If so, let me ask the obvious question: assuming you agree that a proven factual error in the Torah would strengthen the claim that the Torah is not from Heaven, and you know there is a claim that such an error exists in the Torah, how can a person who wants to do the Creator’s will allow himself not to examine such a claim? After all, if the Torah is not from Heaven, that means you are missing the Creator’s will.
The only answer I can think of is that you have some joker argument that makes the whole issue irrelevant to the question (similar to the possibility that the creation narratives are an educational falsehood). Such an argument would also need to show a reasonable divine motivation for why the Torah would be structured that way (in the matter of an educational falsehood, the motivation is clear).
If so, it follows that from your point of view there is such a joker argument, because otherwise you would examine this critical question. Now that we’ve come to this, what exactly is it?

Neither. I don’t look into it because there are several answers and it is hard to decide between them. It is unlikely that this question would change anything for me, because it will not emerge from here that there is a factual error in the Torah. For exactly the same reason I do not deal with biblical criticism.

I don’t understand how. After all, it’s a matter of probabilities: as long as there is no reasonable interest on God’s part to write the Torah in such a way that it would look as though it was written by a human being, then apparently it really was written by a human being. Don’t you agree?

The topic was well summarized in Oren Sa’id’s article, “The Hare and the Hyrax — Do They Chew the Cud?”, on the blog “Torah and Science,” and there is no need to add and “chew the cud” further 🙂

Best regards, Yaron Fish”l Ordner

But it is not true that the Torah looks as though it was written by a human being. That is the meaning of the various explanations: they resolve the difficulty. Besides, this is only one detail, and even if I were convinced about it, I would say that it is an erroneous addition to the Torah. There are verses that seem to have been added later (“to this very day”).

I want to take the discussion in a slightly different direction.

What do you mean by your statement that:

“It is not true that the Torah looks as though it was written by a human being”

In your opinion, does it look as though it was written by some other agent (God)?

The Torah is written in human language like every other text written by human beings… I don’t understand what you mean.

Interestingly, according to the Septuagint the hyrax does not appear and the rabbit is mentioned in its place. It also says that they chew the cud. In the Christian world this claim doesn’t come up in discussions with atheists.

With God’s help, 19 Elul 5781

To P — greetings,

It seems that the “shafan” in the Torah was identified by the translators of the Septuagint with the rabbit, because the hyraxes are “a people not mighty, yet they make their homes in the rock” (Proverbs 30), and their place is in the cliffs of the desert with the ibexes (Psalms 104), and therefore they were not known in the Nile valley.

Best regards, Efo”r

The translators of the Septuagint did know the ibexes, which they translated as “akko” — “tragelaphos,” since hunters brought the ibex, as a large animal, to Egypt; but small hyraxes were of no interest to anyone to hunt and bring to Egypt.

I was mistaken; it says that they do not chew the cud. Also, the value of pi in the Septuagint is very close to the value of pi. In my opinion one needs to check what other versions from that period say, and then it will be possible to infer what the original text was, because it is quite possible that the translators of the Septuagint changed it because they had a broad Hellenistic education.

With God’s help, on the eve of the holy Sabbath, “The Lord will command the blessing,” 5781

How broad the “broad Hellenistic education” of the translators of the Septuagint was — I do not know. As I have heard, the Septuagint was written in popular Greek, “Koine” in the vernacular, whose distance from the standard Greek in which the Hellenistic intellectuals spoke and wrote is like the distance of Yiddishized biblical translation from the German of Goethe and Schiller.

The Septuagint and similar works were popular among Jewish communities in which Hebrew and the original text of the Torah had been forgotten, Jews who knew the Torah only secondhand. By contrast, among the Pharisees they made sure that every child would devote five years of his life to memorizing the biblical text from morning till night, so that in adulthood he could read from the Torah any portion with which he might be honored in the synagogue.

A Jewish society in which even among its ordinary members accurate reading of the Bible was a supreme value, and whose spiritual leaders were called “scribes,” who knew every letter and every crown in the Bible and derived Jewish laws and ways of life from the fine details of the text — such a society knew how to preserve the sacred text like the apple of its eye, and I would not go and “correct” its tradition, preserved throughout all the diasporas, on the basis of vernacular adaptations made by those who were already immersed up to their necks in foreign culture.

Best regards, Amiyoz Yaron Schnitzel”r

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… they made sure that every child would devote five years of his life to memorizing the biblical text from morning till night, …

The Septuagint was written for the Jewish diasporas in the Hellenistic world whose language was Greek. It was never intended for Greeks and Hellenists who were not versed in Judaism and the Hebrew sources. Many times the translation rendered biblical expressions literally, expressions that have no meaning in Greek and are not understandable to a Greek speaker who is not familiar with the scriptures. Even in the New Testament there are expressions that were translated literally, and to this day there are disputes in the Christian world about what exactly they mean.

The Hellenistic Jews were well versed in Hellenistic culture. The translators were respected people, and it is reasonable to assume that they had a broad Hellenistic education and were knowledgeable in mathematics, zoology, and Greek philosophy.
The Septuagint that we have also went through several stages, and in order to get as close as possible to the original one has to know Koine Greek and read it in the original language. And even then one cannot be sure that no textual changes and later additions were made.

To know the truth, one has to examine ancient versions and see exactly what is written there. If, for example, a Qumran text agrees with the Septuagint, then one may assume with high probability that the corruption is in the Masoretic Text. If the text is more similar to the Masoretic Text, then one may infer with high probability that the corruption is in the Septuagint text. The more ancient versions are surveyed, the higher the probability will be.

The original text of the Bible was probably lost. The Masoretic Text is different even from the text that the Sages had, as can be seen from quite a bit of inconsistency between the Sages’ interpretations and the biblical text. For example, in the number of times it says “melakhah” or “melakhto,” or in minor corruptions of verses. Apparently they had a text that differed somewhat from the Masoretic Text.

Another possibility I thought might be that in the original text neither the hyrax nor the hare appeared, and there were no examples given. The examples were added at a later period by the priests. But evidence is needed to support that. Otherwise it is apologetics more suitable for outreach rabbis or Christian missionaries. But it is definitely a reasonable possibility in my opinion.

Michi, in another thread you got back to me and said there was a response here to my question (whether the Torah “looks” as if it was written by human beings).
I don’t see such a response here.

If you read the thread again, you’ll see that this expression was raised not by me, and I only responded to it. What he meant was to say that a Torah with errors was not written by the Creator.

That’s a relief.

To the questioner: you didn’t address at all the possibility that the Torah gives signs of kashrut that could be identified by the ancient Israelite — not a scientific zoological list. Since the hyrax and the hare move their jaws like cud-chewers, there was no reason for the ancient, hungry Israelite not to eat them when they happened to cross his path (after all, people didn’t raise them at home…), just like the commandment of sending away the mother bird is a commandment for passersby, and so on. Therefore the Torah says that even though they are “cud-chewers” (and in the fine print it would say — according to your understanding, etc.) they are forbidden. Because something that looks like a duck and goes quack quack is not necessarily a duck. I really don’t find this difficulty compelling at all. Only assumptions from the Talmud and the Oral Torah complicate the matter for no reason. Let it go. On the contrary, in biblical scholarship they are amazed by verses like these, which teach about the attentiveness and scientific powers of observation of the priests, the “writers of the Torah” according to their view. It is a plus, not a minus. (See, for example, The World of the Bible, or in Weinfeld’s article on the Sabbath and Deutero-Isaiah.) By the way, I was always bothered — well, not really a difficulty, more of a mismatch — by the verse “Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, hovers over its young… bears them on its pinions,” as though the eagle literally carries its young on its wings. It sounds like aggadic literature and nothing more. But actually, no. See Tigay’s commentary on Deuteronomy — the best scholarly commentary there is — where he notes regarding a certain eagle (I don’t remember exactly its name) that it really does carry its young on its wings. And there are many more such cases.