Do rabbits chew their cud?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Widely regarded as a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Leviticus 11:6 classifies the hare (Hebrew *arnevet*) among animals that "bring up the cud" (*ma'alat gerah*) but do not have a divided hoof, and on that basis declares it unclean. The same idiom governs the surrounding list: the camel (11:4), the rock badger or hyrax (11:5, *shafan*), and the hare are each said to *ma'alah gerah* — to "raise/bring up" *gerah* — yet fail the hoof criterion, while the pig (11:7) divides the hoof but does not bring up cud. The parallel legislation in Deuteronomy 14:6-7 repeats the grouping. The zoological problem is straightforward: hares and rabbits (Lagomorpha) and the hyrax are not ruminants. Rumination is a specific physiological process in which a four-chambered stomach (rumen, reticulum, omasum, abomasum) ferments plant matter and regurgitates a bolus — the cud — for further mastication. Lagomorphs are hindgut fermenters with a single-chambered stomach; they do not regurgitate and re-chew swallowed food.

The principal harmonization, associated with Gleason Archer's *Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties*, appeals to cecotrophy (also called refection or caecotrophy): rabbits and hares produce soft pellets in the caecum, excrete them, and re-ingest them to extract additional nutrients on a second digestive pass. Archer proposes that this re-ingestion is functionally analogous to rumination and that the biblical observer was registering a real, if differently mechanized, double-processing of food. The proposal has a kernel of truth — cecotrophy is a genuine second pass — but it does not rescue the text on its own terms for two reasons. First, the Hebrew is specific about *direction*: *ma'alah* is the hiphil of *'alah*, "to go up," hence "to bring up" — the image is of material rising back into the mouth from the gut, which is what ruminants visibly do and what cecotrophy does not do; cecotropes are passed and taken from the anus, not regurgitated. Second, the verse pairs the hare with the camel and the hyrax under one descriptor, and the only feature uniting all three to an observer is the lateral, near-constant grinding motion of the jaws. The classification is by observable behavior, not by internal anatomy.

Mary Douglas, in *Purity and Danger*, and Jacob Milgrom, in the Anchor Bible Leviticus commentary, read the dietary list exactly this way: as a folk-taxonomy in which the Israelite observer sorted animals by visible, salient traits — does it chew constantly (apparent cud-chewing) and does it have a split hoof? Walter Houston's monograph on the clean/unclean animal laws likewise treats the criteria as empirical generalizations drawn from ordinary observation, not as a precise zoological key; John Hartley's commentary concurs that the hare's continual chewing motion was the natural basis for the grouping. On this reading the text is not committing a blunder so much as recording a culturally embedded, observation-based classification typical of its time and place — which is a coherent account of an ancient priestly writer but a more awkward one for a claim of dictation by an omniscient source.

The harmonization therefore fails on the strict question ("do hares bring up cud?") while the historical-critical reading succeeds on the descriptive question ("why did the writer say so?"). Cecotrophy redefines *gerah* to fit modern physiology rather than reading the Hebrew on its own terms; the directional verb and the camel/hyrax pairing both point to apparent rumination judged by jaw motion.

Where the critical reading lands: genuine factual error, fully intelligible as ancient observational taxonomy.