Kosher Animals - Land Animals: Mammals

Land Animals: Mammals

Leviticus 11:3-8 and Deuteronomy 14:4-8 both give the same general set of rules for identifying which land animals (Hebrew: בהמות Behemoth) are ritually clean. According to these, anything that "chews the cud" and has a cloven hoof is ritually clean, but those animals that only chew the cud, or only have cloven hooves is unclean.

Both documents explicitly list four animals as being ritually impure:

• The camel, for chewing the cud without its hooves being divided.
• The hyrax, for chewing the cud without having cloven hooves. (The Hebrew term for this animal - שפן shaphan - has been translated by older English versions of the bible as coney; the existence of the hyrax wasn't known to early English translators. The coney was an exclusively European animal, not present in Canaan, while the shaphan was described by the Book of Proverbs as living on rocks like the hyrax, but unlike the coney.)
• The hare, for chewing the cud without having cloven hooves.
• The pig, for having cloven hooves without chewing the cud.

Camels are actually both even-toed ungulates and ruminants, although their feet aren't hooves at all, instead being two toes with a pad. Similarly, although the bible portrays them as ruminants, the hyrax, hare, and coney, are all coprophages, and do not ruminate and lack a rumen. These obvious discrepancies, and the question of whether there is a way to resolve them, have been investigated by various authors, most recently by Rabbi Natan Slifkin, in a book, entitled The Camel, the Hare, and the Hyrax.

Unlike Leviticus 11:3-8, Deuteronomy 14:4-8 also explicitly names 10 animals considered ritually clean:

• the ox
• the sheep
• the goat
• the deer
• the gazelle
• the yahmur; this term, directly taken from the Masoretic Text, is ambiguously used by Arabs to refer to roe deer and to oryx
• the the'o; this term, directly taken from the Masoretic Text, has traditionally been translated ambiguously. In Deuteronomy, it is traditionally been translated as wild goat, but in the same translations is called a wild ox where it occurs in Deutero-Isaiah; the Bubal Hartebeest lies somewhere between these creatures in appearance and has been regarded as a likely fit for the'o.
• the pygarg; the identity of this animal is uncertain, and pygarg is merely the Septuagint's rendering. The Masoretic Text calls it a dishon, meaning springing; it has thus usually been interpreted as some form of antelope or ibex.
• the antelope
• the camelopardalis; the identity of this animal is uncertain, and camelopardalis, is merely the Septuagint's wording. The Masoretic Text calls it a zemer, which means wool, but camelopardalis means camel-leopard and refers to the giraffe (giraffe is derived, via Italian, from the Arabic term ziraafa meaning assembled ). The traditional translation has been chamois, but the chamois has never naturally existed in Canaan; neither is the giraffe naturally found in Canaan, and consequently the mouflon is considered the best remaining identification.

The Deuteronomic passages mention no further land beasts as being clean or unclean, seemingly suggesting that the status of the remaining land beasts can be extrapolated from the given rules. By contrast, the Levitical rules later go on to add that all quadrupeds with paws should be considered ritually unclean, something not explicitly stated by the Deuteronomic passages; the only quadrupeds with paws are the carnivorans (dogs, wolves, cats, lions, hyenas, bears, etc.), and all carnivorans fall under this description.

The Leviticus passages thus cover all the large land animals that naturally live in Canaan, except for primates, which (besides humans) are not mentioned by the Bible at all, and equids (horses, zebras, etc.), which are not mentioned in Leviticus as being either ritually clean or unclean, despite their importance in warfare and society, and their mention elsewhere in Leviticus.

In an attempt to help identify animals of ambiguous appearance, the Talmud, in a similar manner to Aristotle's earlier Historia Animalium, argued that animals without upper teeth would always chew the cud and have split hoofs (thus being ritually clean), and that no animal with upper teeth would do so; the Talmud makes an exception for the case of the camel (which, like the other ruminant even-toed ungulates, is without upper teeth). The Talmud also argues that the meat from the legs of clean animals can be torn lengthwise as well as across, unlike that of unclean animals, thus aiding to identify the status of meat from uncertain origin.