Dragon
Senior Member
- Sep 16, 2011
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According to this hares DO infact reingest some of their food, not exactly like cows do, though:
Does the hare really chew cud? - Come Reason Ministries
Ah, well -- it seems to me that this is a bit of a stretch. The ancient Hebrews raised cattle among other herd animals and they knew what cud-chewing meant; some critter that grabs proto-poop from its own ass and swallows it whole refers neither to cud nor to chewing.
In any case, rabbits also don't have solid hoofs, so the passage from Leviticus was wrong on both points. My best guess is that the author intended to say that the hare was unclean because it DID have a cloven hoof but did NOT ruminate, and both were required; this was an error in transcription and it got repeated by a lazy copier down the road in Deuteronomy and was never corrected. In practice it doesn't matter, because the idea is that they weren't supposed to eat anything that didn't BOTH chew the cud AND have a cloven hoof, and the rabbit is properly on the no-eat list even if the specifics are wrong here. It just calls the infallibility of the Bible into question.