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3:24), many of the individual commands are no longer applicable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 = 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. 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 is 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 does thereafter does chew ‘predigested
material’! The mistake is in our applying of the scientific terms
of rumination to something that does not require i
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