Bats are birds. Just not our kind of bird.

Perhaps the most oft-quoted biblical error round these-here parts is that it says 'bats are birds'. This strikes me as an anachronism, not an error. The term 'bird' used now means a specific branch of the heirachical tree of life, sharing certain properties, however we have no way of assertaining what exactly 'bird' (or more accurately the word translated as 'bird') meant to the writers of the time. It may well have meant 'flying non-insect' a group into which bats do, indeed, fall.In other words, we cannot know that the biblical group 'bird' refers to our modern understanding of the word 'bird'.

Is there a point to this passage, or are you just being silly? But does not mean that according to what they call a 'bird', it is a 'bird'?

Oh come on, that's semantic nonsense. Would you be happier if I refered to it as an oft-quoted biblical 'error'? In any case, how I refer to it in my pre-ramble is irrelevant to my discussion and thus cannot make it flawed. The bible is riddled with errors and contradictions; I don't think this is one of them.To consider it so is to apply a more advanced modern thinking about what constitutes a 'bird' to the writings of a bronze age culture. That strikes me as absurd.As the writer refers to the bat as being a bird, is the logical conclusion not that whatever they considered 'bird' to mean includes bats?

Only by the modern definition of bird. Applying that to an ancient text is an anachronism. 'Bird' is an arbitary grouping, which we have tried (only largely succesfully) to give a world meaningful definition to.To say a bat is a bird is only wrong by the modern definition of bird. It is not inherently wrong to group birds and bats.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'?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.

Oh, but it's science that tells us it's an arbitary grouping. At some point some dinosaur grew feathers and starting jumping off things, or running and jumping (taking a rather simplistic view of current theories on avian evolution). When did it become a 'bird'?Why do we choose to group that particular branch on the tree of life as 'bird', and not an earlier or later one? Why do we choose to group according to the particular properties we do, and not (like quadraped) on the basis of simpler morphological similarities (as the biblical writers appear to)? The anachronism is not in the biblical text, but in our reading of it.

In agreement. In agreement. In agreement.

Oops, missed the Ostriches in that passage. My bad.Clearly flight wasn't their only criteria then. Still, both bats and ostriches have two wings (non-functional in ostriches, and of a different structure in bats). Both bats and ostriches are outliers on the group of 'birds' refered to; both share traits with the more 'normal' members of the group but little with each other. I found it doubtful that they formed a formal definition of these concepts.As I see it there are two possibilities:1. The ancient hebrew scholars were so ignorant of bats that despite being able to identify them as seperate from all those other kinds of creature and knowing of their habits in caves they had failed to notice the lack of feathers, lack of beak and presence of fur.2. The chose to group bats as birds based on their ability to fly and the presence of two wings. This is, as Brian points out, scientifically naive; but not, I believe, strictly wrong.

Er, that's exactly my point, Abshalom.

I would say so, yes.