“The Lord said to Moses: Speak to the priests, sons of Aaron, and say to them: None shall become impure from a corpse among his people” (Leviticus 21:1). “Speak to the priests, sons of Aaron.” Rabbi Tanḥum ben Rabbi Ḥanilai began: “The sayings of the Lord are pure sayings” (Psalms 12:7). “The sayings of the Lord are pure sayings,” but the sayings of flesh and blood are not pure sayings.
The way of the world is that when a flesh and blood king enters a province, all the residents of the province laud him, and their lauding is pleasant to him. He says to them: ‘Tomorrow, I will construct for you public buildings and bathhouses, tomorrow I will bring you an aqueduct.’ If he then went to sleep and did not arise, where is he and where are his sayings? But the Holy One blessed be He is not so.
Rather, “the Lord God is truth” (Jeremiah 10:10). Why is He truth? Rabbi Avin said: Because “He is a living God and eternal King” (Jeremiah 10:10). “Pure sayings” – Rabbi Yudan in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan, Rabbi Berekhya in the name of Rabbi Elazar, and Rabbi Yaakov of Kefar Ḥanin, all said in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi: We find that the Holy One blessed be He employed a circumlocution of eight letters and did not express a despicable matter from His mouth, as it is stated: “From the pure animal and from the animal that is not pure” (Genesis 7:8).1The verse could have been more succinct if it stated “and the impure [hateme’a] animal.”
In Hebrew, eight additional letters are needed for the phrase “that is not pure [asher einena tehora].” In another place, He employed a circumlocution of two and three words in the Torah so as not to express a matter of impurity from His mouth. That is what is written: “And of the animals that are not pure” (Genesis 7:2). “The impure [hateme’a]” it does not say, but rather, “that are not pure [asher lo tehora hi].”2In this instance, the verse uses four words instead of one.
Some emend the text of the midrash to read: “He employed a circumlocution of three words.” Alternatively, the meaning is that in the previously-cited verse (Genesis 7:8) there are two unnecessary words, and in this verse there are three. Rabbi Yudan ben Menashe said: When He came to introduce to them the signs of the impure animal, as well, he began only with purity: “The camel, because it does not have split hooves” (Leviticus 11:4) is not written here,3It is not written first.
In order for mammals to be considered kosher they must have split hooves and chew the cud. The verses (Leviticus 11:4–7) mention four exceptional animals that have one of the two aforementioned characteristics, but are non-kosher because they lack the other. For each of these animals, the verse mentions the sign that they do have before mentioning the one they are lacking. but rather, “because it brings up its cud” (Leviticus 11:4); “the hyrax, because it does not have split hooves” (Leviticus 11:5) is not written here, but rather, “because it brings up its cud” (Leviticus 11:5), and likewise with the hare, and likewise with the pig.