In the Portion of Re’eh, the Torah seems to offer two very different kinds of evidence for its own Divinity and they appear only a few verses apart. First [Devarim 14:7-9], the Torah discusses the signs of kosher mammals. A kosher mammal must possess two signs: it must chew its cud and it must have split hooves. The Torah then lists four exceptions: the camel, the hare, and the hyrax, which have one sign but not the other, and the pig, which has the other sign but not the first. The Talmud in Tractate Hullin [59a] accepts this list not as a few helpful examples but as an exhaustive claim: There is no animal that chews its cud and is impure except for these, and no animal that has split hooves and is impure except for the pig. The very boldness of the verse becomes its proof. Only the Creator of the World could speak with such confidence about the creatures He created.

At first glance, this is a powerful argument. A human author writing in the wilderness more than three thousand years ago would have been insane to stake his credibility on a global zoological claim. It would take only one expedition, one undiscovered continent, one strange mammal emerging from a jungle, to bring the whole thing crashing down. And indeed, for generations this argument was presented as one of the classic demonstrations of Torah from Heaven. The Torah knows what human beings could not have known. The Torah speaks not like a man making an educated guess but like the Manufacturer describing His own product. The Torah seems to be saying: I know the world because I made the world.

But the argument becomes more complicated as soon as the llama walks into the room. For most people, the Torah’s claim sounds straightforward until they discover how many unusual mammals exist beyond the borders of the ancient Near East. The llama, the alpaca, the vicuña, and the guanaco are New World camelids. They are related to camels, possess unusual feet that are neither classic hooves nor paws, and process vegetation through a digestive system that resembles that of the camel. Nor are they the only challenge. The hare and rabbit do not fit the modern biological definition of rumination. Instead, they practice cecotrophy,........

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