Dear Eddie —



We would be the first to agree that “Judaism does not begin and end with the Chazon Ish, and the like minded Charedi rabbis today,” and it is indeed sad to see this kind of rabbi turning into a flagship of present-day Orthodox Judaism, at least in the fields of Halakhah and religious thought (on non-political matters). In any event, our Pamphlet #3 deals basically with a matter-of-fact error in the Written Torah.

As for the attempts to identify the Torah’s shafan and arnevet with some animals beside the hyrax and the hare, we have to note that Rabbi Nosson Slifkin published, a couple of years ago, a book on the problem discussed in our Pamphlet #3. The book’s title is The Camel, the Hare and the Hyrax, and it managed to stir up heated controversy in the Orthodox Jewish world. For a description of the book and the controversy, see http://zootorah.com/controversy/controversy.html .

In our view, Slifkin’s book is the best attempt to deal with the question of shafan and arnevet (along with a number of related questions) from an admittedly religious position made to this day. This is not to say that we agree with everything he says in his book (important criticisms of Slifkin’s arguments have been published by David Goldstein on the internet: http://www.talkreason.org/articles/slifkin.cfm). But Slifkin is correct, in our view, on a good number of points, including the identification of shafan and arnevet.

According to what Slifkin says on pp. 99-105 of his book, shafan is to be identified with the rock hyrax based on the following considerations:

1. Verses in the Bible which mention shafan as a small animal dwelling in rocks (Psalms 104:8, Proverbs 30:26); these verses also show, naturally, that shafan was a familiar animal for the readers of the Bible in ancient Israel;




2. Evidence from other Semitic languages beside Hebrew (a modern South Arabian dialect which has thufun = “rock hyrax” — the correspondence of South Arabian th with Hebrew sh is normal in the framework of comparative Semitic linguistics);




3. Explicit identification of shafan as the rock hyrax (Arabic wabr) by Rabbi Sa’adiah Gaon and Rabbi Yonah ibn Jannach.

According to what Slifkin says on pp. 126-136 of his book, arnevet is to be identified with the hare based on the following considerations:

1. Evidence from other Semitic languages beside Hebrew (Arabic ‘arnab = “hare,” and evidently also Akkadian caption arnaba beside the engraving of a hare on the wall of an ancient Syrian temple; however, we were unable to check the latter assertion);




2. The famous story in the Talmud about the translation of the Torah into Greek, which shows that Chazal understood the Hebrew arnevet to be equivalent to the Greek lagos = “hare” (this story is mentioned in our Pamphlet #3; Slifkin notes additional sources in Chazal and later commentaries on the Talmud equating arnevet with lagos)




3. A number of mentions of the term arnevet in the Talmud which fit the characteristics of the hare: her feet being covered with hair, or her front legs being shorter than her hind legs, arnevet serving as a source of wool for clothes, etc.

In our view, these criteria for identification of shafan and arnevet with the hyrax and the hare, respectively, are compelling.



Daat Emet

Dear Eddie,



1) We do not think that David and Solomon were authors of Psalms and Proverbs, respectively, but that is not the point under discussion now. Anyway, neither Psalms 104:18 (“8” was a typo) nor Proverbs 30:26 are interpretations of the Pentateuch or its laws. These two verses simply describe natural phenomena as they were apparent to the authors and to their intended readers. In other words, these two verses testify to the use of the term shafan in a non-halachic context, and this use fits the hyrax perfectly.



2) It is not quite clear what you mean by “original.” Generally, when substantially the same root is attested in different Semitic languages (with possible alterations of consonants that can be explained by regular sound correspondences between given languages), scholars assume that the root belongs to a common Semitic vocabulary, inherited from the most ancient Semitic language (Proto-Semitic) — the language from which all known Semitic languages (“daughter languages”) presumably developed. To be sure, there may be some complications here, since the possibility of loanwords from one daughter language into another must be accounted for, but that is hardly possible in the case under discussion. First, if there were a borrowing, the Hebrew sh would be rendered as the South Arabian sh rather than by the voiceless interdental th (like in the English thing), and second, the words in question are identical in regard to their lexical category (nouns) and their root (originally th-f-n, which in Hebrew became sh-f-n), but not in regard to their vowel structure (vowel a in Hebrew, vowel u in South Arabian). Thus, it is most likely that the word shafan/thufun, meaning “hyrax,” belongs to the common Semitic vocabulary, which is by definition older than any date at which the Pentateuch could have been written.



3) We would not invest much credence in Saadiah Gaon’s scientific knowledge, for the simple reason that science proceeds by discovery, and normally, every subsequent generation of scientists knows more than the preceding one. Concerning the meaning of the term shafan, however, we are not talking about science but about the Hebrew language. Every language exists as a tradition: it is shared by some group of people who transmit it to their children by the sheer act of communicating with them, and those transmit it to their children in the same way, etc. And just as happens with any other tradition, some features of language inevitably change with time. It is reasonable to assume that the less time which has elapsed between two different points, the less any given language has changed between those points. Thus, the magnitude of linguistic change in Hebrew between the date of the writing of the Torah (whatever that may be) and the period of Saadiah Gaon’s life must have been smaller than between the date of the writing of the Torah and the present time. Hence, the information given by Saadiah Gaon is valuable if we want to check out the meaning of the term shafan. (Please note that we speak of the term shafan in Hebrew; in the field of comparative Semitic linguistics present-day scholars know much more than did Saadiah Gaon or any of his contemporaries.) Of course, the opinion of Saadiah Gaon cannot be the sole criterion, but when it supports the above two criteria, it lends additional weight to the identification of shafan with hyrax.



Daat Emet