Bava Kamma 81a ~ Open Defecation

On today’s page of Talmud we read about ten conditions which Joshua stipulated when he divided up the Land of Israel between the tribes. These include the right of all to pasture animals in a privately owned forest, the right of all to fish from the Kinneret (called then the “Tiberias”) using hooks, and the right to draw water from a new privately owned spring. But today we will discuss another of these conditions. The right to defecate in public.

בבא קמא פא, א

וְנִפְנִין לַאֲחוֹרֵי הַגָּדֵר, וַאֲפִילּוּ בְּשָׂדֶה מְלֵיאָה כַּרְכּוֹם

And people shall have the right to relieve themselves outdoors behind a fence, even in a field that is full of saffron [karkom].

The Talmud then outlines the details of this public right:

בבא קמא פא, ב

אָמַר רַב אַחָא בַּר יַעֲקֹב לֹא נִצְרְכָה אֶלָּא לִיטּוֹל הֵימֶנּוּ צְרוֹר. אָמַר רַב חִסְדָּא: וַאֲפִילּוּ בְּשַׁבָּת. מָר זוּטְרָא חֲסִידָא שָׁקֵיל וּמַהְדַּר, וַאֲמַר לֵיהּ לְשַׁמָּעֵיהּ (לִמְחַר): זִיל שִׁירְקֵיה

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov said: It goes without saying that one may relieve himself when necessary; this stipulation is necessary only to permit the one relieving himself to take a stone out of a wall in the field with which to clean himself. Rav Chisda said: And it is permitted to remove a stone from a wall for this purpose even on Shabbat. Mar Zutra the Pious would take a stone in this manner on Shabbat and replace it in the wall, and say to his attendant after Shabbat: Go and plaster it over, so that it would fit securely back in the wall.

So the right even extended to using the stones from another person’s wall to as toilet paper, though for extra credit it should be replaced and plastered over. Thankfully, in rich, modern, liberal western democracies, open defecation is not something most of us need to think about. But it remains a reality for much of the world's population, even here in the US.

Elsewhere in the Talmud, open defecation is discussed, well, openly:

ברכות סב, ב

וְכֵן אָמַר לֵיהּ רַבִּי זֵירָא לְשַׁמָּעֵיהּ: חֲזִי מַאן דְּאִיכָּא אֲחוֹרֵי בֵּית חֶבְרַיָּא, דְּבָעֵינָא לְמִפְנֵי

Rabbi Zeira told his servant: See who is behind the study hall, as I need to defecate…

אָמַר עוּלָּא: אֲחוֹרֵי הַגָּדֵר — נִפְנֶה מִיָּד. וּבַבִּקְעָה, כל זְמַן שֶׁמִּתְעַטֵּשׁ וְאֵין חֲבֵרוֹ שׁוֹמֵעַ. אִיסִי בַּר נָתָן מַתְנֵי הָכִי: אֲחוֹרֵי הַגָּדֵר,כל זְמַן שֶׁמִּתְעַטֵּשׁ וְאֵין חֲבֵרוֹ שׁוֹמֵעַ, וּבַבִּקְעָה — כל זְמַן שֶׁאֵין חֲבֵרוֹ רוֹאֵהוּ 

With regard to where one may or may not go to defecate, Ulla said: Behind a fence, one need not distance himself from people and may defecate immediately. In a valley or open field, one must distance himself sufficiently so that if he passes wind, no one will hear him. Isi bar Natan taught as follows: Behind a fence one must distance himself sufficiently so that if he passes wind another does not hear him, and in a valley, one must distance himself sufficiently so that no one can see him.

During Talmudic times nearly everyone defecated outside. So let’s discuss…open defecation.

Open Defecation - a Worldwide Problem

In 2018 a small team of public health and civil engineering experts conducted a survey of open defecation in the American city of Atlanta. Yes. Atlanta. America’s 37th most populous city, and home to the busiest airport in the world. They identified and mapped thirty-nine open defecation sites, the majority of which were located within just 400 meters of a soup kitchen. San Fransisco has also been challenged with open defecation on its streets. An NBC report last year found more than “300 piles of feces” throughout the downtown area, leading Dr. Lee Riley, an infectious disease expert at the University of California to conclude that areas of the city are even dirtier than the slums in some developing countries.

As its name implies open defecation is the practice of defecating in the open environment rather than using any kind of toilet. Although great progress has been made in reducing the practice, it still remains a serious challenge to public health. India is likely to be the country that comes to mind in association with open defecation, but that country has in fact made tremendous strides. “Sanitation is more important than independence,” Mahatma Gandhi remarked at a time when more than three-quarters of the population defecated in the open. Just two weeks ago, on the 150th anniversary of Gandhi’s birth, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared India free of open defecation. India launched its Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign in 2014, and Modi claimed that since then “toilets have been provided to more than 600 million people in 60 months, building more than 110 million toilets…No one was ready to believe earlier that India will become open defecation-free in such a short period of time. Now, it is a reality.” Critics are not convinced that the rates of open defecation have fallen as rapidly as Modi claimed, but there is no doubt the country has made a remarkable effort to improve the situation. According to the World Health Organization, the campaign saved as many as 300,000 deaths.

“Defecating in the open is as old as humankind. As long as population densities were low and the earth could safely absorb human wastes, it caused few problems. But as more people gathered in towns and cities, we gradually learned the link between hygiene and health and, in particular, the importance of avoiding contact with feces. Today open defecation is on the decline worldwide, but nearly 950 million people still routinely practice it. Some 569 million of them live in India. Walk along its train tracks or rural roads, and you will readily encounter the evidence.”

— National Geographic Magazine, August 2017

The percentage of people defecating in the open air declined worldwide from 1990 to 2015, with the most dramatic reductions in some of the least developed countries. Yet nearly 950 million people still practice this public health hazard. From National Geographic Magazine, August 2017.

“Open defecation, as strange as this may sound to Westerners, offers young women a welcome break from their domestic confines and the oversight of in-laws and husbands”

— National Geographic Magazine August 2017.

Bathrooms with locks - a Jewish gift to humanity

Here is a Mishnah that introduces a rather radical notion for the time: lockable latrine stalls:

משנה תמיד כו,א

ומדורה היתה שם ובית הכסא של כבוד זה היה כבודו מצאו נעול יודע שיש שם אדם פתוח בידוע שאין שם אדם

And a fire was burning there [in a tunnel off of the the side of the Temple in Jerusalem]…and there was a bathroom of honor in the Chamber of Immersion. This was its honor: If one found the door closed, he would know that there was a person there, and he would wait for him to exit before entering.

Restored view of Ithidiki’s lavatory on Amorgos, built in the mid-4th century BCE. From G.P. Antoniou, Lavatories in Ancient Greece. Water Science and Technology, Water Supply 7:1; 156-164.

This notion of privacy was not always shared. Prof Ann Olga Kolowki-Ostrow of Brandeis University is the world’s expert about Roman toilets, and author of the fascinating Archaeology of Sanitation in Roman Italy: Toilets, Sewers, and Water Systems. Virtually every home excavated in Pompeii and Herculaneum has its own private toilet she notes, but the Romans used two terms for their toilets, latrina and forica. The latrina was found in a home or private space and was not publicly accessible, whereas the forica was an open plan multi-seat facility. In contrast, the Mishnah and this passage of Talmud remind us that for Jews, the toilet was supposed to be a very private space.

More Advice on Hygiene

The Talmud has with more advice about what today we would call hygiene:

שטוף ושתי [שטוף] ואחית וכשאתה שותה מים שפוך מהן ואח"כ תן לתלמידך 

When you drink wine, rinse the cup first and only then drink from it; after you drink, rinse the cup and only then set it back in its place. But when you drink water, it is not necessary to rinse the cup afterward; rather, pour out some of the water to rinse the rim of the cup, and afterward you may give the cup to your student, if he wants to drink.

The Essenes and Hygiene

Although ancient Judaism often encouraged frequent bathing and the washing of shared utensils, some sects really emphasized it. One of the most well known was the Essenes, a sect that broke away from Jerusalem and whose members lived around the Dead Sea from the second century BCE to the first century CE. It was this sect that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in the these scrolls are strict rules for where the Essenes were allowed to defecate. According to a report published in Nature, these places had to be “far enough away from the camp not to be visible, sometimes as much as 3,000 cubits (1.4 kilometres) away in a northwesterly direction. They also had to bury their feces and perform a ritual all-over wash in the local waters afterwards.” The report continues:

At Qumran, following such instructions would take the Essene men to a nicely secluded spot behind a mound. And … the soil there bears the hallmarks of a latrine — and one not used by the healthiest of people.

Dead eggs from intestinal parasites, including roundworm (Ascaris), whipworm (Trichuris), tapeworm (Taenia) and pinworm (Enterobius vermicularis), were preserved in the soil. "If you look at a latrine from the past you will always find these parasites," comments Piers Mitchell, a medical practitioner and archaeologist at Imperial College London, UK.

It seems a pretty ordinary picture of ancient ill health, says Mike Turner, a parasitologist at the University of Glasgow, UK. He describes the pinworm rather aptly as "common as muck", adding that to use its presence to argue that the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls is "an interesting bit of lateral thinking…”

[One researcher, J. Zias] is certain that the toilet was used by the scrolls' authors. He was already convinced that the Essenes lived at Qumran from previous studies of the local graveyard, which contains remains of almost exclusively men, which fits with the fact that the Essenes were a monastic sect.

What's more, the men buried there had an average age at death of 34, making them a sickly bunch. But it wasn't the toilet parasites that finished them off, Zias suggests, but their ritual of post-poo bathing in a stagnant pool.

Geography worked against the Essenes because the pool in which they cleansed themselves was filled with run-off collected during the winter months. "Had they been living in Jericho 14 kilometers to the north, where one finds fresh spring water, or in other sites whereby one has an oasis, they would have lived quite well," Zias says.

What rotten luck: a religious code that emphasized bathing, but not the cleanliness of the water itself.

Although it lacked any idea about the causes of communicable diseases, the Talmud sometimes contained what we now understand to be very good public health advice. And the requirement to remove human waste far from habitation predates the Talmud. It is found in the text of the Torah itself:

דברים 23:10

וְיָד֙ תִּהְיֶ֣ה לְךָ֔ מִח֖וּץ לַֽמַּחֲנֶ֑ה וְיָצָ֥אתָ שָׁ֖מָּה חֽוּץ׃ 

וְיָתֵ֛ד תִּהְיֶ֥ה לְךָ֖ עַל־אֲזֵנֶ֑ךָ וְהָיָה֙ בְּשִׁבְתְּךָ֣ ח֔וּץ וְחָפַרְתָּ֣ה בָ֔הּ וְשַׁבְתָּ֖ וְכִסִּ֥יתָ אֶת־צֵאָתֶֽךָ׃ 

כִּי֩ יְה-וָ֨ה אֱלֹקיךָ מִתְהַלֵּ֣ךְ ׀ בְּקֶ֣רֶב מַחֲנֶ֗ךָ לְהַצִּֽילְךָ֙ וְלָתֵ֤ת אֹיְבֶ֙יךָ֙ לְפָנֶ֔יךָ וְהָיָ֥ה מַחֲנֶ֖יךָ קָד֑וֹשׁ וְלֹֽא־יִרְאֶ֤ה

בְךָ֙ עֶרְוַ֣ת דָּבָ֔ר וְשָׁ֖ב מֵאַחֲרֶֽיךָ׃

Further, there shall be an area for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself. With your gear you shall have a shovel, and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement. Since the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you, let your camp be holy; let Him not find anything unseemly among you and turn away from you.

How fortunate we are that we no-longer have to dig our own outside latrines, or hop behind a fence and use a stone for cleanliness. But much of the world is not as fortunate. The Gates Foundation has donated at least $200 million to fix the problem, and if you want to help, click here to donate to the World Toilet Organization. Tell them it’s in honor of Mar Zutra the Pious.

Bava Kamma 77b ~ Pig x Sheep

בבא קמא עז, ב – עח, א

ואמר רבא זה בנה אב כל מקום שנאמר שה אינו אלא להוציא את הכלאים ...אמר לך ר"א כי איתמר דרבא לטמא שנולד מן הטהור ועיבורו מן הטמא...וטהורה מטמאה מי מיעברא אין דקיי"ל דאיעבר מקלוט 

Rava said this establishes a model and teaches that wherever the term שה [seh] is stated in the Bible, it is meant to exclude a hybrid... R. Eliezer would say to you  - when did Rava state his model?  With respect to a non-kosher animal that was born from a kosher mother and a non-kosher father...But can a kosher animal conceive from a non-kosher animal? Yes, for it has been established that this case refers to a kosher animal that was conceived from a [kosher mutant animal that was] born with uncloven hooves. (Bava Kamma 77b-78a)

A pig in sheep's clothing? Nope. Just a pig.

In toady's page of Talmud we read of a debate regarding the crossbreeding of different species, and the possibility that a non-kosher animal (say, a pig) could fertilize a kosher animal (like a sheep). Here the Talmud seems to suggest that this could not happen, and that when this possibility is raised, it refers to a kosher animal that is breeding with another kosher animal but which looks non-kosher because of a mutation that causes it to have non-cloven hooves. Here is that case:

k= kosher; m= mutant, born with non-cloven hooves

This debate is part of a larger one found in another tractate of the Talmud, Bechorot. Here is part of that discussion:

בכורות ז, א

והאמר ר' יהושע בן לוי לעולם אין מתעברת לא טמאה מן הטהור ולא טהורה מן הטמא ולא גסה מן הדקה ולא דקה מן הגסה ולא בהמה מן חיה ולא חיה מן בהמה חוץ מר' אליעזר ומחלוקתו שהיו אומרים חיה מתעברת מבהמה וא"ר ירמיה דאיעבר מקלוט בן פרה ואליבא דרבי שמעון

...R. Yehoshua ben Levi said: A non-kosher female can never conceive from a kosher male, nor a kosher female from a non-kosher male, nor a large animal from a small animal, nor a small animal from a large animal, nor a domesticated animal from a non-domesticated animal, nor a non-domesticated animal from a domesticated animal, except for R. Eliezer and his disputant [in Chulin 79b], who claimed that a non-domesticated animal can conceive from a domesticated animal...(Bechorot 7a)

Which leads to the question of the day: Can a kosher animal indeed successfully breed with a non-kosher animal? Let's take a look.

When a pig loves a sheep

Pigs have been known to act, well, like pigs, and copulate with sheep. (There's even a video of it, if you are interested). But could this lead to a baby peep, or ship, or whatever you'd like to call it? There are pictures that suggest this may be so, but in actual fact this pig with wool is the rare Hungarian Mangalitza pig, and has no sheep ancestry.  

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Foster Dwight Coburn, a farmer who also served as the secretary of the Kansas Department of Agriculture published Swine in America; a text-book for Breeder, Feeder and Student, and on page 63 he made the following observation: 

There exists in some sections of Old Mexico a type of “hog” represented as the product of crossing a ram with a sow, and the term “Cuino” has been applied to this rather violent combination. The ram used as a sire to produce the Cuino is kept with the hogs from the time he is weaned. A resident of Mexico has given the following description of the Cuino: “The sow used to produce the Cuino belongs to any race, but as a rule to the Razor-Back family, which is the more numerous. There is never any difficulty with her accepting the ram when breeding time comes. The progeny is a pig—unmistakably a pig—with the form and all the characteristics of the pig, but he is entirely different from his dam if she is a Razor-Back. He is round-ribbed and blocky, his short legs cannot take him far from his sty, and his snout is too short to root with. His head is not unlike that of the Berkshire. His body is covered with long, thick, curly hair, not soft enough to be called wool, but which nevertheless he takes from his sire. His color is black, white-black, and white-brown and white. He is a good grazer and is mostly fed on grass with one or two ears of corn a day, and on these he fattens quickly. The Cuino reproduces itself, and is often crossed a second and third time with a ram. Be it what it may, the Cuino is the most popular breed of hogs in the state of Oaxaca, and became so on account of their propensity to fatten on little food.”

It may have been the most popular pig breed in Oxaca, but it was still rather an oddity in the US; newspapers found them interesting, as evidenced by two reports, from 1902 and 1908 about sheep-pig hybrids.  

The Minneapolis Journal, September 24, 1902, from here.

Los Angeles Herald. October 3, 1908, from here.

Species and interbreeding

Despite these reports, it would seem that the rule suggested by R. Yehoshua ben Levi is correct. Different species cannot successfully interbreed, because, well, because that's the definition of a species, as the Oxford English Dictionary makes clear:

A group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding. The species is the principal natural taxonomic unit, ranking below a genus and denoted by a Latin binomial, e.g., Homo sapiens.

So although it is a tautology, you get the idea: a species by definition can only breed with other members of its own species. If a pig and a sheep could breed and have offspring, they'd be members of the same species. But they are not. Pigs belong to genus Sus, and the species Scrofa, whereas sheep belong to the genus Ovis and the species Aries. Pigs have 38 chromosomes, and sheep have 54.  So they cannot cross-breed.  (Lions and tigers both have 38 chromosomes, so they can cross breed, and produce a liger.)

But it's not as simple as that.  Even if you don't have the same number of chromosomes, you can still sometimes breed outside your species. Horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62. Yet they can cross breed, resulting in a mule (if mom was a horse) or a hinny (if mum was a donkey), although these are nearly always sterile. Horses belong to the genus Equus and the species ferus, and donkeys belong to the same genus but to a different species, africanus.  Yet they can interbreed.  Which raises the question: should a horse and a donkey be re-classified as belonging to the same species? But that would be odd, because they look so different and act in very different ways.

These kinds of questions  are perplexing, and have challenged the world of biology since the time of Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778) who gave the world a way of categorizing and naming all living things called binomial nomenclature. Briefly it goes like this: the grey wolf belongs to the genus Canis and the species lupus.  Dogs belong to the same genus, Canis, and are a subspecies of wolves, so their scientific name is Canis lupus familiaris (which I suppose makes it a trinomial nomenclature).  We belong to the genus Homo and the species sapiens, whereas chimpanzees belong to a different genus and species, Pan troglodytes. Anyway just what gets a creature into one species class or another is a really challenging question, one that is still being played out in the scientific literature. There's even a 320 page book from the University of California Press in which the author "provides a new perspective on the relationship between philosophical and biological approaches" to the concept of a species. For now, though, R. Yehoshua ben Levi's generalization found in Bechorot is pretty close to the Linnaean taxonomy we use today.  We can also conclude that the general rule of the Talmud from today's daf, that a kosher animal could not successfully breed with a non-kosher one, is a pretty good rule of thumb.

“Every living thing loves its like,
and every person his own sort.
All creatures flock together with their kind.”

— Ecclesiasticus, 13:15.

 Next time on Talmudology: Is garlic good for you? 

Talmudology on the Parsha, Bo: ~ The Length of the Lunar Month

שמות 12:2

הַחֹדֶשׁ הַזֶּה לָכֶם רֹאשׁ חֳדָשִׁים רִאשׁוֹן הוּא לָכֶם לְחָדְשֵׁי הַשָּׁנָה

Rashi, citing the Mechilta, explains that Moses received a lesson in lunar astronomy:

רש׳י, שם

החדש הזה. הֶרְאָהוּ לְבָנָה בְּחִדּוּשָׁהּ וְאָמַר לוֹ כְּשֶׁהַיָּרֵחַ מִתְחַדֵּשׁ יִהְיֶה לְךָ רֹאשׁ חֹדֶשׁ (מכילתא)

החדש הזה — He showed him the moon in the first stage of its renewal, and He said to him, “This stage of renewal (חדש) shall be the moment of beginning the months.”

Apparently, Moses was a visual learner, so God pointed out the way the moon would look at various times in the month:

רש׳י, שם

נִתְקַשָּׁה מֹשֶׁה עַל מוֹלַד הַלְּבָנָה, בְּאֵיזוֹ שִׁעוּר תֵּרָאֶה וְתִהְיֶה רְאוּיָה לְקַדֵּשׁ, וְהֶרְאָה לוֹ בְּאֶצְבַּע אֶת הַלְּבָנָה בָּרָקִיעַ וְאָמַר לוֹ כָּזֶה רְאֵה וְקַדֵּשׁ (שם). .. סָמוּךְ לִשְׁקִיעַת הַחַמָּה נֶאֶמְרָה לוֹ פָרָשָׁה זוֹ וְהֶרְאָהוּ עִם חֲשֵׁכָה

הזה THIS [STAGE OF RENEWAL] — Moses was in perplexity regarding the Molad of (the exact moment when begins) the new moon — how much of it must be visible before it is proper to consecrate it as new moon: He therefore pointed it out to him in the sky with the finger and said to him, “Behold it like this, and consecrate it” (i. e., when you see the moon in a stage of renewal similar to this which you now behold you may proclaim that a new month has begun). … This chapter was spoken to him close to sunset and He pointed it out to him at nightfall.

The moon is the defining celestial object for the Jewish People, dictating the rhythms of the calendar and its cycle of special events. This week on Talmudology, we will focus therefore on one crucial aspect of this calendar: how long is a Jewish lunar month?

The Talmud addresses this question in (where else but) Masechet Rosh Hashanah:

ראש השנה כה, א

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: פַּעַם אַחַת נִתְקַשְּׁרוּ שָׁמַיִם בְּעָבִים, וְנִרְאֵית דְּמוּת לְבָנָה בְּעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה לַחֹדֶשׁ. כִּסְבוּרִים הָעָם לוֹמַר רֹאשׁ חֹדֶשׁ, וּבִקְּשׁוּ בֵּית דִּין לְקַדְּשׁוֹ. אָמַר לָהֶם רַבָּן גַּמְלִיאֵל: כָּךְ מְקוּבְּלַנִי מִבֵּית אֲבִי אַבָּא — אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה מֵעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה יוֹם וּמֶחֱצָה וּשְׁנֵי שְׁלִישֵׁי שָׁעָה וְשִׁבְעִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה חֲלָקִים

The Sages taught in a baraita: Once the sky was covered with clouds, and the form of the moon was visible on the twenty-ninth of the month. The people thought to say that the day was the New Moon, and the court sought to sanctify it. However, Rabban Gamliel said to them: This is the tradition that I received from the house of my father’s father: The monthly cycle of the renewal of the moon takes no less than twenty-nine and a half days, plus two-thirds of an hour, plus seventy-three of the 1,080 subsections of an hour.

Rabban Gamliel had a tradition that a lunar month cannot be shorter than 29 days, 12 hours and 792 chalakim (where one chelek is 1/1080 parts of an hour). Therefore, if witnesses claim to have seen a new moon before this time has elapsed after the previous new moon, they must be mistaken. But according to the medieval commentator Menachem ben Solomon (1249–1315) known as the Meiri, this period is also the longest period for a lunar month.

How the Lunar Month varies

The average length of a lunar month, that is, the period between two new moons, is 29.53059 days, which is 29 days 12 hours and 44 minutes. But this is an average, and the actual length of the month varies. This is because the moon’s rotation around the earth is not uniform. When the moon is closest to the earth (called the lunar perigee) it speeds up, and when it is furthest from the earth (at the lunar apogee) it slows down, though only by a little in each case.

From here.

Take a look at the lengths of the lunar months for this calendar year, 2024. Note the longest lunar month marked in red, and the shortest lunar month, shown in green. They differ by eight hours and fifty-seven minutes!

Lunar Calendar 2024
Lunar Month Start*	Lunar Month End*	Lunar Month Length
Jan 11, 11:57	Feb 9, 22:59	29 days, 11 hours, 2 min
Feb 9, 22:59	Mar 10, 09:00	29 days, 10 hours, 1 min
Mar 10, 09:00	Apr 8, 18:20	29 days, 9 hours, 20 min
Apr 8, 18:20	May 8, 03:21	29 days, 9 hours, 1 min
May 8, 03:21	Jun 6, 12:37	29 days, 9 hours, 16 min
Jun 6, 12:37	Jul 5, 22:57	29 days, 10 hours, 20 min
Jul 5, 22:57	Aug 4, 11:13	29 days, 12 hours, 16 min
Aug 4, 11:13	Sep 3, 01:55	29 days, 14 hours, 42 min
Sep 3, 01:55	Oct 2, 18:49	29 days, 16 hours, 54 min
Oct 2, 18:49	Nov 1, 12:47	29 days, 17 hours, 58 min
Nov 1, 12:47	Dec 1, 06:21	29 days, 17 hours, 34 min
Dec 1, 06:21	Dec 30, 22:26	29 days, 16 hours, 5 min
*all times are UTC, which may or may not be the same as GMT

The corrupted text in the Talmud

In his book Calendar and Community, the British scholar Sacha Stern pointed out that the period of the lunar moth, called a lunation, is exactly the same as in the present day rabbinic calendar. “However, the phrase אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה (‘not …less than’) which implies a minimal value, is inappropriate for what should represent a fixed value.” He continues:

Moreover, the mean lunation is totally out of context in this passage. The context of this passage is the Mishnaic, empirical calendar, which is based on the appearance of the new moon; calculation of the molad is therefore irrelevant. R. Gamliel was only establishing that the moon could not have been sighted before the 29th day of the previous month. All he could have stated, therefore, was the minimal number of days in an empirical lunar month.

Other scholars like David Gans (1743), Hayyim Slonimsky (1852) and Hayyim Yehiel Bornstein (1904) also recognized this problem. Stern therefore suggests that the text we have in our Talmud is a later addition.

Originally the text would have read: אֵין חִדּוּשָׁהּ שֶׁל לְבָנָה פְּחוּתָה מֵעֶשְׂרִים וְתִשְׁעָה יוֹם (‘not after less than 29 days’) - and no more. The interpolation שְׁנֵי שְׁלִישֵׁי שָׁעָה וְשִׁבְעִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה חֲלָקִים (‘and a half, two-thirds of an hour and 73 parts’) would have been made by an editor who thought that the mean lunation - not the minimal number of days in the month - was meant in this passage. The absence of manuscript evidence does not undermine this argument; it only suggests that the interpolation must have been made relatively early, perhaps in the late Geonic period.

The origin of 29-12-793

If Professor Stern and his intellectual predecessors are correct, the origin of the 29-12-793 period for a lunation is not in fact in the Talmud. So where does it come from? In the twelfth century Rabbi Avraham bar Hiyya acknowledged that the calculation is identical to that found in the Almagest, a Greek language compendium on mathematics and astronomy which was composed by Ptolemy in the second century. In that book Ptolemy gives the lunation in the standard Babylonian sexagesimal system as 29d, 31i, 50ii and 20iv, (where one i=1/60 of the day, one ii is a sixtieth part of that and so on). It is exactly the same length as the rabbinic lunation. Rabbi Avraham bar Hiyya claimed that Hipparchus (the second century B.C.E scholar who Ptolemy used as his source) had taken this value from the Jewish sages - the ancestors of Rabban Gamliel referred to on today’s page of Talmud. But, as Sacha Stern noted, “it seems far more plausible to assume on the contrary, that it was the rabbis who borrowed their lunation from Ptolemy.” This assumption led a number of Jewish scholars to conclude that the molad calculation of 29- 12-793 could not have been instituted before the ninth century.

This is because Ptolemy’s Almagest was not known to astronomers in the Near East before its translation into Arabic in the early ninth century…It is likely that Ptolemy’s calculation of the conjunction was only then transmitted to the Jews, who soon incorporated it into the fixed rabbinic calendar. Although somewhat conjectural, this theory remains completely plausible, particularly as evidence of the present day molad calculation only begins to emerge in the ninth century.

Stern also admits that it is also possible that rabbinic calendar makers took their lunation period of 29-12-793 directly from the Babylonians, without resorting to Ptolemy’s Almagest. If that happened, “the rabbinic lunation could have been adopted long before the ninth century.” Either way, we got it from the Babylonians.

“Whether the molad calculation was borrowed from Babylonian astronomers, or from an Arabic translation of Ptolemy’s Almagest that would have been made at the ninth century Abbasid capital of Baghdad, in the heartland of Babylonia, the geographical origins of this molad would have been the same. It was in Babylonia, indeed, that this molad would have become known to the Jews and incorporated into the present-day rabbinic calendar. ”

— Sacha Stern Calendar and Community. Oxford University Press 2001; 209-210.

Where does that 1/1080 measure come from?

In 1989, shortly before his death, Otto Neugebauer (d. 1990), who was described as “the most original and productive scholar of the history of the exact sciences, perhaps of the history of science, of our age” published a paper that reviewed the transmission of the standard Babylonian value for the lunation. In it, he noted that in the third century B.C.E (!) in Mesopotamia, there existed a small unit of measure called “barleycorn” which represented a fraction of 1/6 of a finger breadth. The finger breadth is in turn a faction of a palm, and the palm of the cubit, so that 1 cubit = 180 barleycorns. But, noted Neugebauer, “measures can lose their specific meaning and become terms for fractional parts in general….Similarly, the barleycorn, embedded in a sequence of sexagesimally arranged units, retains only its fractional significance as 18 units of 60ths, ie 1/1080.” And so the Babylonians used this measure, which we inherited as halakim (parts). representing 1/1080 of an hour.

The Babylonians also discovered the nineteen year cycle around 600 B.C.E. which today is known as the Metonic cycle. It is is the period after which the phases of the moon recur at the same time of the year. They kept careful records of the time for a number of lunar cycles, and used these to calculate the average lunation. These were later adopted by the Romans. And by us.

No, It’s not a miracle

Some organizations, keen to spread the word about the beauty of Judaism, have looked to Rabban Gamliel and his knowledge about the length of the lunar month as proof of the divine origins of the oral law. Here is an excerpt from the Aish Hatorah Discovery Book:

So just how long is a lunar month, according to the reckoning of the Talmudic sages? The Talmud in Rosh Hashanah 25a tells us: Rabban Gamliel said...I have it on the authority of my father’s father that the renewal of the moon takes place after not less than twenty-nine and a half days, two-thirds of an hour and seventy-three parts of an hour.

Okay, class, you do the math. Two-thirds of an hour remembering that an hour is divided into 1,080 parts equals 720 parts. Add to that another 73 parts and you have 793 parts. So that according to the ancient calculation of the Sages of the Talmud, a lunar month is 29 and days plus 793 out of 1,080 parts of an hour. 793 out of 1,080 equals 0.734259 hours, which equals 0,03059 days. Add to that 29.5 days, and the average length of the lunar month according to the Rabbis is 29.53059 days.

What is so incredibly amazing about all this is the fact that, in our own times, the scientists and researchers at NASA have spent years of research using satellites, hairline telescopes, laser beams and supercomputers and all this in order to determine the exact length of the synodic (lunar) month. And the calculation they came up is that the length of the lunar month is 29.530588 days. The difference between this figure and that used by the Sages is .0000006, or one sixth millionth of a day!!!

Incredible! How could the Sages of millennia ago have been able to calculate the exact length of the lunar month with such incredible precision, enabling them to accurately and successfully balance the solar and lunar cycles for so many thousands of years?! With absolutely no modern technological tools and equipment, how could the Rabbis of old have had access to such accurate information way ahead of their time?! [Can you say G-d?]

We actually have a tradition, based on an ancient Midrash, that when G-d commanded Moses regarding the establishment of the calendar and the Jewish holidays based on the sanctification of the New Moon, He also gave to Moses all the secrets and vital information necessary to accurately calculate and balance the solar and lunar cycles.

Maybe accepting the Torah as G-d’s truth doesn’t require such a leap of faith after all?

There may be lots of good reasons to follow traditional Jewish practice, but, contra Aish Hatorah, the knowledge of the length of the lunar month is not one of them. It was an inheritance we took from the Babylonians, and unless Aish is suggesting that God revealed the average length of the lunar month to them, knowing the history of the Jewish lunation reveals something else and just as impressive. It is the ingenuity of the human mind.

Talmudology on the Parsha, Va'erah: Scientific Explanations of the Plagues

9:3 שמות

הִנֵּ֨ה יַד־ה׳ הוֹיָ֗ה בְּמִקְנְךָ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר בַּשָּׂדֶ֔ה בַּסּוּסִ֤ים בַּֽחֲמֹרִים֙ בַּגְּמַלִּ֔ים בַּבָּקָ֖ר וּבַצֹּ֑אן דֶּ֖בֶר כָּבֵ֥ד מְאֹֽד׃

Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous plague.

Scientific Explanations of the Ten Plagues

There is a fascinating explanation on this pasuk from Rabbi Yehuda Ayyash (1688–1760) who lived in Algiers, and served as rabbi of the city. He eventually made his way to Jerusalem although his lengthy work, Vezot Leyehuda was published in Sulzbach, Germany in 1776. It included a commentary on the Pesach Haggadah, in which Rabbi Ayyash asked why, when God threatened Pharaoh with the plague of pestilence [dever] the Torah used the specific words found in our parsha: “ . . . the hand of the Lord will strike cattle which is in the field” (Exodus 9:3). It would surely have been obvious that cattle, which generally spend time outside in fields, would be smitten with the plague there, in those same fields.

To explain why this location—the fields—was specifically mentioned, Rabbi Ayyash reminded his readers of the etiology of plagues, or what today we might call their scientific explanations. They were believed to have been caused by foul air, or miasmas, which poisoned those who breathed it. Therefore, when a plague struck, it was best to flee to a place where the air was clean of these poisonous vapors, and this often meant leaving the confines of one’s home and living in open fields.

Yehudah Ayyash, Vezot L’Yehudah. Sulzbach 1776. 58a column II.

It was important to note that in a pandemic [magefah] most of the sickness is caused by poisonous air and foul smells. Therefore, many people flee to the fields and orchards and meadows, open spaces where there is no foul air, but instead the air is pure and clean and sweet . . . And it is here that the Egyptians were forced to acknowledge the hand of God and his providence, because they realized that these deaths were not natural . . . for they occurred in the fields and not inside, which is the opposite of what usually happens. This is the hand of God and there is none like Him.

This account was published some two centuries before a rational etiology of the Ten Plagues became a topic of scientific interest. and it demonstrated that even traditional Jews turned to the scientific theories of their time as a starting point for understanding the significance of biblical miracles. Although Rabbi Ayyash understood the plague of pestilence as a supernatural event and a reversal of the natural order, it could only be understood as such using the widely accepted theory of miasmas to explain how it miraculously everted the natural order.

Academic scholars generally do not view the Bible as the word of God given at Sinai. Instead, it is a collection written and edited over hundreds of years, starting around the tenth century B.C.E. and ending sometime in the fifth. What natural events, these scholars have asked, might explain the Ten Plagues? Over the last sixty years there have been a number of different theories, each describing a scenario in which one plague causes the next, and each has a rational explanation. As we discuss some of the purported scientific explanations for the miraculous Ten Plagues, it is worth remembering it was not just academic scholars, historians, and scientists who used the best contemporary theories to make sense of the biblical account of the plagues. Deeply religious Jewish thinkers like Rabbi Ayyash did the same long before.

It begins with Silt, and ends with ANTHRAX

Writing in 1957, Greta Hort suggested the plagues began with silt that was washed into the Nile from one of its flooded tributaries. The river was overrun, with bacteria which caused the fish to die. As a result, “the frogs would have to leave their normal biotope and seek refuge on dry land.” However, the frogs themselves died from anthrax, one of those bacteria that bloomed in the Nile. The plague of “lice” was actually a mosquito infestation, and the fourth plague, a swarming of fleas, “is the sudden mass multiplication of some insect or other and its just as sudden disappearance, as it is known to everyone who has lived for any length of time in tropical or subtropical regions.” The decimation of the cattle was caused by their ingesting fodder contaminated with the same anthrax that killed off the frogs. When the anthrax bacillus later infected the Egyptians, it caused the skin pustules described in the sixth plague. Hort’s series of unfortunate events stops at this plague; she postulated that the last four plagues were not interconnected.

Or maybe mold

More recently, other microbes responsible for the plagues have been suggested. Perhaps it was not anthrax, but by a tiny single-celled protozoon which goes by the scientific name of Trypanosoma evans and causes disease in cattle, or the rove beetle, which produces a blister-inducing toxin. Perhaps molds played a part. They would have grown quickly in the wet and humid conditions of Egypt’s grain stores, where they released dangerous mycotoxins. In biblical times (and long beyond), firstborn sons were always treated more favorably. Maybe, “during the famine that must have followed the previous plagues, any little food that might have remained inside the houses would have been given to the firstborn. Such food would have been moldy and toxic in view of the rain, hail, and darkness.” In the mold theory, the victims of the tenth plague were killed by the very prejudices of a society that had favored them.

Or the weather

Another telling lays the blame not only on bacteria or molds but on something with which we are all too familiar—climate change, or more specifically, an “unseasonable and progressive climate warming along the eastern Mediterranean coast where Israelites worked in forced labor.” It all began with a change in the weather over the eastern Pacific Ocean, which today we call the El Niño effect. This in turn heated the Mediterranean and the atmosphere over Africa. The Nile waters warmed to a critical temperature, which allowed a massive red algae to bloom. This was described as the plague of blood. The river then became uncomfortably warm for the frogs, who fled to dry land, where they later died and spread disease. The third plague, lice, was caused by a rise in the population of small insects that enjoyed the unusual wet and humid conditions. Then came the larger fleas and biting flies of the fourth plague “having hatched in soil heavily polluted with animal urine and feces.” The fifth plague that killed Egypt’s livestock was due to infections like the Rift Valley Fever Virus and West Nile Virus, both having been spread by mosquitos enjoying the unusually warm and moist climate. Other fly larvae burrowed into the skin and were responsible for the boils inflicted on the Egyptians and described in the sixth plague. The last four plagues were also consequences of the El Niño effect. As the warm moist seas air collided with the cooler inland air, violent storms with hailstones resulted. These same storms and high winds then carried huge swarms of locusts into Egypt; as they subsided, a dense fog settled, caused by the sudden condensation of moisture. This was described in the Torah as the penultimate plague of darkness. Once again, these conditions were perfect for the mosquitos, which this time spread viral diseases into the Egyptian human rather than the animal population. Older Egyptians would have been immune, having already been infected in previous years but the younger population, which of course included the firstborn, were not so lucky. In this, the final plague, they died in large numbers.

Or Volcanoes

There is another natural explanation for the biblical plagues in Egypt. Volcanos. This was first suggested in 1940 by a father-son pair of British archeologists who theorized that a volcanic eruption along the rift valley in central Africa led to a series of ecological changes, which resulted in the plagues. The theory was criticized soon after its publication not because of its vulcanology but rather its geography: a volcanic eruption in central Africa would send lava south rather than north toward the Nile. This problem was addressed in 1964 when a German researcher suggested a new volcanic site. Around 1600 B.C.E. there had been a massive eruption that destroyed the Aegean island of Thera. It was this eruption, and not one in central Africa, that was the proximate cause of the ensuing plagues. The Aegean eruption was also offered as an explanation of the plagues in a recent book by Barbara Sivertsen. It was too far away, she notes, to have been seen in the Egyptian delta, though perhaps the people there “noticed a clattering or shattering of some of their pottery as a wave of air seemed to rush past.”The tsunami that followed the eruption flooded the Delta and contaminated the normal supplies of drinking water. Iron dust from the volcanic eruption settled in the water and was taken up by iron- eating bacteria, which in turn excreted large amounts of organic nitrogen. This nitrogen stimulates the “massive growth of toxic dinoflagellates and results in a red tide two or three months after the original dustfall.”It was this chain of events that turned the water red. Sivertsen further suggested that an echo of the plague of Blood might be found in an Egyptian text known as the Admonitions of Ipuwer: “Lo, the river is blood. As one drinks of it one shrinks from people and thirsts for water.”

The contamination of the water left it uninhabitable, and the amphibians were forced to leave, which resulted in the plague of frogs. The third plague, lice, was actually a dust storm in which fine volcanic ash reached the Delta.

Over the centuries, as the story was remembered and misremembered, the dust from the sky became lice from the ground. “The first light ashfall was not dense enough to produce darkness,” Sivertsen explained. “It was only dense enough to be perceived as dust— an acid-bearing dust, irritating the skin of man and beast, like gnats or lice or mosquitos biting. In time, the modifier “like” would be dropped from the oral tradition . . . and the dust was transformed into small biting insects.” The same oral tradition might have embellished the small insects and turned them into the large flying insects of the fourth plague. That, or the insects swarmed and invaded Egyptian homes as the ash “blocked their tra- cheal tubes and hindered their ability to fly.” This falling ash killed the livestock that could not be sheltered indoors and caused the blisters, described in the fifth and sixth plagues. This would explain the biblical connection between hot soot and the plague of blisters and boils: “Then God said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Take handfuls of soot from a furnace and have Moses toss it into the air in the presence of Pharaoh. It will become fine dust over the whole land of Egypt, and festering boils will break out on men and animals throughout the land.’” The seventh plague of hail was an aggregation of cyclonic storms and ash from the eruption. The next plague, locusts, had nothing to do with volcanos, but was an ordinary perhaps even expected occurrence in the Egyptian Delta. It was remembered as an especially severe outbreak and was incorporated into exodus story. The ninth plague of darkness is readily explained by the huge clouds of volcanic ash, but rather disappointingly Sivertsen stops here. She makes no attempt to explain the etiology of the final plague, the death of the firstborn: “ . . . from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well.”

“שָׁ֭לַח מֹשֶׁ֣ה עַבְדּ֑וֹ אַ֝הֲרֹ֗ן אֲשֶׁ֣ר בָּחַר־בּֽוֹ׃
שָֽׂמוּ־בָ֭ם דִּבְרֵ֣י אֹתוֹתָ֑יו וּ֝מֹפְתִ֗ים בְּאֶ֣רֶץ חָֽם׃
שָׁ֣לַֽח חֹ֭שֶׁךְ וַיַּחְשִׁ֑ךְ וְלֹֽא־מָ֝ר֗וּ אֶת־[דְּבָרֽוֹ] (דבריו)׃
הָפַ֣ךְ אֶת־מֵימֵיהֶ֣ם לְדָ֑ם וַ֝יָּ֗מֶת אֶת־דְּגָתָֽם׃

He sent Moshe his servant; and Aharon whom he had chosen. They performed his signs among them, and wonders in the land of Ḥam. He sent darkness, and made it dark, and they did not rebel against his word. He turned their water into blood, and slew their fish.
”

— Psalm 105. 26-29

How many plagues were there, really?

Despite the importance of the plagues to the Exodus story, nowhere in the Bible are they listed as being “ten.” When they are mentioned in the book of Psalms, which they are, twice, they are reduced to only seven in number. In Psalm 78, no mention is made of lice and darkness; in Psalm 105 darkness is mentioned as the first plague, not the ninth. This suggests that there had been different traditions about both the number and the nature of the plagues, which were later unified in the account found in Exodus. In light of these different accounts, it is difficult to give credence to any of the differing attempts to explain the natural causes and order of the Ten Plagues, no matter how imaginative they are.

Regardless of which of these highly conjectural explanations might be correct, the Bible would have described the plagues in terms that would resonate with those who first read it. Those for whom the story was first written would have recognized many features of the plagues described in the book of Exodus. They would have nodded their heads at the accounts of lice infestations, skin boils, and sudden deaths, for they were also features of their own lived experience. The Ten Plagues included both natural disasters and epidemics, which, just as they do today, claimed lives in a capricious and random way. The formation of the Children of Israel took place in a crucible of disease.

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Excerpted from The Eleventh Plague; Jews and Pandemics from the Bible to COVID-19 (Oxford University Press 2023).