Bechorot 37b ~ Trephination (Copy)

Although human remains transmit ritual impurity, if they are missing a bit they may not transmit a certain kind of ritual impurity called tumat ohel. Which brings us to the case of a skull with a hole in it. How much needs to be missing for the skull to be incapable of causing others to become impure?

בכורות לז,ב

ובגולגולת ב"ש אומרים כמלא מקדח וב"ה אומרים כדי שינטל מן החי וימות

Concerning the deficiency in the skull: Beit Shammai say that it must be missing a piece like the size of a drilled hole, and Beit Hillel say: It must be missing an amount that if removed from a living person, he would die.

But just how big is Bet Shammai’s “size of a drilled hole?” In this daf (38a) we learn that it is the size of “the small drill hole, used by physicians” (בקטן של רופאים). So around the first century BCE there were physicians going around drilling holes (of various sizes) into the skulls of the living. Why on earth would they do such a thing, and just how common was this practice?

Trephinated skull of a 50-year old woman found in Corseaux-En Seyton, Switzerland. Growth of the bone around the burr-hole indicate that the the patient survived the procedure. From the collection of the Cantonal Museum of Archeology and History, Lausanne Switzerland.

Trephination - a hole drilled into the skull

Let’s start by introducing you to a word you may not have heard of. Trephination. It is the art of boring holes into people’s heads, and is also known as trepanning. The word is ultimately derived from the Greek trypanon, which was the instrument used to bore these head-holes. That is what the Talmud refers to as “the small drill hole, used by physicians” (בקטן של רופאים). Trephination, the removal of a piece of the skull of a living individual without penetration of the underlying soft tissues goes back a long, long way. In fact it is the oldest surgical procedure known to humanity, and it predated Bet Shammai by at least 4,000 years.

Trephinated skulls from ancient Israel

Left: Round trephination found in Jericho. Right: Angular trephination, found in Timna. Angular trephination was associated with a very low rate of survival, indicated by lack of healing of the wound in the skull. It may have been practiced for ritual rather than for therapeutic reasons. From Arensburg B., Hershkovitz I. Cranial deformation and trephination in the Middle East. Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, XIV° Série. Tome 5 fascicule 3, 1988. pp. 139-150.

Trephinations in Israel and South Sinai by type, healing status and period. From From Arensburg B., Hershkovitz I. Cranial deformation and trephination in the Middle East. Bulletins et Mémoires de la Société d'anthropologie de Paris, XIV° Série. Tome 5 fascicule 3, 1988. pp. 139-150.

Archeologists in Israel have discovered a many trephinated skulls. According to Prof I. Hershkovitz from the Department of Anatomy at Tel-Aviv University these include trephined skulls from a 7th century BCE. at Tel Duweir, a trephinated skull found in a tomb near Timna, roughly dated between the 6th century B.C.E. and the 3rd century C.E, and a skull from the Hellenistic-Roman period in Acco. Two trephinated skulls from the Middle Bronze Age I (~2,200-2,000 BCE) were found in Jericho, one from the Early Bronze age was found in Azor, and a trephinated Iron Age skull was found in Yavneh. But the very earliest skull found around the Land of Ancient Israel was uncovered in a a large cemetery at Wadi Hebran in the Southern Sinai. It belonged to a man aged between 35 and 40, who was buried around 4,000 BCE; that’s over 6,000 years ago. So yeah, trephination is a really old procedure.

“According to anthropologists who have studied tre- phined skulls, patient survival rate varied greatly. One scientist found advanced healing in 250 of 400 skulls, for a survival rate of 62.5%. Other scientists have found the survival rate to be between 23.4% and 55.3%.”

— Froeschner, E. Two examples of ancient skull surgery. J Neurosurg 1992; 76: 550-552.

Around the world with trephination

Evidence of trephination is by no-means unique to ancient Israel. Trephinated skull have been found in Peru, India, and Africa (where it is still practiced). The procedure was practiced in several different and geographically remote populations, which demonstrate that it independently evolved in each. Why would that happen?

In 2015 the neurosurgeon Miguel Faria suggested the following as an explanation. Neolithic man would have noticed that while massive blunt head injuries were invariably lethal, milder head injuries were not. There might be an extended period of unconsciousness to be sure, but some victims would, having been left for dead in the back of a cave, “miraculously” recover and become “undead.” Today we would call this period a “coma”, and, so the claim goes, it would have been supposed that “something in the head had to do with undying.” Then this:

“..an opening in the head, trephination, could be “the activating element,” the act that could allow the demon to leave the body or the good spirit to enter it, for the necessary “undying” process to take place. If deities had to enter or leave the head, the opening had to be sufficiently large…The head was chosen for the procedure, not because of any particular intrinsic importance or because of magic or religious reasons, but because of the unique and universally accumulated experience observed by primitive man in the Stone Age with ubiquitous head injuries during altercations and hunting. Otherwise, the pelvic bone or femur could have served the same purpose. We must recall that even the much more advanced ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hindu, and even Hellenic civilizations believed the heart to be the center of thought and emotions, not the brain. In fact, the association of the heart with emotions lingered to the present age.

And so it was that the procedure came to be practiced across the world. This may also explain how it also ended up being used in ancient Israel, and trickled down into a teaching about ritual impurity cited by Bet Shammai.

Bechorot 36a ~ How Often do People Lie?

בכורות לו, א

מילתא דעבידא לאיגלויי לא משקרי בה אינשי

People do not lie about something that may later be revealed [as having been false]

Can a Cohen may be relied upon to testify that first-born animal in his possession has been declared by an expert to have a blemish (which would widen its permitted uses)? Rav Yehuda ruled (in the name of Rav) that the Cohen should indeed be believed. Since that expert could come forward and state that he issued no such ruling, the Cohen would not risk being discovered as having lied. In a small village or town of a few dozen to a few hundred families, this ruling is reasonable. To lie would expose the Cohen to the risk that his fraud might be exposed. But does Rav Yehuda’s no-lying rule make sense in today’s society?

It is important to point out at the outset that Rav Yehuda is not claiming that, as a rule, people do not lie. His point is that if they risk being discovered, they will not do so. So if there is no risk of the lie being detected, well, all bets are off.

“Most people lie often”

In 2002 Robert Feldman published a study demonstrating that 60% of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies. Now this cannot really be generalized, since it involved 121 pairs of undergraduate psychology students at a large state university who had to speak to a stranger for a period of time in a laboratory setting (and for their participation, received extra credit in their introductory psychology course). Although the researchers acknowledged that it would be “ hard to imagine that people lie almost three times per 10 min during most social interactions” the study was widely cited in the media, and is another example of journalists failing to take the time to understand what a scientist is actually claiming.

But there is a substantial and more reliable body of literature about the prevalence and psychology of lying. For example, there is the Principle of Veracity, first articulated by the philosopher and ethicist Sissela Bok. According to Bok, there is a moral asymmetry between truth and deception such that ‘‘truthful statements are preferable to lies in the absence of special considerations.” In other words people will be honest when the goals are attainable through honest means; absent a motive, honesty prevails. It sounds obvious, but that didn’t prevent three psychologists from Michigan State University to put this to the test. And not all lying is the same. People tell more lies to strangers than to close friends, and if people lie, they tell different lies to their close friends than to strangers: They tell more self-centred lies to strangers, more other-oriented lies to close friends, and more altruistic lies about close friends than about strangers.

“When social, psychological, and instrumental goals...can be accomplished without deception, then, absent psychopathology, people are honest. People do not deceive when the truth is equally efficacious. However, situations are sometimes such that the truth thwarts goal attainment. In these situations, people tacitly or actively consider deceit, and deceit is more or less probable depending on the importance of the goal, the difficulty of goal attainment absent deceit, and the probability of avoiding detection. ”

— Timothy R. Levine , Rachel K. Kim & Lauren M. Hamel (2010) People Lie for a Reason: Three Experiments Documenting the Principle of Veracity, Communication Research Reports, 27:4, 271-285,

Here is how the behavioral economist Dan Ariely summed up his comprehensive research on cheating and lying in his 2012 book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty:

Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.

Unfortunately, I don’t know if any of these claims are true. Ariely has retracted a 2002 paper on procrastination and deadlines after signs of data tampering were discovered. And then came this:

A 2012 paper on dishonesty -published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and coauthored by Harvard researcher Francesca Gino - was also retracted over concerns data in the study were fabricated. The authors of Data Colada were cited in that retraction notice for providing evidence questioning the validity of the data. 

That retraction brought attention to Ariely’s work. In 2024, another of Ariely’s papers on dishonesty, this one published in the Journal of Marketing Research in 2008, earned an expression of concern for concerns “about the replicability of the results.” A 2004 paper in Psychological Science on compensation in monetary versus social markets had received an expression of concern in July 2021, noting there was “uncertainty regarding the values of statistical tests reported in the article and the analytical approach taken.” (From here.)

Oy.

The Prevalence of Lying in America

A 2010 survey of 1,000 American adults found that 60% reported telling no lies at all over a 24 hour period. It also found that almost half of the lies are told by 5% of adults. In other words, most lies are told by a few rather prolific liars.

(A) The majority of Americans reported they did not lie in the past 24 hours (60%). (B) Percentage distribution by number of lies told; 32% told one to five lies and 8% reported telling six or more lies. From Serota K, Levine T and Boster F. The Prevalence of Lying in America: Three Studies of Self-Reported Lies. Human Communication Research 36 (2010) 2–25.

Over time, the researchers concluded, “most Americans probably lie at least occasionally. But the inference of pervasive daily lying, drawn from the statistical average of one to two lies per day, and reinforced by media coverage of corporate deception and political malfeasance, as well as pop culture portrayals of deception detectors, belies the basic honesty present in most people’s everyday communication.” So there is hope after all.

Those in the UK tell more lies

Using the same methodology, the same researchers surveyed almost 3,000 adults in the United Kingdom. As in the United States, most people in the UK reported lying relatively infrequently, but a few prolific liars had deceptive behavior that is both more pronounced (more big lies) and riskier in terms of the consequences of being caught. The U.K. mean was about one-and-a-half lies per day or more than double the U.S. mean of 0.70, providing some evidence that lying is more prevalent in the United Kingdom than in the United States. Make of that what you will.

Situations in which prolific and everyday liars consider it acceptable to lie. Data from the UK survey by Serota and Levine. A Few Prolific Liars: Variation in the Prevalence of Lying. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 2015, Vol. 34(2) 138–157/

If only it were so

People will lie even if there is a risk of being discovered, and will do so brazenly and without concern for others. Just ask Elizabeth Holmes. Actually, don’t ask her, since she’d probably lie you. Rav Yehuda’s rule that people will not lie if there is a risk of their lie being uncovered is at best aspirational. Sadly, it is no-longer an accurate description of social norms. (Perhaps it never really was.) But wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were so?

Bechorot 24a ~ Can a sheep suckle a pig?

בכורות כד, א

? יולדת מרחמת או אינה מרחמת

Might an animal that has given birth show mercy and suckle the young of another species?

On today’s daf we continue the vigorous argument between the rabbis and Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel over the following question: is it possible for a female of one species to adopt and nurse the young of an entirely different species? The rabbis (in the majority) believed that such a phenomena was entirely possible, while the great Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel believed that this does not occur. The rabbis were correct.

Animals as human wet-nurses

Let’s start with us. Unless you are lactose-intolerant, you probably are nourished from the milk of another species several times a day. But putting milk in our coffee is just the most recent manifestation of our being nursed by another species. There are myths and fables in many cultures in which a human infant is nursed by animals. In Rome, it was Romulus and Remus who were suckled by a wolf; this legend dates back to at least 350 BCE. In Greek mythology, Telephus the son of Hercules was (in most versions) suckled by a deer, but on the Telephos frieze from the first half of the second century BCE he is depicted suckling from a lioness. Another Greek myth tells of Zeus being suckled by a goat Amalthea.

The infant Telephos at the lioness’ breast, detail from the Telephos frieze. From here.

The Capitoline Wolf - La Lupa Capitolina. 11-12th century. The figures of Romulus and Remus were added in the 15th century.

In his 1976 essay “The Role of Animals in Infant Feeding,” Samuel Radbill noted that these common myths of a great leader being suckled by an animal owe their popularity to the belief that “mental, emotional and physical characteristics, as well as disease, can be transmitted through milk…” He continues:

The Persian Cyrus, raised by Cyno, a bitch, was thought to derive his name from the dog. Heiro of Syracuse was fed sweet food by the apes; Semiramus was fostered by birds. Midas was nourished by ants that put food into his mouth. Habia, king of the Tartessians, and Telphus, son of Hercules and Pelias in the greek myth were both suckled by deer. Paris and Orion by bears’ Aegisthus, by a goat; Rursus Sabdrocotto of India by a lio; Gordius of Lydia , by birds. Recently delivered mares refreshed the infants Croesus, Xerxes and Lysimachus. These extraordinary foster parents were portentous omens of future greatness.

To this list we might add our very own Moses, raised for future greatness in the house of Pharaoh himself. Except, of course, that the Torah made sure to distance Moses from any suggestion that he was suckled by an animal or an Egyptian wet nurse. Instead, Moses was suckled by his own mother, and in a Midrash the rabbis describe why:

“לְפִי שֶׁהֶחֱזִירַתּוּ לְמשֶׁה עַל כָּל הַמִּצְרִיּוֹת לְהָנִיק אוֹתוֹ וּפָסַל אֶת כֻּלָּן, וְלָמָּה פְסָלָן, אָמַר הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא הַפֶּה שֶׁעָתִיד לְדַבֵּר עִמִּי יִינַק דָּבָר טָמֵא

Moses passed before all the wet nurses in Egypt, and rejected them all. And why did he reject them? The Holy One, Blessed be He said “should the mouth that will in the future speak to me suckle from that which is impure?””

— Shemot Rabba 1:25

Goats have been used as wet nurses for human infants for centuries. In her cultural history of milk, historian Deborah Valenze notes that during the syphilis plagues of the 1500s, “mothers bypassed infected wet nurses by employing goats. Similarly, eighteenth century abandoned children…received animal milk at the udder.” in 1900, a reference to animal wet nurses (in this case pigs) even made its way into the Philadelphia Medical Journal. Here it is in the original:

Philadelphia Medical Journal 1900;5: 236

More examples of Interspecies feeding

Beware of believing what you see on the Internet. But if these images are real, they are examples of interspecies feeding: camels nursing goats, goats nursing camels (at the same time as her own calf) pigs nursing tiger cubs But perhaps the most moving (and authenticated) story of interspecies care is that of the Kenyan lion that adopted a baby antelope. Six times. Take the time to watch the story here.

Tarzan, Raised by Apes

On this page of Talmud the rabbis stated that nursing females will suckle the young from another species, and they are certainly correct. Perhaps the best description of why this should be so is found in Tarzan of the Apes, the famous 1912 novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the story, John Clayton II is one year old when he is snatched from his crib by Kala, an ape whose own infant had just died. As Kala took John

…she dropped the dead body of her own into the empty cradle; for the wail of the living had answered the call of universal motherhood within her wild breast which the dead could not still…Then hunger closed the gap between them and the son of an English lord and an English lady nursed at the breasts of Kala, the great ape.

Talmudology on the Parsha, Vezot Haberacha: Where Does Dew Come From?

דברים 32:13

וּלְיוֹסֵף אָמַר מְבֹרֶכֶת יְהֹוָה אַרְצוֹ מִמֶּגֶד שָׁמַיִם מִטָּל וּמִתְּהוֹם רֹבֶצֶת תָּחַת׃

And of Joseph he said:
Blessed of God be his land
With the bounty of dew from heaven,
And of the deep that couches below

In this penultimate chapter of the Torah, Moshe blesses each of the Tribes of Israel. On reaching the Tribe of Joseph, Moshe asks that they be blessed with “the bounty of the dew from heaven” - “מְבֹרֶכֶת ה׳ אַרְצוֹ מִמֶּגֶד שָׁמַיִם מִטָּל” Dew is not something we think about very often, and its appearance was long considered a mystery, until a British physician named William Charles Wells spent thirty years solving it.

Dew In the Talmud

The Talmud takes dew very seriously, and in tractate Taanit Rabbi Hanina makes a curious claim: dew never ceases to appear, and the winds never cease to blow - אָמַר רַבִּי חֲנִינָא: לְפִי שֶׁאֵין נֶעֱצָרִין. It is for this reason that there is no requirement to ask them of God in the silent prayer known as the Amidah, (although they may mentioned, for good measure).

But in the Book of Kings, Elijah tells the wicked King Ahab that God will withhold the rain and the dew:

מלאכים א, 17:1

וַיֹּאמֶר אֵלִיָּהוּ הַתִּשְׁבִּי מִתֹּשָׁבֵי גִלְעָד אֶל אַחְאָב חַי ה׳ אֱלֹהֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֲשֶׁר עָמַדְתִּי לְפָנָיו אִם יִהְיֶה הַשָּׁנִים הָאֵלֶּה טַל וּמָטָר כִּי אִם לְפִי דְבָרִי

And Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab: As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, before whom I stand, there shall be no dew or rain in these years but according to my word.

The Talmud explains that there are two kinds of dew: regular dew that appears every day, and a second dew that only appears as a blessing. It was this second kind of dew, which helps the crops to grow, that was being witheld as a punishment. But, rather sneakily, the two dews are indistinguishable, so when God ended the drought of rain, he did not re-introduce the second type of dew, since its presence is imperceptible. In other words, a blessing that you cannot tell from the background is a blessing that does not need announcing. Or something like that.

תענית ג ב

אֲפִילּוּ טַל בְּרָכָה נָמֵי לָא אָתֵי ... מִשּׁוּם דְּלָא מִינַּכְרָא מִילְּתָא

Elijah told Ahab that even the dew of blessing would not come... [and God did not restore it afterward] because the matter is not recognizable. (Taanit 3b)

So Where does the dew come from?

For many centuries, the origin of dew was completely mysterious. The answer took a long time to arrive. Aristotle believed that there was a kind of dew equivalent of the rain cycle. As outlined in his Meteorolgy (Book I, 9-11), the sun's heat lifts moisture from the earth as vapor. Some of the vapor does not rise high during the day, because the heat lifting it is weak relative to the amount of moisture. When it cools and descends at night, it is called dew.

For all his fame, Aristotle’s claims were usually wrong. This one was no different, although it stayed around for a couple of millennia; until 1814 to be precise. The man who finally settled the question was not a meteorologist. He was a physician named William Charles Wells, who practiced St. Thomas's Hospital in London, and in 1812 he began, in his own words, to study dew “with great patience.” In 1814 he published An Essay on Dew, and Several Appearances Connected with It, which won him the Royal Society's Rumford Medal. The physicist John Tyndall later called it "a model of wise enquiry and lucid exposition," and it has been described as the “first foundational paper in modern climate science.”

“If, in the course of the night, the weather, from being calm and serene, should become windy and cloudy, not only will dew cease to form, but that which had previously formed, will either disappear, or diminish considerably.”

— William Charles Wells. An Essay on Dew. London 1815, 5-6.

Wells' Experiments

Armed with thermometers, wool, paper, string, wood shavings and a friend's suburban lawn, Wells set out to discover how dew forms. He concluded that it is neither invisible rain falling from heaven nor sweat from plants. Rather, it is condensation from air in contact with objects that have cooled by radiating their heat into a cloudless night sky. It forms best on calm, clear nights. Clouds interrupt the radiation, and cloud cover reduces or stops dew. Dark materials and poor conductors of heat collect more dew than pale ones and good conductors. Fine shavings of wood collected more dew than a thick piece of the same wood. Metals, which cool slowly, attract much less.

So rain and dew are intimately connected. Rain needs clouds; dew needs their absence. The Talmud noticed that dew behaves differently from rain, even if it lacked a mechanism to explain why. Strictly speaking, dew is not "never withheld." It depends on clear, still nights, and it will not form under cloud cover or in wind. But look at what the Gemara actually does. It places dew in the same category as wind and groups both with things that are not withheld. And it distinguishes dew from clouds, which it says can be withheld in the later part of the rainy season.

And what of the verse's claim that dew comes "from heaven"? Wells showed that dew does not fall. Rather, it forms in place, from the moisture in the air at ground level. But that is a physicist's quibble. The sky is what cools the ground, so perhaps, after all, the dew does come from heaven.

A Note on Gideon's Fleece

Readers of the ספר שופטים (The Book of Judges) will recall Gideon's famous test. While rallying the Tribes of Israel to join his fight against Ba’al, Gideon asks God for a sign he will be victorious: that a fleece left outside be wet with dew while the ground stays dry. And that’s what happens. Wells's finding that different materials collect very different amounts of dew makes that outcome easy to imagine for a woolly object. Not satisfied, Gideon asks for a different (harder?) miracle: that the fleece now remain dry while the ground became wet with dew. Now that’s much harder to explain, and so, I suppose, it was a really convincing sign.

שופטים 6:36-40

וַיֹּאמֶר גִּדְעוֹן אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִים אִם־יֶשְׁךָ מוֹשִׁיעַ בְּיָדִי אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבַּרְתָּ׃

הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי מַצִּיג אֶת־גִּזַּת הַצֶּמֶר בַּגֹּרֶן אִם טַל יִהְיֶה עַל־הַגִּזָּה לְבַדָּהּ וְעַל־כל־הָאָרֶץ חֹרֶב וְיָדַעְתִּי כִּי־תוֹשִׁיעַ בְּיָדִי אֶת־יִשְׂרָאֵל כַּאֲשֶׁר דִּבַּרְתָּ׃

וַיֹּאמֶר גִּדְעוֹן אֶל־הָאֱלֹהִים אַל־יִחַר אַפְּךָ בִּי וַאֲדַבְּרָה אַךְ הַפָּעַם אֲנַסֶּה נָּא־רַק־הַפַּעַם בַּגִּזָּה יְהִי־נָא חֹרֶב אֶל־הַגִּזָּה לְבַדָּהּ וְעַל־כל־הָאָרֶץ יִהְיֶה־טָּל׃

וַיַּעַשׂ אֱלֹהִים כֵּן בַּלַּיְלָה הַהוּא וַיְהִי־חֹרֶב אֶל־הַגִּזָּה לְבַדָּהּ וְעַל־כל־הָאָרֶץ הָיָה טָל׃

וַיְהִי־כֵן וַיַּשְׁכֵּם מִמחֳרָת וַיָּזַר אֶת־הַגִּזָּה וַיִּמֶץ טַל מִן־הַגִּזָּה מְלוֹא הַסֵּפֶל מָיִם׃

And Gideon said to God, “If You really intend to deliver Israel through me as You have said, here I place a fleece of wool on the threshing floor. If dew falls only on the fleece and all the ground remains dry, I shall know that You will deliver Israel through me, as You have said.” And that is what happened. Early the next day, he squeezed the fleece and wrung out the dew from the fleece, a bowlful of water. Then Gideon said to God, “Do not be angry with me if I speak just once more. Let me make just one more test with the fleece: let the fleece alone be dry, while there is dew all over the ground.” God did so that night: only the fleece was dry, while there was dew all over the ground.

William Charles Wells. An Essay on Dew. London 1815, 149.

חג שמח from Talmudology

עד הנצחון

Want more on Wells and dew? Have a read here and here.