Shachar Ilan reports about the Daat Emet pamphlets, in the third of which the authors wonder how Moses our teacher included the hare and the hyrax amongst the ruminants "while the hyrax and hare do not ruminate at all." The authors wonder whether "Moses wrote this according to the holy Spirit?!! Was this, G-d forbid, an error? An error in our holy Torah?!"
It is not reasonable to suppose that such a gross error was in the Scriptures for so many generations. Is there no better answer to the difficulty?
An alternative answer should be considered -- that they did not properly understand what is written in this section of the Torah. Can we now definitely identify the types of animals mentioned in the Torah as shafan and arnevet? I don’t know of any such positive identification. Therefore it is eminently reasonable that the two animals mentioned in the Torah are not the one which, thousands of years later, are called by those names in modern Hebrew. All we may have here is a semantic problem.
Dr. Israel Zeidman
Jerusalem
From Ha'Artez February 3, 1999 17 Shevat 5759