IvanJames

Hi, everyone. I'm Ivan, and this is my first post. I'm truly sorry if I was supposed to do something else first!

Anyway, I have a very simple, seemingly minor question that I for one feel puts a steak through the heart of Biblical inerrancy. I'll start with the verse in question:

Deut 14:7 "Nevertheless these ye shall not eat of them that chew the cud, or of them that divide the cloven hoof; as the camel, and the hare, and the coney: for they chew the cud, but divide not the hoof; therefore they are unclean unto you."

Now, it could have been the result of the Bible's authors mistaking a hare's toes for a camel-like "hoof", and mistaking the near-constant chewing hares do as "cud chewing." But, that would make the Bible the work of human beings. I would honestly like a Christian to respond to this dilemma.

For the record, no, no species of rabbit ("coney") or hare chews cud, nor did they ever.

---Ivan

PoodleLovinPessimist

Welcome, Ivan.

No, you're cool. :thumbs:

Top sirloin or Porterhouse? Stake. </spelling nazi> (No worries, you're still cool; I'm just an asshole pedant. Or a pendantic asshole.)

Yeah, that's probably one of the best. A lot of us have this one memorized.

It's much more interesting to have an inerrantist respond. And it's so much fun watching them squirm.

Actually they used to have cloven hooves and chew cud, but Satan switched them around just to fuck us up.

TheBigKahoona

This topic has been brought up before during many different debates and in many different forums. From what I have heard, and I am no hebrew scholar, is that the english meaning of "cud" and the Hebrew meaning of "cud" are two different things. What I have been told is that rabbit's "cud chewing" is referring to the fact that rabbits, will occasionally re-eat there own fecies making them unclean animals.

With regard to the "hoof" comment, any primitive man, whether this was written at the time claimed by Christians/Jews or skeptics, would have known what a rabbits foot looked like. A Hebrew who spent his whole life living outdoors or near the outdoors would have known alot more about his environment and the animals that populated it than you or I do. SO, I think that it is safe to say that this is again a small thing which is lost in translation between the Hebrew and English.

But then again, I am no Hebrew scholar. :huh:

IvanJames

Thanks for the welcome, PLP. I'm a bit of a spelling stickler myself!

I'm a pug guy, myself! They're better in pairs. (no, really...lol!)

So, do Christians EVER respond to posts like this?

---Ivan

IvanJames

Well, that brings up an interesting point: If the translations are so bad, how could a Biblical literalist know which parts are well-translated and which aren't? To me, this just seems like an excuse to dismiss any particularly hard-to-explain factual errors. Don't get me wrong, it's a great rhetorical fallback, the whole "we don't know what the translations really say but we're following it literally anyway" thing. So, if anyone has a more accurate translation, one which contradicts hundreds of years in Christian and Jewish scholarship in Bible translation, please let us know...with links to supporting evidence. I don't mean to be a jerk, but a dismissal based on a vague assumption that flies in the face of every published Bible I've ever seen, deserves a bit more explanation.
---Ivan

ficino

There was discussion of the rabbit-cud chewing question on Ex-Christians.com recently, on a thread under Debating with Christians, started by Messchird on dec. 25

http://exchristian.com/forums/index....opic=1998&st=0


Here's some stuff I came up with:

That the hyrax does not chew cud, cf. for example
http://www.talkreason.com/Forum.cfm?MESSAGEID=313
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyrax

That the hyrax does chew cud, cf. for example of many Christian websites:
http://www.theologyweb.com/forum/showthread.php?t=16860

A Jewish website that goes into great detail and concludes that the question is hard to answer, given difficulty of translating the Hebrew words in the passage, but that there's room for considering the text factually correct:
http://www.aishdas.org/toratemet/en_pamphlet2.html

This is too much detail for me! Maybe there's enough ambiguity that this verse is not a test case one way or the other.
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Then I added this, similar to IvanJames' point:

I've come to the conclusion (sorry, guys, many of you have reached it before me, I know) that it doesn't matter so much that the Bible contains errors of fact. The worse thing is, it is USELESS.

I'm stretching for rhetorical purposes. But consider.

Let's go back to the rabbit/hyrax cud chewing thing.

If the hyrax doesn't chew cud, then Leviticus made an error of fact. So inerrancy falls (sorry, M-G; I can't see how this doesn't follow).

But, worse still.... there is reason to think that we don't really know what animal is denoted by the Hebrew word "shafan," or whether it chewed "cud" or its own waste. See link to the Jewish site I posted on page six of this thread.

So the Torah has stuff that no one really can understand. Therefore we need a passle of rabbis to construct a "fence around the Law," inventing subordinate commands that are designed to keep us away from violating what might or might not be the intent of the original command.

Or..

Jesus cuts through the knot and liberates us from the text of the Law. But what is the result? Christians just have an even longer sacred book than the Jews have. And the additions to the sacred book spawn their own problems of interpretation.

Meanwhile, you're royally fucked if you disobey God. But who can know how to puzzle out the meaning of the sacred text?

Is it really antecedently probable, that if the creator of the universe wanted to reveal itself to humans, it would choose a text produced in a historical context and leave that text for thousands of years as the normative deposit of revelation? Even allowing some of the definitions of the ancient words to fall out of human memory?

Do we solve the problem by better scholarship? How can people's eternal destinies be held hostage to the findings of scholars? And which scholars?

Revelation as a TEXT can satisfy only one criterion necessary: i.e. anyone can read the text, it is not a secret tradition memorized by a priestly class alone (as ancient Roman law was oral, memorized by patricians alone, so plebeians never knew what the law said). But that is not an advantage, when the problem, who has the right to interpret in later ages, is never solved by the text.

laestrella

Muah I love you! Thats hilarious

TheBigKahoona

You have a good point, and you deserve a better explanation than I can give you. But the flaw is not in the text, the flaw is in OUR text. When you read the english version of the bible you are actually reading what a bunch of translators believe to be the most accurate translation of the Bible. This has led to incredibly huge mistakes throughout history. For example, the Vulgate made the famous mistake of translating the word "repent" to "Do penance" and that of course led to a bunch of peasants wearing uncomfortable shirts and hitting themselves on the head to atone for their sins.

So how do you find a flawless way to deal with the problems that translating can lead to? The truth is, there really is no infallible way, and so any English translation of the Bible will always, to a tiny degree, be flawed. That is why churches pay people known as Pastors/Reverends to know the ORIGINAL hebrew/Greek the Bible was written in.

Finally, to the last part of your post, can a Christian constantly dodge questions by blaming Biblical inconsistencies on simple translation problems? Of course not, but the real meat of the question is not in the English word "Hoof" or "Cud" but in the Hebrew word "hoof" and "Cud". Believe it or not Hebrew is not English said in a funny way. (I don't want to sound patronizing really) Instead, it is as you know a completely different language with, in some cases, completely different words for things.

Here is an example in Spanish which could potentially be confusing for English speakers to translate. Let's pretend you speak Spanish and need to translate this ancient sacred text into English.

Nunca coma caballos el domingo.

The English translation for this is:

Never eat horses on Sunday.

However, this is not a complete translation, because the passage could mean:

Never eat MALE horses on Sunday Leaving female horses on the menu. A small yet important difference.

Is this making any sense at all??? Be honest, I know you will.

PoodleLovinPessimist

One would expect an omnipotent god to ensure all translations of its were absolutely accurate.

First of all, I don't think most clergy don't actually read Hebrew or Greek. They probably know a little bit, but the level of philology and linguistics (not to mention historical methodology) necessary to understand the original text is a rigorous and narrow speciality.

Secondly, when a christian asks me to believe in experts in translation and interpretation, I am no longer being asked to believe a god; I am being asked to have faith in--to submit my moral and intellectual will to--other human beings. And that's tyranny, plain and simple. Evil, pernicious, degrading and offensive tyranny.

Ask me to submit to a god and I'll merely laugh at you. Ask me to submit to you and you'll get my boot in your ass.

TheBigKahoona

"First of all, I don't think most clergy don't actually read Hebrew or Greek. They probably know a little bit, but the level of philology and linguistics (not to mention historical methodology) necessary to understand the original text is a rigorous and narrow speciality."

That's why various religious orders make their spiritual leaders go through years of rigorous training before they are ordained. Jesuit Priests take the cake with 13 years of study after a four year college education. Every Pastor worth his salt knows how to read Hebrew and Greek. Pardon me, every innerantist/literalist Pastor worth his salt knows how to read hebrew and Greek.

With regards to the translations/translators. What do you expect, God to come down and swat their hand every time they make a mistake. Besides, God doesn'te even need to do that, there are more than enough Atheist Watchdog groups out there anyway i.e. this very website.

Evil, pernicious, degrading and offensive tyranny.

It's not like the knowledge isn't out there for you to obtain. If they were to stop you from seeing the original text or from learning HEbrew, that would be tyrrany. I suppose if I didn't trust my pastor I might try to learn Hebrew myself. However, not everyone has the time to learn two dead foreign languages but it certainly isn't tyrrany to have somebody translate it for you.