He that cooks in milk the ischiadic sinew on an annual festival is to be scourged five times forty stripes save one:--For cooking the sinew, for eating the sinew, for cooking flesh in milk, for eating flesh cooked in milk, and for lighting the fire.
To this very day this sinew is extracted from the hind quarters of all animals before it is allowable for a Jew to eat them. This operation, in popular parlance, is termed porging.
The mysteries of the law are not to be communicated except to those who possess the faculties of these five in combination:--"The captain of fifty, and the honorable man, and the counselor, and the cunning artificer, and the eloquent orator" (see Isa. iii. 3).
"Captain of fifty." This should be read, not captain of fifty, but captain of five, that is, such as knew how to manage the five-fifths of the law (or Pentateuch).
Five characteristics were ascribed to the fire upon the altar:--It crouched there like a lion, it shone as the sun, it was perceptible to the touch, it consumed liquids as though they were dry materials, it caused no smoke.
How is it that the word signifying "And I will be glorified," occurs in Hag. i. 8 without the letter which is the symbol for five, though it is sounded as if that letter was there? It indicates the absence of five things from the second Temple which were to be found in the first, (1.) The ark, i.e., the mercy-seat of the cherubim; (2.) the fire from heaven upon the altar; (3.) the visible presence; (4.) the Holy Spirit (of prophecy, says Rashi); and (5.) the Urim and Thummim.
How then, it may be asked, if these five tokens of the Divine presence and favor which rendered the first Temple so glorious were wanting in the second could it be said (Hag. ii. 9), "The glory of this latter house shall be greater than of the former"? It is a question which it is natural to ask, and it should be ingenuously answered. Is it that these were tending to usurp the place of the spiritual, of which they were but the assurance and the symbol, and darken rather than reveal the eternal reality they adumbrated?
The Israelites relished any flavor they fancied in the manna except the flavor of these five things (mentioned in Num. xi. 59):--"Cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic."