 Numbers 4, verse 5-6, in the New American Standard Bible, a porpoise skin is unclaimed. I'm surprised it's used to cover the Ark of the Covenant. After more research, the Hebrew, Takash, says fine leather. It's not animal specific. Why would Hebrew scholars choose this as an acceptable translation? Well, they would choose that because the meaning of porpoise skin is nothing more than a conjecture. Takash here, to try to make this succinct and some of these things don't really translate well to being verbal on a podcast, but I'll take a stab at this. This word, this Hebrew lemma, has, for many scholars, they've argued that it has an Akkadian background and ultimately therefore a Sumerian background. Now ESV renders it goat skin. Again, Dana mentioned animal skin. Some other scholars like Milgrom in his commentary opt for yellow-orange like a color as the meaning of Takash and both the color and the sort of neutral animal skin idea really comes from the assumed etymology, the assumed bringing in of this word from the outside, Akkadian and Sumerian, into the Hebrew lexicon. Here's how it goes. There is a term dushu, and that refers to a stone of a certain color. Again, you have to have a little bit of Semitic language background here. You say, what dushu doesn't sound like Takash? That's true, but you can have a word in one language that doesn't have all of the continental similarities in another language still speak of the same object. This today in modern languages, and it often works that way in the ancient world. Every Akkadian word, for instance, doesn't share the same consonants as every Hebrew word. Akkadian is Semitic, Hebrew is Semitic, but Akkadian is Eastern, Hebrew is Northwest Semitic. There's geography to it. There's different language groups and dialects and subgroups and all this sort of stuff. The reason why this seems like a good correlation is you have dushu, and that comes from Sumerian dushia. That is alignable to a Hurrian word, tuk siwe. So now you're getting into the Takash, sort of phonological neighborhood. So by virtue of Akkadian and Hurrian, this one would be like the Newsy dialect is Hurrian. You may have heard of the Newsy tablets when it comes to the patriarchs, because Hurrian and Akkadian sources align these two things, dushu and tuk siwe, okay? Because they align those terms to speak of the same thing. Scholars take that, they notice the correlation with the Hurrian dialect, and they say, okay, well, that sounds a lot like Takash, and let's go look and see what that meant in Akkadian. In Akkadian, it referred to a stone of a particular color. And so some scholars would argue that Takash refers to the particular color that resulted from dying leather, there you get your animal skin idea, dying leather in the culture. Now, you notice in all of that, we didn't say anything about dolphins or porpoises. I don't know of anybody who would really defend that idea, the whole porpoise skin, you know, that it probably, I hate to put it this way, but it probably comes from older English translations or traditions about the translation. However, to be fair, Levene, I've looked this up in Levene's Numbers Commentary, and he says that, quote, dolphin skins were used quite extensively in the ancient Near East and in certain cults. That's what he says. He doesn't ever say that this term means that, but he happens to discuss that at one point in his commentary. So we don't really know why porpoise skin or dolphin skin would be an acceptable translation here. Etymologically, again, and if you're doing the comparative Semitic vocabulary, it seems that a better option is either to translate it as the thing being dyed, i.e. the animal skin, or the color that results. And so that's where you're going to find most commentators land, again, because of the Cadian and Sumerian and the Hurrian linguistic evidence. So again, having said all that, I can't find any passage where this lemma, Takash, occurs in a description of something unclean. Takash doesn't occur in Leviticus at all, for example. So I don't really know why the unclean element is part of the conversation. Maybe if under the assumption that we're dealing with a porpoise skin and that relates to some other animal group, I'm not sure. I mean, I don't want to sit here and search through everything. That makes for a really boring podcast. But again, a quick search of the lemma, it doesn't occur in any passage that names unclean things. So I'm not really sure why, again, that's part of the question, but I thought I'd throw that out there. Maybe some people thought it was unclean because, again, Near Eastern cults use dolphin skins and then they just made that correlation. Okay, well, I could see how you would get there then. But the fact of the matter is, if you actually look up this lemma's usage in the Hebrew Bible, it doesn't occur in passages that list that. Maybe it has a homograph. I don't know at this point. But again, from what I do know, just fielding the question, that's how I would answer it.