus’ original audience would have understood his statement to be an exaggeration.
That incident was an early lesson for me in this truth about biblical interpretation: The Bible, even though it’s for us, was not written to us, but to audiences greatly removed from us in time, culture, and language. We can never read Scripture plainly, if by “plainly” we mean ignoring our own cultural biases and the cultural and historical gaps between us and the text. If we do not respect the historical, cultural, and linguistic differences between us and Scripture, we are in danger of reading modern cultural ideas back into the Bible and distorting whatever insights we might get out of it.
Clarity of Scripture
I am not saying that the Bible is so obscure that only Bible scholars can understand Scripture properly.  Neither am I arguing against the Reformation’s doctrine of the clarity of Scripture, historically called the “perspicuity of Scripture.” That doctrine does not assert that everything in Scripture is clear and easy to understand. It only teaches that what is necessary for salvation is clear in Scripture. We see this in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1646): “All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation, are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them” (Ch. 1.VII).
Scripture itself shows that some parts of the Bible are not easy to understand: “(Paul’s) letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own destruction,” the apostle Peter writes, (2 Pet. 3:16) and the Ethiopian eunuch needed Philip’s help to understand the prophet Isaiah (Acts 8:26-40).
So even without biblical scholarship, anyone can still read the Bible and sufficiently discern its main message of salvation. But not everything in the Bible is easy to understand, not even for first-century readers like the ones Peter wrote to. How much more difficult must it be for those who are centuries removed from the Scripture’s cultures, customs, and contexts?
Lost in Translation
Modern translations of the Bible, though generally reliable, are not infallible. Despite the translators’ best efforts, there are many cultural and linguistic nuances that cannot always be adequately translated into English or some other language.
For example, most of us know that ancient Greeks had multiple words for “love.” Agape means sacrificial love, philos means brotherly love, and eros denotes erotic or romantic love, to name the most common ones. All of these words are usually rendered into English from the original Greek of the New Testament as simply “love.” Readers of English translations can thus miss out on some linguistic nuances.
In John 21:15-19, for instance, Jesus asks Peter three times if Peter loves him. This is, of course, reminiscent of Peter previously disavowing Jesus three times. We can understand this story as Jesus gently reconciling with Peter and restoring him to his apostleship. What might be lost on us without reading the original Greek, however, is that two different words for “love” were used in that conversation.
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