Names Time Has Made Uncertain

Shemini's list of forbidden birds (Leviticus 11:13-19) gives no defining criterion comparable to the split hoof and cud-chewing test for land animals or the fins and scales test for water creatures; it simply names roughly twenty species. Modern scholarship treats the identification of several of these Hebrew bird names with specific present-day species as genuinely uncertain, since the terms are rare, some appearing nowhere else in the Bible, and ancient translators, including those who produced the Greek Septuagint centuries before rabbinic tradition was fixed in writing, already disagreed on some renderings, so Jewish communities today transmit differing customary lists of traditionally kosher birds based on unbroken local practice as much as on the biblical names themselves.

Source critics attribute Shemini's dietary legislation, like the surrounding sacrificial law, to the Priestly source, and note that Leviticus 11's list of permitted and forbidden animals runs closely parallel, with some differences of detail and order, to a second list given later in Deuteronomy 14, a doubling read as evidence that the same core dietary tradition was preserved and transmitted independently within two law collections before being incorporated into the Torah's present five books.