DAY 117
CHALLENGE
“Leviticus mistakenly describes insects as having four legs, but everyone knows they have six.”
DEFENSE
Everyone does know they have six. The Hebrews knew it, too.
Little boys everywhere have the curiosity and cruelty needed to count and pull off the legs of insects. Hebrew boys were no exception. Even for children who don’t do this, the discovery that insects have more legs than the four we see on other animals is a notable discovery everyone makes in childhood.
So what does Leviticus 11:21 mean when it refers to insects that walk “on all fours” (Hebrew, ‘al ’arba‘)?
In English, walking “on all fours” is a standard idiom based on the fact that most animals we interact with walk on four legs rather than standing erect and walking on two. Describing the crawling motion of insects, an English speaker might use the standard expression “on all fours” rather than switching to the awkward, unfamiliar phrase “on all sixes.” If queried, “Don’t you mean on all sixes?” he might reply, “It’s just an expression. Don’t be a pedant” (or he might use a less polite word than “pedant”). A Hebrew speaker might say the same thing, and “on all fours” may be nothing more than an expression to describe insects’ movement that is not meant literally.
We also need to comment on Leviticus 11:23’s reference to insects that have “four legs” (Hebrew, ’arba‘ raglayim). Here it is noteworthy that the word for “legs” is in the dual number. This is a grammatical feature of Hebrew that English doesn’t have. In English, we have two grammatical numbers: singular (for one item) and plural (for more than one item), but Hebrew also has a dual number for referring to things that come in pairs, like hands, eyes, and lips. Thus some scholars have taken the phrase as meaning “four pairs of legs.”
This would not be a reference to the eight legs that spiders have— not because spiders aren’t insects in modern animal taxonomies (which the ancient Hebrews didn’t have), but because the verse is referring to winged insects. However, insects do have another pair of appendages—their antennae—and these are sufficiently leglike that they might be described that way phenomenologically.
In any event, Hebrews could count and knew insects have six legs.