Hi,
Only by the modern definition of bird.
Yes but then there is much more of the Bible that we wouldnt understand then. The thing is, you have to look at what else has been categorised along with the bat here, everything else is a bird isn't it?
Also, our modern defintion in regard to 'insect' is anachronistic as well, and our defintion of 'fish' too. The translators had to give it a defintion that makes sense to us, they would have to justify their choice of word to the committees that scrutinised the translations.
It is not inherently wrong to group birds and bats.
It is unscientific though isn't it? So if the Bible is unscientific, or prescientific, why are so many believers intent on proving that there is indeed accurate scientific information in the Bible.
I do not think that we are that far apart here, we both appear to believe that the Bible should be read for what it is, a collection of ancient literature written for a specific religious purpose.
The authors were not interested in giving accurate scientific information, they were only intent in informing their audience about the relationship between God and Israel, His chosen people.
The only point I had to bring up was that you couldn't say this is the most 'oft-quoted error' when we do not know for a fact if it is an error or not, you admit yourself that we don't know exactly what they meant, so they could have meant it was a 'bird'. They could have meant that they believed that the bat belonged to the same 'kind' as lapwings and doves and the other listed birds.
Do you really think that they didn't know that Bats didn't have feathers? Or a beak? Or that they had fur? In other words, many of the things that we consider to make bats not birds? If they didn't know these things how would they even have had a concept of 'bat'?
This isn't the issue with the debate over this information, the issue is that God should know and he should have passed on accurate information to his prophets, this is what the whole issue is. The arguments over this apparent error is not because the protagonists think that the ancients didn't have our definitions, the argument is over why God lumped the bat in with the birds.
So, having knowledge of the non-(modern-)birdlike qualities of a bat, they still considered it to be a bird. That tells me that what they had a different idea of what a bird is than we do.
It tells me that they are a very naive society. I would guess that most children would think that the bat is a bird and this reflects the child like presentation of the listings.
This is what undermines the inerrantists belief here, not that they authors placed bats in with birds but that God told Moses that a bat is a bird. This naivety just reflects the prescientific approach that the author had, and shows that the Bible is just the work of the human imagination.
Brian.