Q&A: Hyrax and Hare
Hyrax and Hare
Question
Is it correct to say that the fact that the hyrax and the hare do not chew the cud is not a difficulty for the claim that the Torah is from Heaven? After all, even if a human being wrote it, he wouldn’t be so idiotic as to write about some random animal that it chews the cud but does not have split hooves. In other words, the author of the Torah (again, assuming it was a human being) knew the hyrax and the hare and claimed that they chew the cud. So we just need to understand what “chewing the cud” meant in the sense he intended. Do you agree with that claim?
Answer
It would not be correct to say that. They would tell you that he probably thought so and was mistaken. Or that he really was idiotic. That is a very weak argument.
Discussion on Answer
With God’s help, eve of the holy Sabbath, “Walk before Me,” 5781
See the articles by Oren Saeed (“Do the Hyrax and the Hare Chew the Cud?” on the site “Torah and Science”) and Gil-ad Stern (“The Hyrax and the Hare,” on the site “Knowing to Believe”), that the hyrax and the hare resemble cud-chewing animals in two respects:
(1) in the form of their horizontal chewing motion,
(2) in re-digestion. The difference in re-digestion is that in other cud-chewing animals, the material is returned for renewed digestion inside the body, whereas the hyrax and the hare swallow the soft droppings from the anus and thus return them for final digestion.
With blessings, The Trumpeting Hyrax
To me that sounds like a good argument, because surely if he thought they chew the cud, then he recognized some particular characteristic on the basis of which he ascribed to them the trait of chewing the cud.
And that characteristic is exactly what the Torah meant.
Even if that characteristic is different from the scientific characterization…
But his thinking that it does chew the cud is the Torah’s definition of chewing the cud.