The Bible is scientifically wrong when it says rabbits and hares "chew the cud" (Leviticus 11:6), since they aren't ruminants.

Rabbits and hares aren't ruminants: they don't have the multi-chambered, fermenting stomach that cattle, sheep, and goats use to bring up and re-chew cud. But they do practice a real digestive process called cecotrophy, or refection: food ferments in a pouch called the cecum, forms a soft, nutrient-rich dropping, and the animal re-ingests that dropping directly to run it through the gut a second time. Functionally, it accomplishes something similar to what rumination does (a second pass at fermented plant matter to extract more nutrition), and to anyone watching the animal's mouth in motion, it looks like continuous chewing. Biologists still debate exactly how equivalent cecotrophy and true rumination are, so treat this as a strong resemblance, not a precise biological match.

Leviticus 11 isn't offering a technical zoological classification; it's describing animals the way an ordinary observer would see them. A rabbit's jaw working constantly on that re-ingested material reads, to the naked eye, exactly like a cow working its cud. The dietary law's actual criterion (chewing the cud and having a split hoof, both together) is applied with real precision elsewhere in the same chapter: the text specifically names the camel, rock badger, and pig as near-miss cases, which is a teaching move, showing where a rule bites so a reader can think with it rather than just memorize a list. That argues for careful observation behind the text, not carelessness.

This is the same kind of case as the "coriander, not kid" finding elsewhere in this dietary-law study: a caution against assuming an ordinary-language biblical description is making a scientific claim it was never trying to make. This is the standard apologetic answer to the objection, not a verdict handed down by biology: the rabbit doesn't obviously catch the text in an error, and the text reads like a description of what anyone standing in a field with a hare would actually have seen.