Thanks Cariad for the response.
If the Bible has no errors, can I ask you to explain the verse below?
Leviticus 11:6
6 The rabbit, though it chews the cud, does not have a divided hoof; it is unclean for you.
Rabbits don't chew their cud. How could God have said such a thing?
The idea of God as shown in the Gospels- Who loves us so much that He was willing to come down and live with us and teach us and die for us- then resurrect- so that we may have salvation is a beautiful. Quite frankly, I don't know of any other religion that teaches that God would love us so much and be so selfless and wonderful...
... however, just because something sounds wonderful doesn't necessarily make it true.
If it wasn't for the errors of the Bible, I would never have stopped believing what it teaches about Jesus being God. I would love very much for it to be true. In fact I believed it was true for most of my adult life.
I wish it were true. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be.
Dear Peter, it is not a contradiction when we apply context of time.
we see it as contradiction by today's scientific knowledge of ruminants animals that chew the cud. What is chew the cud? To chew the cud we accept as to eat, then regurgitate and re digest (I'm not sure if regurgitate is like absolutely the correct term) but we know that food is digested more than once in the case of ruminants in different stomach compartments (four I believe) so does the rabbit and hare regurgitate and digest again? Yes it does.
So to describe rabbits chewing the cud is not incorrect. Simply stated, it is not reasonable to accuse a 3500-year-old document of error because it does not adhere to a modern man-made classification system. Consider what rabbits do. They engage in an activity called cecotrophy. Rabbits normally produce two kinds of feces, the more common hard feces as well as softer fecal pellets called
cecotropes. Cecotropes are small pellets of partially digested food that are passed through the animal but are then reingested. As part of the normal digestive process, some partially digested food is concentrated in the cecum where it undergoes a degree of fermentation to form these cecotropes. They are then covered in mucin and passed through the anus. The rabbit ingests the cecotropes, which serve as a very important source of nutrition for the animal.
Is this the same as cud? In the final analysis, it is. Cud-chewing completes the digestion of partially digested food. The Hebrew word translated “chew” is the word
‘alah. With any attempt to translate one language to another, it is understood that there is often more than one meaning for a given word. A cursory glance at any Hebrew lexicon reveals that
‘alah can mean go up, ascend, climb, go up into, out of a place, depart, rise up, cause to ascend, bring up from, among others. Here it carries the implication of moving something from one place to another. So the phrase translated to English as “chew the cud” literally means something on the order of “eats that which is brought forth again.”
Also, most reference material on rabbit digestion says that the cecotrope pellet is swallowed whole and found intact in the rabbit stomach. However, experts have observed that rabbits keep the cecotrophe in the mouth for a time before swallowing. So even though the mucin membrane covering the cecotrope is not broken, the rabbit is able to knead it in its mouth before swallowing, possibly to enhance the process of redigestion.
So is the Bible in error here? No it is not. Rabbits re-ingest partially digested foods, as do modern ruminants. They just do so without the aid of multiple stomach compartments.
God always knows best.
Such "errors" have no baring on the central Gospel message. You are looking to the Bible when your eyes should be upon God, Yeshua showed God to us. If you wish to persuade yourself that translation issues or scribal errors etc mean the the Bible has been corrupted then that is fine and your prerogative to do so. Don't be attracted to Islam because it's believed there are no errors or contradictions in it, because are some. I have read the Qur'an and I see some plain contradictions. Muslims then tell me I simply do not understand the meaning because I am not seeing it in context, well that's ok, maybe that is so. But...then that same rule must be applied to the Bible. So such arguments do not interest me. I need to see the difference between the central message of the Bible compared to the Qur'an. That is big problem for me as the message is totally different. It's a simple thing for me God IS love, where is the greatest love shown to me from God. I know I am saved. We all have a road to travel in life and if God wants you to be a muslim then it will be so.
God bless and keep you.
