Deuteronomy: Religious Centralization or Decentralization? by Dr. Baruch Alster

https://www.thetorah.com/article/deuteronomy-religious-centralization-or-decentralization

For more than two centuries, most biblical scholars have understood cult centralization (i.e. requiring all sacrifices to be offered from one central Temple) as being one of the main themes of the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy’s law code (chs. 12-26) begins, in Parashat Re’eh, with the commandment to restrict sacrifices only to “the place that the Lord your God will choose out of all your tribes to put His name there” (Deut. 12:5).

The late Israeli scholar Moshe Weinfeld (1925-2009), however, has argued that the central cult is not the focus of the book’s religious program, but rather observance of divine commandments. In Deuteronomy, the covenant between God and Israel is maintained by Israel’s loyalty to God’s laws; worship at the temple plays only a supporting role.

Deuteronomy’s commandments hardly deal with sacrifices, but rather with day-to-day actions done at home, throughout the land God has given to Israel. Indeed, the chosen place is often contrasted with “your gates” (שעריך), a synecdoche for “towns.” For example, in the tithing laws (14:22-29), the standard tithe, to be eaten in the “place the Lord will choose,” is contrasted with the triennial tithe, to be made use of at home. Although Deuteronomy does have a number of laws that are Temple or Jerusalem focused, I would argue that, if anything, Deuteronomy’s interest is in downplaying Temple or cultic rules and emphasizing the day to day religious observance of the average Israelite.

Why Chicken and Cheese Became Prohibited But Chicken and Egg Remained Permitted by Dr. Jordan D. Rosenblum

https://www.thetorah.com/article/why-chicken-and-cheese-became-prohibited

In the Second Temple period, we have evidence that at least one Jew, the philosopher Philo of Alexandria, understood this biblical injunction literally, i.e., a prohibition to boil a baby animal in its own mother’s milk, and saw in it a lesson in ethics. Philo argues that it is so easy to avoid eating the meat of a baby animal with milk that literally comes from the udder from which it nursed, that only cruel people with no sense of compassion would go out of their way to do this:

…it was grossly improper that the substance which fed the living animal should be used to season and flavour the same after its death, and that while nature provided for its conservation by creating the stream of milk and ordaining that it should pass through the mother’s breasts as through conduits, the license of man should rise to such a height as to misuse what had sustained its life to destroy also the body which remains in existence.

If indeed anyone thinks good to boil flesh in milk, let him do so without cruelty and keeping clear of impiety. Everywhere there are herds of cattle innumerable, which are milked everyday by cowherds, goat-herds and shepherds, whose chief source of income as cattle rearers is milk, sometimes liquid and sometimes condensed and coagulated into cheese; and since milk is so abundant, the person who boils the flesh of lambs or kids or any other young animal in their mother’s milk, shows himself cruelly brutal in character and gelded of compassion, that most vital of emotions and most nearly akin to the rational soul.

According to Philo, if you were to cook meat from a baby animal in milk that comes from another mother, then that would not violate this taboo and would be “kosher.” Philo could not have possibly meant to include fowl in this prohibition, since mother birds do not produce milk.