Do rabbits chew their cud?
The Bible beats the sceptics (again) …
by Jonathan Sarfati
The book of Leviticus contains a number of food laws that the ancient Israelites
were to obey. Modern medicine has shown that many of them had very good health benefits
for people in that time and place. As the Law of Moses was our tutor to lead people
to Christ (Galatians
3:24), many of the individual commands are no longer applicable after Christ’s
death for our sins and His bodily resurrection from the dead. In particular, the
Lord Jesus and His Apostles declared that all foods are now ‘clean’
(Mark
7:18–19,
Acts 10:10–15,
Colossians 2:16).
Some of the food laws have been attacked by sceptics as ‘proof’ that
the Bible makes mistakes, meaning it could not be God’s written word. For
example,
Leviticus 11:3–6 says:
- ‘Whatever divides the hoof, and is cloven-footed,
chewing the cud, among the animals, that you shall eat.
- ‘Only, you shall not eat these of them that chew the
cud, or of them that divide the hoof: the camel, for he chews the cud but does not
divide the hoof; he is unclean to you.
- ‘And the rock badger, because he chews the cud, but
does not divide the hoof; he is unclean to you.
- ‘And the hare, because he chews the cud but does not
divide the hoof; he is unclean to you.’
We showed a photo of the camel’s
hoof in Creation 19(4):29, 1997, proving that
the
Leviticus 11:4 assertion was right that the camel did not completely ‘divide the hoof’, despite what some sceptics
claim. Other sceptics have claimed that the Coney (Hebrew shaphan, = hyrax,
rock badger) and hare (Hebrew ’arnebeth = hare/rabbit) don’t
chew the cud.
In modern English, animals that ‘chew the cud’
are called ruminants. They hardly chew their food when first eaten, but
swallow it into a special stomach where the food is partially digested. Then it
is regurgitated, chewed again, and swallowed into a different stomach. Animals which
do this include cows, sheep and goats, and they all have four stomachs.1 Coneys and
rabbits are not ruminants in this modern sense.
However, the Hebrew phrase for ‘chew the cud’
simply means ‘raising up what has been swallowed’.
Coneys and rabbits go through such similar motions to ruminants that Linnaeus, the
father of modern classification (and a creationist), at first classified them as
ruminants. Also, rabbits and hares practise refection, which is essentially
the same principle as rumination, and does indeed ‘raise
up what has been swallowed’. The food goes right through the rabbit
and is passed out as a special type of dropping. These are re-eaten, and can now
nourish the rabbit as they have already been partly digested.
It is not an error of Scripture that ‘chewing the cud’
now has a more restrictive meaning than it did in Moses’ day. Indeed, rabbits
and hares do ‘chew the cud’
in an even more specific sense. Once again, the Bible is right and the sceptics
are wrong.
God, through Moses, was giving instructions that any Israelite could follow. It
is inconceivable that someone familiar with Middle-Eastern animal life would make
an easily corrected mistake about rabbits, and also inconceivable that the Israelites
would have accepted a book as Scripture if it were contrary to observation, which
it is not.
Addendum
After my article (above) was published in Creation magazine, I came across
an article on the Internet with more detail than was possible in a family magazine.
This article vindicates what I claimed, and backs it up with detailed lexical analysis.
The relevant section is below:
13. Rabbits do not chew their cud
LEV 11:6 And the hare, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he
is unclean unto you.
[An obscure bibliosceptic called Meritt claims:]
Gerah, the term which appears in the MT means (chewed) cud, and also perhaps
grain, or berry (also a 20th of a sheckel, but I think that we can agree
that that is irrelevant here). It does not mean dung, and there is a perfectly
adequate Hebrew word for that, which could have been used. Furthermore, the phrase
translated ‘chew the cud’ in the KJV is more exactly ‘bring up
the cud’. Rabbits do not bring up anything; they let it go all the way through,
then eat it again. The description given in Leviticus is inaccurate, and that’s
that. Rabbits do eat their own dung; they do not bring anything up and chew on it.
[Response by J.P. Holding:]
‘MT’ is the Masoretic text, which is a late Hebrew transmission of the
OT.
Meritt is apparently quite proud of himself here, having gone—for the one
and only time—to the original Hebrew for answers. (Guess translation issues
are important after all.) Too bad he didn’t dig a little further.
Two issues are at hand: the definition of ‘cud’ and that of ‘chewing’.
Let’s take a close look at the Hebrew version of both. Cuds first, chewies
afterwards.
First, gerah (or gehrah) is indeed the word used here, and—this
is important—it is used nowhere in the Old Testament besides these verses
in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. We have only this context to help us decide what it
means in terms of the Mosaic law.
Second, the process rabbits go through is called refection, and it is not
just ‘dung’ that the rabbits are eating, which is probably why the Hebrew
word for ‘dung’ was not used here. Indeed, contrary to Meritt’s
assertion, that the word gehrah also means 1/20th of a shekel
actually gives us a hint here! 1/20th of a shekel is of little worth,
but it does have worth. Where the word for ‘dung’ is used in the Bible,
it implies something defiled, unclean, or useless. But in lapine terms, ‘dung’
is not useless: It contains pellets of partially digested food, which rabbits chew
on (along with the waste material—UGH!) in order to give their stomachs another
go at getting the nutrients out. (It’s an efficient way of getting more vitamins
and nutrients, we’re told, but I think I’ll stick with my Flintstones
chewables, thank you very much.) The pellets have some minute value, much as 1/20th
of a shekel has some value.
Contrast this with what cows and some other animals do, rumination, which
is what we moderns call ‘chewing the cud’. They regurgitate partially
digested food in little clumps called cuds, and chew it a little more after while
mixing it with saliva. (This also, presumably, helps them get the most out of their
food, but I’m not trying it.)
So, let’s see … partially digested food. Partially digested food. Seems
to be a common element here. Could it be that the Hebrew word simply refers to any
partially digested food? Could it be that the process is not the issue, just the
object?
Our other key word provides us with some hints. Meritt is partially correct when
he says that the phrase translated ‘chew the cud’ in the KJV is more
exactly ‘bring up the cud’. (The full phrase is ‘maketh the cud
to come up’.) By leaving it at that, he apparently wishes for us to believe
that ‘bring up’ means, in an exclusive sense, regurgitation. Whoooooa,
horsey. Back up. Let’s check those hooves for Hebrew words! The word here
is ‘alah, and it is found in some grammatical form on literally (well,
almost literally) every page of the OT! This is because it is a word that encompasses
many concepts other than ‘bring up’. It also can mean ascend up, carry
up, cast up, fetch up, get up, recover, restore, take up, and much more. It is a
catch-all verb form describing the moving of something to another place. (‘maketh
the gehrah to ‘alah’)
Now in the verses in question, ‘alah is used as a participle. Let’s
look at the other verses where it is used this way (NIV only implies some of these
phrases; where in parentheses, the phrase is in the original, sometimes in the KJV):
- Josh. 24:17 It was the Lord our God himself who brought
us and our fathers up out of Egypt. …
- Isaiah 8:7 … therefore the Lord is about to bring
(up) the burnt offering …
- Nahum 3:3 Charging cavalry, flashing swords (lifted up),
and glittering spears!
- Isaiah 8:7 … therefore the Lord is about to bring
(up) against them the mighty floodwaters of the River …
- 2 Chron. 24:14 When they had finished, they brought (up)
the rest of the money …
- Ps. 135:7 He makes clouds rise (up) from the ends of the
earth …
- 2 Sam. 6:15 … while he and the entire house of Israel
brought up the ark of the Lord with shouts and the sound of trumpets. (Similar
quote,
1 Chr. 15:28)
OUCH! That last one would hurt if the word meant regurgitation. No wonder people
were shouting …
So what have we learned? The Hebrew word in question is NOT specific to the process
of regurgitation; it is a phrase of general movement. And related to the specific
issue at hand, the rabbit is an animal that does ‘maketh’ the previously
digested material to ‘come up’ out of the body (though in a different
way than a ruminant does—as Meritt says, with rabbits, it comes all the way
through; but again, the word is not specific for regurgitation!) and thereafter
does chew ‘predigested material’! The mistake is in our applying of
the scientific terms of rumination to something that does not require it.
Further reading
Note
- This is a common colloquial usage, also backed up in Stomach, Ruminant Categories, MedicalGlossary.org, which refers to four stomachs: (1) Rumen (from which ruminant gets its name), (2) Reticulum, (3) Omasum, (4) Abomasum, the ‘true stomach’. Other sources prefer to categorize them as four stomach chambers.
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