Nevertheless you shall not eat of them that only chew the cud, or of them that only are cloven-footed: the camel, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the shafan, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the arneves, because it chews the cud but doesn't have a cloven-hoof, it is unclean to you. And the swine, because it has a cloven-hoof, but doesn't chew its cud, it is unclean unto you."The Torah is informing us that these are the only existing examples of animals with one sign without the other... How could any human, at the time the Torah was written, have known this?" That's the "proof" in a nutshell, as made by Aish.com in the section of an article on Parashat Shemini called Evidence Of Divinity Of Torah.- Leviticus 11
I have refrained until now from discussing this so-called proof of the divinity of the Torah as it has been discussed in depth by many others. The most definitive treatment of this zoological issue is, of the course, Rabbi Slifkin's (unfortunately out of print) book The Camel, the Hare, and the Hyrax. It is somewhat surprising that the "proof" is still being used by OrthoFundies, since its assertions have long been shown to be seriously flawed. Indeed, the attempt to use this as a proof is so untenable that it has been turned on its head to prove the exact opposite by those seeking to show the fallibility of the Torah! (R. Slifkin unfairly calls those critics "atheists".)
Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness in my ongoing posts on "Bad Proofs of Torah" - and in the spirit of Parashat Shemini - here is my terse summary of why this is a bogus argument:
To assert that the shafan and arneves are maaleh gerah, one must extend "chewing the cud" to animals that are not true ruminants. But then one must accept that many other animals not mentioned in the Torah also chew the cud. And to claim that these other animals are from the same "min" and are somehow included in the category of shafan and arneves is to make the idea of min so wide-ranging as to render the word meaningless.
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5 comments:
Great article, very interesting point
LOL, "Torah" is advertizing on a kefirah blog. See Zeligman's "Letter to my Rabbi", available on-line, for more detail about this.
Well put, it's the best "Dvar Torah" on Parshas Shmini for my money.
Thanks for sharing this link, but unfortunately it seems to be offline... Does anybody have a mirror or another source? Please answer to my post if you do!
I would appreciate if a staff member here at frumheretic.blogspot.com could post it.
Thanks,
William
If you are asking about the aish link in the post, it is up when I just checked. Here is the relevant text:
EVIDENCE OF DIVINITY OF TORAH
Of course, following God's commands is largely predicated on belief in God and an acceptance of the idea that He gave the Torah.
One of God's most concrete fingerprints is found in the laws of Kashrut. In order for an animal to be kosher it must have two identification signs: (1) it has split hooves, and (2) it chews its cud (regurgitates its food partially digested in the stomach).
Once the Torah informs us of this, it is a simple logical deduction that if an animal has only one of the above, it is not Kosher. Yet the Torah goes out of its way to inform us that there is only one animal that has split hooves and does not chew its cud - the pig.
The Torah is informing us that these are the only existing examples of animals with one sign without the other. This means that if you encounter an animal you've never seen before, and you see that it has split hooves, yet you have no way of knowing if it chews it's cud, then you may eat that animal on one condition: That you are certain it's not a pig. Why? Because the Torah testifies that there is no other animal on planet Earth that has split hooves and doesn't chew its cud except the pig!
This raises a very interesting question. How could any human, at the time the Torah was written, have known this? Zoologists today have identified over 5,000 different species of mammals. And only one, the pig, has split hooves and doesn't chew its cud. Was Moses familiar with every mammal in every corner of the world? Of course not. Only God could know such a thing, and only God could make such a claim in the Torah, written thousands of years ago.
In the heyday of the Bible Critics, they actually sent a expedition to Australia to find another species and disprove the Bible. Having observed the kangaroo, koala bear, and the duck-billed platypus, researchers still couldn't find a split-hoofed animal that didn't chew its cud.
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