Moses' Socks and Rabbits' Cud

People who try to use some minor detail of the Bible to claim that it is not God's word remind me of...some guy living in ancient Egypt, and Moses comes to town and he starts doing all kinds of miracles, turning the rivers to blood, and bringing plagues of frogs and locusts and pestilence.

But in spite of all the signs and miracles Moses does, this Egyptian refuses to believe Moses has been sent from God, because he doesn't like his looks. "Moses can't be a man of God," the Egyptian says, "because he always wears socks that don't match."

Okay, granted, Moses wasn't perfect. Maybe he did have trouble with his socks. But does that mean he was not a man of God? Hardly. To say that would be to ignore all the mighty works God did through him. After all, nobody's perfect. God uses imperfect people.

Well, if God uses imperfect people, what happens when God uses people to write His word? Could it be that the imperfections of these human writers show up in small ways in what they wrote?

Maybe. Or maybe not. But even if there are inaccuracies in what the Biblical writers wrote, God could still use what they wrote. God can use anything for his purpose. God could even use things written out of ignorance to express a truth on a higher level.

David writing the Psalms didn't know the full prophetic meaning of things he wrote. But God used what David said as prophecies of Christ. Perhaps things in the Bible that are factual errors are on one level can express spiritual truths on another level...

Anyway, if there are imperfections in the Bible, they are very insignificant, human errors. Maybe that's why the charges of error made by Bible critics seem to deal so much with extremely trivial details of the written word. Maybe it's just too hard to find any fault with the important, powerful, supernatural truths of the Bible, so the critics have to scrutinize the text in hopes of finding some minor inaccuracies in the tiny, corollary details.

Why don't those critics spend more time grappling with the big truths of the Bible--that God created everything, the facts of the sinfulness of man, of God's working through the chosen nation of Israel, of prophecy, and of the coming of Jesus in the flesh to be the sacrifice for sin, his resurrection and his second coming?

Instead of these important truths, they focus on things like whether hares chew their cud. Wow, now there's a real cornerstone of the faith. That's certainly an insignificant detail of the Bible--but since Bible critics bring it up so often...okay, let's deal with it. I think it could be interesting to discuss it at some length, even though in the end it's not a very important subject.

Hares don't chew their cud, do they? So what gives? Why does the Bible seem to say they do (Lev. 11:6 and Deut. 14:7)? Well, it could be human error. Maybe "hare" is not the true original meaning of the Hebrew word. It's not like the word is a common one in the Bible. In fact, that Hebrew word occurs only twice in the whole Bible, both times to say that the animal is unclean because it chews its cud. Maybe we just don't know what animal the Hebrew word referred to at that time.

However, it doesn't seem that that's the most likely explanation, although I wouldn't rule it out altogether. I've only seen one source that suggested that as the explanation (and that was in the notes in the Scofield Bible, which I personally don't trust anyway).

Another way this example could be human error is if it is the result of a copying error somewhere along the way. We know that the Bible has been extremely faithfully passed down from the original manuscripts, but VERY minor errors have crept in here and there.

But there are other possible explanations that make the hare argument quite inconclusive as a disproof of the Bible. Perhaps, as the critics claim, it really does refer to the hare, and the Israelites really did believe that the hare chewed its cud. Well then, maybe God was just speaking to them in terms they understood, sort of like we do when we speak to small children--for example we might say, "Mommy has a baby in her tummy," even though to a child the tummy is where food goes, and it would actually be more correct to say "womb" instead of "tummy." But we just say it in terms the child can readily understand.

The whole point of what's being talked about in the hare passages is to say, "Even though an animal chews the cud, don't eat it if it doesn't have a divided hoof." God was just warning them that even though a hare might appear to be chewing its cud, that's not enough. It's got be an animal with divided hooves.

But then again, maybe hares DO chew their cud, in a manner of speaking! Rabbits and hares do process their food a second time--not by regurgitating it but by chewing on certain fecal pellets that they excrete. In fact, here's a quote from Encyclopedia Britannica:

"Some lagomorphs [rabbits and hares] are capable of reingesting moist and nutritionally rich fecal pellets, a practice considered comparable to cud-chewing in ruminants."

It kind of reminds me of the attempts to criticize the Bible as incorrect because in the OT it classifies the bat as a bird. That's not incorrect, because classification is just a matter of how you choose to do it. The Israelites' classification system classified bats as birds, so it was correct to call them such in Jewish writings of that time. Similarly, chewing the cud does not have to be defined in terms only of regurgitated food.

Anyway, all of this is just to show that there are several possible explanations for the "hare" passages by which they might not have been errors at all as they were originally spoken and written.

But really the whole hare thing is an extremely minor detail. Kind of like staring at Moses' socks while he's doing his mighty miracles.

I don't necessarily say there were ANY errors in the Bible as it was originally written. There always may be possible resolutions for seeming errors that we may not have thought of. But I am saying that even if the piddling details that Bible critics claim to be errors are indeed such, it doesn't affect the important truths of the Bible, so I just can't get worried about them.

Now instead of focusing on trivial details, why don't Bible critics attack the really important claims of the Bible--such as the supernatural fulfillment of prophecies or Jesus' resurrection from the dead? If they could disprove those things, then they would have done something significant. 1