As a noted philosopher observed:
“Stupid is as stupid does.”
— Forest Gump
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And how is this wrong, especially if the ancient claim doesn’t survive scientific scrutiny in our time? Weren’t the ancients wrong about the earth being center of the universe despite their era being different from ours?
This is certainly not what I am doing. I am only critiquing the ancients for making descriptions of insect anatomy that are inconsistent with anatomical data and not just for failing to conform to the monikers present in our time.
Are there four-legged insects then?
There is nothing flawed about my argument here. The Hebrew certainly had words for legs, but we are discussing why they (incorrectly) didn’t consider some limbs in certain insects as legs. We know better now and that’s why I can confidently say they were wrong in describing some insects as four-legged.
You seem to forget there are accurate and inaccurate labels, even though you gave some examples below.
Yes they are factually wrong, because the ulnar nerve is certainly not a bone, neither are bones funny. Its metaphoric or onomatopoeic speak, but it is factually wrong.
They are obviously wrong here too, if and only if, the source of pain is not from the stomach (haven’t you heard of “referred pain”: source of pain is in one site within the body, but the pain is felt elsewhere due to the interconnected nature of nerves).
We use many factually wrong statements or labels in casual discussions, but when we talk and do actual science they are expunged.
They are wrong if they don’t fit rigorously obtained facts about them.
This makes sense. I think I may have to stop using this as an example of biblical errancy. Its a case of poor translation on the part of the translators. However, if ancient Jews had seen whales, they would most likely have thought of them as regular fishes, albeit as large ones.
I am not assuming anything here. The anatomical features of grasshopper limbs do not support a four-legged description and that’s why it’s wrong. Similarly, the genetic and gross morphological features of whales don’t allow them to be classified as fishes, even though many ancients (and me, when I was younger) would have thought so.
Happy New Year.
As another noted philosopher asked, “If you call a dog’s tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
It has the same answer as the question, “If you call a dog’s tail an appendage, how many appendages does a dog have?”—and the question, “If you call a dog’s tail a zypjtilaptiqpa, how many zypjtilaptiqpas does a dog have?” A language can have semantic domains of various breadths—and a given noun in a source language can map to a semantic domain of very different breadth in the target language.
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What? You would argue with Abraham Lincoln? I suppose you would argue with Aristotle about the teeth also?
What is a leg if not an appendage used for locomotion? It is not clear why “‘springs’ or ‘jumpers’” are not a subset of legs, rather than a category all on their own.
Addendum – does this mean that quadrupeds with enlarged jumping legs, such as frogs, were considered to be ‘two legged’ by Biblical-era culture?
The reason it is not clear is because different cultures/languages may arrange their classification labels differently. Modern English definitions and semantic domains do not dictate what happens in other languages.
Even various dialects and speaker-subgroups can use different classifications of the same things. An example I’ve used here in the past involves nouns for farm animals:
A family from a major city visits a Midwestern farm. The father says to his children, “Look at the cows in that feed lot.” The farmer says, “Those are heifers. The cows are behind the dairy barn over there, lining up to be milked.”
The visitors from the city treat cow as a synonym for cattle but the farmer distinguishes between the female cattle which have given birth to a calf (cows) and the female cattle with have not (heifers). Who is correct in their classification systems and use of the noun? They both are. People can observe the world and classify-and-name objects by means of a wide variety of standards and points-of-view. Those which are familiar to us in modern day American English do not govern other cultures and languages—or even all speakers in our own population of language speakers.
In the early 1800’s the word heifer was also used as a slang term for women/girls in general. More recently that slang word has morphed into a serious insult meaning an obese women. If language vocabulary and semantic domains were represented by animated Venn diagrams, their shapes, colors, and sizes would be seen to change over time.
A statement like, “The ancient Hebrews ignorantly considered whales to be fish” fails on many levels—especially when one considers that the English language did not yet exist and our modern day notions of classifications likes whales and fish did not have identical semantic domains in the Hebrew language and the culture of that day.
Language experience and bias can easily create confusion when translating from another language. Students of New Testament Koine Greek (and Attic/Classical Greek, for that matter) often struggle with the fact that the English definite article the often functions quite differently from the definite article in Greek. (Worse yet, as far as they are concerned, ancient Greek is “missing” an indefinite article, which in English is a.) Morever, they come upon O THEOS in the Greek New Testament text and want to translate it as the god, and misconstrue it as an emphasis implying “THE God”, as in “the One True God.” No, one can’t assign English nuances and biases back into the ancient text. Some students are insistent that English usage of articles should follow the very same classifications and meanings in Greek just because of what they memorized from a vocabulary flashcard. It is as if they assume some set of “Platonic ideals” governs all languages. [We’ve and similar discussions on PS about the English language distinctions between hills and mountains seeming “necessary” to us—but ancient Hebrew used the word HAR for both “categories”, sort of equivalent to topographic elevations in English.]
(I’ve also observed some fascinating confusions between British English and American English language speakers. In one such instance, the Brit and American understood “Do you play the piano?” quite differently. The ability to play a piano instrument in general was assumed by the Brit (and older Americans of my generation) but the younger American interpreted the definite article as referring to a specific piano that was in the vacinity of their conversation (that is, a demonstrative pronoun meaning.) One could argue that when “translating” the question for the younger American, the better rendering would be “Do you play piano?” Otherwise, there could be confusion over singular versus plural pianos, as in all pianos as a category.)
POSTSCRIPT: Another set of examples which could be drawn from differences in scientific classifications versus English vernacular usage are the words berries and nuts. A blueberry is a true berry because it is a fleshy fruit without a stone produced from a single flower containing one ovary. (So are bananas and cucumbers!) The botanical/taxonomic definition of berry differs from the culinary definition. Likewise, acorns and hazelnuts are botancial nuts but almonds, walnuts, and peanuts are not—except in the culinary sense! Are English speakers “wrong” to refer to walnuts and peanuts? No. Usage dictates meaning, not a set of rules from one “more authoritative” classification system. Science doesn’t dictate what set of sounds (and letters and meanings) a culture assigns to the semantic domains it uses to “map” the world it observes.
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Allen probably thinks its a matter of translation, but it is not. Its a matter of correctly identifying body parts, and the writer of Leviticus partly failed with regards to insects. I don’t blame them for being in error here, but they were in error nonetheless.
The strange thing is that its God who is giving the commands not to eat some four-legged insects, making it seem like he was unfamiliar with the anatomy of his own creations. While its likely he accommodated their ignorance, it would have been better to educate them on actual state of reality. If God had been clear that the earth was not flat, but spheroid in the scriptures, there would be no flat-earth Christians. That accommodation came at the cost of breeding science deniers in the 21st century.
All this is very nice, but is there any actual evidence that ancient Hebrew used one word for the first two pairs of limbs on a grasshopper and another for the last pair? Or is this solely based on your belief that they couldn’t have been mistaken?
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heifer 1. a. A young cow, that has not had a calf.
– OED
I’m sorry, but I’d prefer to take OED’s definition over that of your apparently purely fictional Midwestern farmer. (Have you in fact discussed this with such an actual cattle farmer?)
This places “heifer” as a subset of “cow”, just as I suggested that “jumper” should be a subset of “leg”.
Whilst we are distinguishing scholarship from fiction, can you point to any scholarship that in fact suggests that Biblical-era cultures did in fact not call some locomotive appendages “legs”, distinguished between “jumpers” and “legs” or considered frogs to be bipedal?
Addendum:
I think the core of my argument is that it makes more sense to define “cow” as “the female of any bovine animal” (as OED appears to does), and “heifer” as a subset of it, than to define “cow” piecemeal as “the female of any bovine animal, except for female bovines that have not had a calf”. The latter definition is not inconceivable, but it is more improbable, so would need evidentiary substantiation.
Likewise the claim that the ancient Hebrew word for “leg” could have not included all locomotive appendages, but excluded locomotive appendages that were used for jumping, but that claim likwise would need evidentiary substantiation.
(As an aside, I would suggest that slang uses of word “heifer” are unhelpful, as the Bible would not I suspect used slang, and formal usage tends to be far less volatile than slang.)
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The “apparently purely fictional” Midwestern farmer was my father. I was 14 at the time and standing alongside him. Anybody who grew up on a farm of that region in my generation could tell you the same thing.
By the way, the very first Google result for the word cow is from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (a dictionary of American English, in contrast to your Oxford English Dictionary):
1a : the mature female of cattle (genus Bos)
Of course, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary may be “fictional” as well.
I’m done.
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I apologise for my assumption about your anecdote.
I don’t apologise for using OED as the basis for my argument. I would suggest that it at least undercuts the strength your argument.
I would still suggest that broad definitions with more specialised terms being used for subsets of particular interest would be more common than definitions that exclude those specialised term from the general definition.
In any case, do you have anything beyond this shaky analogy to support the exclusion of jumpers from legs?
No Allen. There is no definitive-article “the very first Google result”. Google tailors its results to its audience. My Google results shows the Wikipedia article on Cattle, two DairyNZ articles on “Cow health” and “Calving cows” and then Encyclopaedia Britannica, which defines “cow” as “in common parlance, a domestic bovine, regardless of sex and age, usually of the species Bos taurus.”
Go figure. 
I’ve already stated that I’m a signer to the statement. So I can affirm it to that degree. I’m not going to go through each article and explain it when all you’ve done is given sentence (or less) assertions of your disagreements. There are book-level explanations of this document.
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