Does the hare really chew the cud, as Leviticus says?

The food laws are not a modern scheme of classification; they give Israel signs that anyone could check in the field. Does the animal part the hoof? Does it ‘bring up the cud’? That is what the Hebrew ma‘alat gerah means, word for word. Gerah (H1625), says Keil and Delitzsch, comes from a root meaning to draw or drag to and fro. The test is one of what can be seen, and a hare sitting still works its jaws steadily, very much like a cow chewing the cud. Keil and Delitzsch note that even Linnaeus, the father of modern classification, said that the hare chewed the cud, and that Moses followed the common way of speaking. To describe an animal as it appears is no more an error than to speak of the sun rising.

The hare also does something closer to rumination than its critics allow. Hares and rabbits pass soft pellets of half-digested food from the caecum, a large pouch of the gut, and eat them again straight away, so that the food goes through the body a second time. This is called caecotrophy, or refection. It is not the same as a cow’s cud, which comes back up from the stomach, but it does the same work: food is brought back and digested again. Neither point makes the hare a ruminant in the modern sense; the law simply was not using modern categories.

Leviticus groups other creatures by everyday categories too. It lists the bat among the birds (11:13–19), because the Hebrew word for bird means any winged creature, not because Moses thought a bat laid eggs. The laws set Israel apart as holy to God (11:44); they make no claim about the inside of an animal’s stomach.

‘Bringing up again’ in a wider sense

Answers in Genesis and others argue that the Hebrew phrase is broader than the English ‘chew the cud’, and may cover any re-eating of partly digested food, as the hare’s refection is.

An animal now unknown

Some notes, including an editor’s note added to Gill’s commentary at Bible Hub and the lexicon behind Strong’s numbers, suggest that the arnebeth was an animal now extinct. Most scholars think it is the hare, since the word matches the Arabic word for hare, arnab.

How widely the phrase ma‘alat gerah was meant is not certain, since it is found only in these food laws.