29 These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,

30 And the ferret, and the chameleon, and the lizard, and the snail, and the mole.

31 These are unclean to you among all that creep: whosoever doth touch them, when they be dead, shall be unclean until the even.

Today’s verses call out individual animals that would also be unclean to the Israelites. First among them are rodents and reptiles, then also snails and moles. Of course, each of these would have already been forbidden under the existing laws: rodents and reptiles do not have split hooves, snails don’t have raised legs for leaping, and moles violate both requirements, whether you consider them a beast or a “creeping thing.”

Presumably these animals are called out as edge case examples, showing that if an animal seems like it might be unclean, it is unclean. So it is in moral life. We may not be able to define every type of sin and every manner of evil, but we can establish principles, provide examples, and then rule out anything else that seems like it might be in violation of those guidelines.

Let us consider one example. Is AI-generated pornography not immoral since it involves unreal characters? The scriptures may not call it out directly, but they do establish a pattern of what God has allowed in regard to sexuality, and we should omit anything questionable around that. God has allowed for a man and a woman to cleave together as one flesh, and He has forbidden extramarital sexuality. Looking at the matter of AI pornography, that starts to sound a lot like a weasel or a tortoise, something on the fringes of more familiar sin, and something we should also treat as unclean.