Bible Biology 101- Bats are "birds"....

Leviticus 11:19 "And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat."

rabbits "chew their cud"....

Leviticus 11:5 "And the coney, because he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the hoof; he is unclean unto you."

snails "melt"....

Psalm 58:8 "As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun."

And unicorns are real...

Numbers 23:22 "God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn."

 

Habakkuk 1:8 "Their horses also are swifter than the leopards, and are more fierce than the evening wolves."

Some bad ass horses right there.

Genesis

30:37-39 "And Jacob took him rods of green poplar, and of the hazel and chesnut tree; and pilled white strakes in them, and made the white appear which was in the rods. And he set the rods which he had pilled before the flocks in the gutters in the watering troughs when the flocks came to drink, that they should conceive when they came to drink. And the flocks conceived before the rods, and brought forth cattle ringstraked, speckled, and spotted."

Evolution be (*)(*)(*)(*)ed.

 

Those are just metaphors for scientifically accurate statements.

 

Research of ancient taxonomy explains this because instead of the more modern basis of differentiating between different species, the method of mobility was used.

Animals were group in regard to their method of locomotion.
Things that jump and others that walk were grouped separately from things that swam or flew.

Insects, birds, and bats would first be grouped together.

 

Jacob essentially performed the same experiments that Mendel would do 3000 years belatedly, when he separated red flowers from white ones and discovered the modern concept of Traits.

Genesis documents the experiment used by Jacob which supports the argument that he and the Jews thereafter realized that genetics is inherent if the generation which is alive.
As people mate and choose wisely amongst themselves for mates, constant improvement in the good traits are being "grown" out of a culture that is strong and smart.

These observations add impetus to the idea that an Einstein or a Christ will eventually appear among them.
It also supports the growing understanding that memory based upon past life experiences collect in the Unconscious mind, which clearly is born again into every child at birth.
They understood that an ancient of ancient entity, the evolving mind that adds to Instincts even more foreknowledge is silently with us in our life experience.
They could understand how this mechanism of genetic could contain the whole knowledge of the life experienced by our species.
They could assume that this deep knowledge lay underneath the thin surface of our Conscious mind, and at some point, it would appear in the day of that Lord.

 

What if the word which is translated as "bird" doesn't mean bird in our modern sense, but had some other definition in practice?

Again, what has been translated as melt probably didn't have the naturalistically rigorous definition as we have today. Another way of putting this would be that it wasn't meant as a literal melting (or at least what we today consider melting to mean). The idea that every word can be interpreted literally is fairly modern. Similes and analogues were often written as direct statements.

I don't see how liking things to other things indicates that they are real. You can say that someone is as white as a ghost without believing in ghosts.

There are many criticisms that can be made against the Bible and its ideological offshoots. These are not them.

 

There were and still are lots of translation problems.. A word in Greek or Aramaic or Latin might not have a corresponding word in Hebrew.

 

In Deuteronomy 20:1, God tells the Israelites, "When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them." The implication is that the Israelites have neither horses nor chariots, and that having horses and chariots would make them considerably more powerful (see also Judges 1:19).

Archeologists have found no horse bones in Palestine.. and the gist of it is that only Roman officers had horses.. There is little pasture and water.

 

I think this is a more fine grained problem. Words change meanings within languages. Definitions crystallise over time. Aramaic or Greek isn't just one language each, they differ over time and space. That an author might have used the word we translate as bird to mean "non-insect animal that flies" rather than "species of the class aves (which wasn't even invented until ~1700s or something)" is not unthinkable.

 

Bats were lumped in with birds that were forbidden to be eaten. They were NOT lumped in with mammals like pigs. Clearly, the writers of Leviticus believed bats were "birds."

If you don't believe the Bible is accurately translated....how do you believe any of it?

How does a person make an analogy to something....they don't believe is real???

On the term of the Subject Line....biology...it is.

 

Speaking of insects....the Bible says they have four legs....they have six.

 

The green poplar and chestnut trees are indigenous to Northern Europe. They have found 9,000 year-old hazel nut pits in Scotland. The first reference to cows was in the 17,000 year-old cave drawings from Lasaux, France Where in the heck was Jacob when he was practicing animal husbandry, and separating the flocks?

 

A few problems with translation or what? How would the writers have known about green poplars or hazelnuts?

 

It is interesting that eating bats is considered one route to the infectious disease of Ebola. They are also the major carriers of rabies in the US. Of course it is also true that they pollinate over 300 species of fruit, and without them, the mosquito population would overwhelm us. Three good reasons not to eat bats.

 

That is a good question, Margot.

 

Livestock in ancient Israel.

http://www.bible-archaeology.info/cattle.htm

 

I don't see how this addresses the point I made. If the word "ציפור" means, not bird in the modern sense but in some sense more relevant to the authors, this is not an issue. We in the modern world base our understanding of the word bird on a taxonomic structure invented in the 1700s and much developed since. Why do we expect Old Testament writers to adhere to the same structure?

What makes you think I believe any of it? It would be hypocritical of me to defend ideas from criticism only if I already believed in them.

I don't understand the problem, it is very simple. Just like I can refer to a pale person as pale as a ghost without believing in ghosts, one can refer to someone as strong as a unicorn without believing in unicorns. I literally gave you an example, so I struggle to understand how you can suggest it can't be done.

 

Sure....but bats are MAMMALS...like pigs....they're not birds.

So why did the Hebrew Chroniclers lump them in with birds....instead of under "divine inspiration from God"....put them in the same category as swine???

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I don't.

But the Literalists and Traditionalists claim that those OT writers were "divinely inspired by God".....I think we both agree, that isn't true, unless God doesn't know anything about taxonomy.

 

Why would they? Taxonomy had little to no impact on their goings on, its importance is mostly modern. Why group animals based on that?

I see no reason presented here to think that God didn't know about taxonomy. God probably knows no less about the alphabetic system, but he didn't put them in alphabetic order either. I agree that the writings probably aren't divinely inspired, but these are not the reasons I think that. It doesn't seem to me that Gods lists should follow our groupings of the animals.

 

I see what you were wondering. Sorry to veer off topic. Why they were lumped together with birds instead of mammals is a good question. But then classifying animals into categories other than birds, fish, animals didn't begin until much later. Maybe the writers didn't want to confuse the readers. I wonder if they classified whales as fish or mammals?

 

First place in the KJV it says fowl not bird so in either the 1611 vocab or Hebrew fowl would include bats. Secondly even in the verse you quote it doesn't actually say the bat is a bird.

Yes they do. They eat their food, it goes entirely through their digestive system, and they eat what comes out the other end to re-digest it. That's a form of chewing the cud.

Try setting one on fire or shake salt on one.

Four theories to that.

1. A horse with a horn. Since as far as I know no one has seen one we can put this theory aside for now.

2. An extinct animal that we identify as something else with one horn. This can include one horned dinosaurs.

3. A living animal that we identify as somthing else. This could include a one horned rhino or something else.

4. An animal, fossil of living, that we have yet to discover. It's a big world and we are finding new kinds in each catagory almost everyday.

 

They do have four legs. Four pointing back and two hands pointing forward. How do I know that's the correct interpretation? Because the Bible speaks of the spider uses its hands to manipulate their web. When you think about it that way the Bible is actually more accurate than modern science termology.

 

Wait, do you mean that little tiny "country" that's the thorn in the side of Israel or are you saying isreal doesn't exist?

 

See what you said there, though....."the WRITERS didn't want to confuse readers".

But supposedly the Old Testament is "accurate" and "divinely inspired by God".

So God should have known that bats were not birds....and not created a 3000+ year old falsehood in the Bible.

 

The list in Leviticus includes birds (storks, herons, etc)...no other species....except that it also includes bats...which are NOT birds. If I list "Professional Baseball Players"...and list DiMaggio, Ruth, Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe...and then include "Clark Gable"....they're all "people"...but they're not all "professional baseball players"

Rabbits "eat their poop"....which means they are "chewing their cud"? Really, you just make up anything to keep your hope of "Bible inerrancy" alive...don't you? It doesn't even matter to you how wrong or even silly it sounds....does it?

Except that's not what the verse says.....does it? You have no answer to that....do you?

Say "unicorn" meant rhinoceros.....the name "rhinoceros" has been in use in Europe since the 1300s....

the King James Bible was written over 200 years later.....why didn't your "perfect translators" in England....use the word "rhinoceros"???