Comments on: Do hares chew the cud?

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 05:16:10 +0000

The charge of “error” here reveals a mistake in thinking. This particular bible verse defines “chewing the cud” and obviously it does not limit the definition to animals with chambered stomachs.

The Bible was around long before someone wrote the definition on dictionary.com that limits “cud” to that which is processed by animals with multi-chambered stomachs. Apparently, “cud” simply needs to be partially processed plant material that is digested (at least) a second time (as Wisdomlover has already mentioned.)

Similarly, the Bible also has a right to define whales as a subset of fishes, bats and locusts as subsets of birds, dinosaurs as dragons, and so on and so forth. Rather, we should accept that the bible defines “fish” as that which swims in the sea, “birds” for those that have wings, and “dragons” for the big hulking reptile beasts.

By: WisdomLover

WisdomLover — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:42:17 +0000

The more difficult issue here is the Hyrax (Rock Badger/Hebrew: Shafan). Hyraces do not exhibit the behavior of hares and rabbits I described above. The evidence that they do anything that could be interpreted as bringing up food (the more literal reading of ma’alah gerah) is mixed.

By: Amtiskaw

Amtiskaw — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:15:49 +0000

That’s my suspicion as well – there was some Hebrew phrase XYZ, which has been translated to “chew the cud”. But it’s unreasonable to expect that XYZ had exactly the same meaning as our modern phrase.

By: WisdomLover

WisdomLover — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 10:44:13 +0000

I would expect the ‘primitive’ authors of the Bible to be very well-acquainted with the behavior of common animals like camels and hares. Such animals were a much bigger part of everyday life than they are now. They would not get this wrong. So they must have meant something different by “chew the cud” than we do today. Leviticus and Deuteronomy are perfectly true given the biblical meaning of “cud-chewing”.

But what could that meaning be?

Hares and rabbits have two types of dropping. One is the hard, dry, spherical dropping we are more likely to be familiar with. The second is soft and moist. This soft dropping is called a cecotrope. Like cats and dogs, hares and rabbits are capable of reaching the anus with the mouth, and they ingest the cecotropes directly from the anus. Cecotropes are sometimes called “night-droppings” because the animal excretes and re-ingests them at night. As such, the behavior is seldom observed.

This is not cud-chewing in the contemporary sense that involves chambered stomachs, the chewing of regurgitated food, and so on. But the biblical authors probably categorized it as cud-chewing.