Sanhedrin 63b ~ The Fireproof Salamander

A salamander unharmed in the fire. From Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KB, KA 16, Folio 126r, c 1350. From here.

סנהדרין סג, ב 

אף חזקיה מלך יהודה ביקש אביו לעשות לו כן אלא שסכתו אמו סלמנדרא 

During a discussion of idol worship, today's page of Talmud notes that some cult practices demanded that parents sacrifice their children by burning them alive. “Even the father of Hezekiah the King of Judea wanted to sacrifice him in this way, but his mother saved him by covering him with the blood of the salamander.” Rashi gives this explanation:

סלמנדרא - חיה קטנה שיוצאה מתנור שהאש בוערת בו שבע שנים והסך מדמה אין האור שולט בו

The salamander is a small creature that emerges from a furnace which has been burning for seven consecutive years. Fire cannot burn someone who has smeared himself with the blood of the salamander.

From where did Rashi get the idea that the salamander emerges from a fire that has been burning for seven years?  Perhaps from the Midrash Tanchumah, where it burns not seven years but seven days.

מדרש תנחומא (ורשא) פרשת וישב סימן ג

 בריות הגדלות באור ואין גדלות באויר ואיזו זו סלמנדרא כיצד הזגגין העושין את הזכוכית כשהן מסיקין את הכבשן שבעה ימים ושבעה לילות רצופין מכובד האור יוצא משם בריה הדומה לעכביש (ס"א לעכבר) והבריות קורין אותה סלמנדרא אדם סך ידו מדמה או אחד

  למה? על שתחילת בריאתה מן האור מאיבריו אין האור שולטת באותו מקום 

There are creatures that thrive in fire and not in air, like the salamander. How is it created? When glassmakers leave a furnace continuously alight for seven days and seven nights, out of the fire there emerges a creature that resembles a spider (or a mouse). That creature is called the salamander. If you cover your arm or any limb with its blood, it that place will become impervious to fire. Why is does the salamander have this ability? Because it was created from fire.

Elsewhere in the Talmud the fire-proof properties of the salamander are used as a homiletic device:

 חגיגה  כז , א

תלמידי חכמים אין אור של גיהנם שולטת בהן, קל וחומר מסלמנדרא; ומה סלמנדרא שתולדת אש היא - הסך מדמה אין אור שולטת בו, תלמידי חכמים, שכל גופן אש, דכתיב הלוא כה דברי כאש נאם ה' - על אחת כמה וכמה 

The fires of hell do not burn Torah scholars, and this is learned a fortiori. Consider the salamander which is created from fire and its blood protects from fire. How much more so is a Torah scholar protected, for his entire body is fire, as it is written "for my words are not as fire, says God" (Jeremiah 23:29).

This is all rather strange. Where does this legend come from, and does science have anything to say about fireproof salamander? Let’s find out.

“[The salamander] has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin. ”

— Leonardo da Vinci, Book XX: Humorous Writings, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880

Identifying the Talmudic Salamander

There is in fact a European species of salamander called the Fire Salamander (Salamandra salamandra) which has bright markings that serve to warn predators that it is poisonous (and that they should therefore leave it alone).  But this cannot be the salamander referred to in the Talmud, because it is found in central and southern Europe, and not in the Middle East where the Talmud was written. The talmudic salamander is the Near Eastern Fire Salamander, found in Israel, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Here is a picture of one, taken on Mt. Carmel near Haifa. 

The Near Eastern Fire Salamander, (Salamandra infraimmaculata)

The salamander is an amphibian that can grow up to thirteen inches in length and feeds on insects and larva. According to Dr Michael Warburg from the Technion, they can live for up to twenty years. He knows this because he visited the same pond on the top of Mt. Carmel for twenty-five years (!) and published a paper titled "Longevity in Salamandra infraimmaculata from Israel with a partial review of life expectancy in urodeles." And what was the name of the journal in which it was published I hear you ask. Good question.  It was Salamandra. Of course it was.

Salamanders live near ponds and streams, though they spend most of their adult lives out of the water.  They can exude a toxin when threatened, which can cause skin irritation but not much more. Since they do not have lungs they breath through their skin, which must be kept moist. And Dr. Warburg, the Technion salamander specialist, informs us that they lay their eggs in water. Not in furnaces. So from where did the rabbis of the Talmud get the ideas that they were fireproof creatures, born from the within flames? They got it from the surrounding cultures which had similar stories about the origins of the salamander.

The FIREPROOF Salamander in other cultures

According to the explorer Marco Polo (d.1324) the name of the creature comes from the Persian words Sam meaning "fire," and Andar and meaning "within."  The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 CE)  wrote that the salamander was "so intensely cold as to extinguish fire by its contact, in the same way as ice does" which demonstrates that the fireproof salamander story goes back to long before the talmudic period. The legend is also found in the writings of Saint Isidore of Seville (560-636 AD) who lived around the time that the Talmud was redacted:

The Salamander is so called because it is strong against fire....It fights against fires and alone among living things, extinguishes them. For it lives in the midst of flames without pain and without being consumed and not only is not burned, but it puts the fire out.

“The Salamander is so called because it is strong against fire....It fights against fires and alone among living things, extinguishes them. For it lives in the midst of flames without pain and without being consumed and not only is not burned, but it puts the fire out.”

— An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages; Isidore of Seville, by Ernest Brehaut, Columbia University 1912, p228

The legend is also found some unusual contemporary places. In Ray Bradbury's dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, books are banned and firemen don't have the job of putting out fires. Instead, they are tasked with burning any books that are found. Do you recall the name of their firetrucks? That's right - they were called Salamanders. The firemen also had an official symbol, which was a salamander.

We know an idea has deeply embedded itself in popular culture when it appears in The Simpsons. And in an episode called See Homer Run, Homer takes a job as The Safety Salamander, teaching schoolchildren about fire safety. And what does Homer need to wear for the job?  A salamander suit. Of course.  

From See Homer Run, in The Simpsons Season 17 Episode 6.

But that's fiction. Take a look at the logo of the International Association of Heat and Frost Workers below. It is a salamander over a fire, and insulating some pipes. And that is a fact.

Logo of the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers. It's a salamander over a fire, and insulating some pipes.

Evidence to the contrary

So the talmudic legend of the fire-proof salamander is a Jewish version of a legend found in contemporary Roman and Christian lore - a legend that still reverberates today. But although the Roman Pliny recounted the myth, he was also skeptical of it. There are numerous references on the internet which tell of Pliny throwing a salamander onto a fire, to see what would happen.  The salamander died.  But I cannot find a primary source for this story (please let me know if you find one), so let's go with Pliny's observations from his work Natural History:

As to what the magicians say, that it is proof against fire, being, as they tell us, the only animal that has the property of extinguishing fire, if it had been true, it would have been made trial of at Rome long before this. Sextius says that the salamander, preserved in honey and taken with the food, after removing the intestines, head, and feet, acts as an aphrodisiac: he denies also that it has the property of extinguishing fire.

We will leave the aphrodisiac properties of the salamander for another time, and focus instead on Pliny's observation that a simple test will confirm or falsify the legend. All you need are a couple of salamanders and a fire...which is also not an experiment too many of us would have the heart to do. But the Christian scholar, Pierius (d ~309) did.  In his work, cited by the British polymath Sir Thomas Browne, Pierius wrote:

Whereas it is commonly said that a Salamander extinguisheth the fire, we have found by experience, that it is so far from quenching hot coals, that it dieth immediately therein.

And that should settle the matter. Rabbi Dr. Natan Slifkin did not throw a salamander into a fire, but he did accidentally leave one rather too close to a heat lamp, which is, I suppose, the next best thing. "I myself once found a fire salamander which I kept in a vivarium" he wrote in his fascinating book Sacred Monsters, "and when I accidentally left a heater too close to its cage, the salamander did not so much escape unscathed, as shrivel up into a withered corpse!"

A Fireproof Newt? SORTA

Rabbi Dr. Slifkin also references a report from a 1997 edition of Herpetological Review (All Amphibians, all of the time!) from a Mark Stromberg at the Hastings Natural History Reservation in California (part of UC Berkeley). He reported seeing the California Newt (Taricha Torosa) moving over the unburned litter in front of a controlled fire that had been burning for at least three hours. Then comes this:

Each newt walked directly into the flame front and did not pause while walking through the burning leaves. The slime covering their bodies foamed up, resembling an egg meringue. Within 20-30 s they were through the flames and on the cool, black ashes of the litter. Upon close examination, the now crusty white coating easily wiped off their wet bodies. I did not observe any skin blisters and the skin color looked normal. The newts were returned to the forest litter and they continued to walk downhill. They did not stop or curl up but walked normally, proceeding at near-record newt speed. As they walked through patches of un- burned grass, the leaves and litter removed almost all of the thin, white crust. They walked under a rotting log in dense litter and I did not follow them further. Fires are frequent in central, coastal California where T. torosa is common. Foaming of the skin secretions would dissipate heat and may be a mechanism used by this species to escape wildland fires.

(I tracked down the original. You can read it here, p82-84.)

This report is fascinating, but hardly proves that salamanders are fireproof.  At best, newts may have the ability to delay the brief harmful effects of a forest fire (which would certainly make evolutionary sense).  

An Explanation

Dr Warburg, the salamander guy from the Technion, noted in his paper that the salamander only spends about 1.25% of its adult life-time in ponds. The rest of the time it lives in rotting logs and leaf litters. This might explain the origin of the legend. When our ancestors, be they Jewish, Roman, or Christian would gather logs and kindling to light a fire, they might inadvertently sweep up a salamander or two with them. When these leaves and logs were set alight, the salamanders would scuttle out of the fire as quickly as they could, and ta-da, it looks like they were born from the flames. Perhaps that is how this whole salamander fire thing started.

The legend of the fireproof salamander is almost 2,000 years old, and certainly predates the Mishnah and Talmud.  It's a great story to tell around a campfire at night. Just don't be surprised if you see a salamander emerging, unscathed, from the ashes.

Next time on Talmudology: The Youngest Mother in the World

Sanhedrin 56-60 ~ Stoning the Blasphemer, and Blasphemy Laws Today

An Act against Atheism and Blasphemy, Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1697.

Over the next few days we will be studying the laws surrounding the trial and execution of a blasphemer (with a lengthy discursus into the Seven Noachide Laws). Here are some examples:

סנהדרין נ׳ה, א

בְּכל יוֹם דָּנִין אֶת הָעֵדִים בְּכִינּוּי, ״יַכֶּה יוֹסִי אֶת יוֹסִי״

On every day of a blasphemer’s trial, when the judges judge the witnesses, i.e., interrogate the witnesses, they ask the witnesses to use an appellation for the name of God, so that they do not utter a curse of God’s name. Specifically, the witnesses would say: Let Yosi smite Yosi, as the name Yosi has four letters in Hebrew, as does the Tetragrammaton…

סנהדרין ס, א

אָמַר רַב אַחָא בַּר יַעֲקֹב: אֵינוֹ חַיָּיב עַד שֶׁיְּבָרֵךְ שֵׁם בֶּן אַרְבַּע אוֹתִיּוֹת, לְאַפּוֹקֵי בֶּן שְׁתֵּי אוֹתִיּוֹת דְּלָא

Rav Aḥa bar Ya’akov says: The blasphemer is not liable unless he blesses, i.e., curses, the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, which is to the exclusion of one who curses the two-letter name of God, spelled yod heh, who is not liable…

תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: אֶחָד הַשּׁוֹמֵעַ, וְאֶחָד שׁוֹמֵעַ מִפִּי שׁוֹמֵעַ – חַיָּיב לִקְרוֹעַ. וְהָעֵדִים אֵין חַיָּיבִין לִקְרוֹעַ, שֶׁכְּבָר קָרְעוּ בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁשָּׁמְעוּ

The Sages taught: Both one who hears the curse himself and one who hears it from the one who heard it are obligated to make a tear in their garments. But the witnesses are not obligated to make a tear when they testify, as they already made a tear when they heard it from the blasphemer himself.

The sentence for blasphemy was death by stoning. Which of course reminds us of this famous scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

But in reality, blasphemy is hardly something to laugh about, and to this day it has very real life and death consequences in more countries than you would think. So today, on Talmudology, we are going to take a look at contemporary blasphemy laws and their consequences.

How Many Countries Have Blasphemy Laws?

An astonishing four in ten countries across the world have blasphemy laws in place. According to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center, “79 countries and territories out of the 198 studied around the world (40%) had laws or policies in 2019 banning blasphemy, which is defined as speech or actions considered to be contemptuous of God or of people or objects considered sacred (and another twenty-two countries (11%) had laws against apostasy, the act of abandoning one’s faith).”

Blasphemy laws worldwide. From here.

Blasphemy Laws in Western Countries

Many western (Christian) countries have repealed their laws against blasphemy, though perhaps not as long ago as you might have thought.

• Australia (last blasphemy prosecution, 1919) abolished and repealed all blasphemy laws at the federal level with the Australia Criminal Code Act 1995, but blasphemy laws remain in some states and territories. For example, blasphemy is an offence in some jurisdictions, including New South Wales (section 49 of the Defamation Act 1974 (NSW)), Victoria, Tasmania, and South Australia, but is not in others.

• Germany still has a blasphemy law (sort of):

§ 166 Defamation of religious denominations, religious societies and World view associations

(1) Whoever publicly or by dissemination of writings (§ 11 par. 3) defames, in a manner suitable to disturb the public peace, the substance of the religious or world view conviction of others, shall be fined or imprisoned for up to three years.

• Ireland repealed its blasphemy law in January 2020. But before this, in 2017, the Irish Police opened an inquiry against the English comedian Stephen Fry. Two years earlier Fry had been asked during an RTÉ program what he might say to God at the gates of heaven. Here is how he responded, without specifying any religion,

I'd say: "Bone cancer in children, what's that about? How dare you? How dare you create a world in which there is such misery that is not our fault? It's not right. It's utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid god who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?" That's what I'd say ... the god who created this universe, if it was created by a god, is quite clearly a maniac, an utter maniac, totally selfish ...

• Italy still has a blasphemy law on the books, which punishes blasphemy against the "Deity." Be especially careful what you say about God in the northern town of Saonara; a law passed there in 2019 punishes blasphemers with a fine of €400.

• The Netherlands introduced a law against blasphemy in 1886, and it remained in force until it was repealed in 2014. It was invoked back in 1966, when the Public Prosecution Service charged writer Gerard Reve under Article 147. In his novel Nader tot U ("Nearer to Thee"), Reve had described the narrator's sexual intercourse with God, who is incarnated in a donkey. The court convicted Reve, but he appealed, and in April 1968, an appeals court quashed the conviction.

• Norway had a law against blasphemy until 2015. And here is a fun fact: In early 1980, Monty Python's Life of Brian (see above) was briefly banned in there because it 'was believed to commit the crime of blasphemy by violating people's religious feelings'. However, the ban was lifted after a group of theologians who had seen the film produced a statement saying that there was no good reason for a total ban. Life of Brian was then allowed on the big screen, provided with a poster at the beginning which stated that Brian was not Jesus. It was then marketed in Sweden as "The film so funny that it was banned in Norway."

• Thomas Aikenhead was last person hanged for blasphemy in the United Kingdom on January 8, 1697. According to witnesses, Aikenhead had said that:

  "divinity or the doctrine of theology was a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense, patched up partly of the moral doctrine of philosophers, and partly of poetical fictions and extravagant chimeras…the "Old Testament [were] Ezra's Fables... which were an allusion of Aesop's Fables, and that Ezra was... a cunning man who convinced a number of Babylonian slaves to follow him, for whom he made up a feined genealogy as if they had been descended of kings and princes in the land of Canaan, and thereby imposed upon Cyrus who was a Persian and stranger, persuading him by the device of a pretend prophecy concerning himself…

  The "New Testament the History of the Imposter Christ, and affirming him to have learned magic in Egypt, and that coming from Egypt into Judea, he picked up a few ignorant blockish fellows, whom he knew by his skill and physiognomy, had strong imaginations, and that by the help of exalted imagination, he played his pranks as you blasphemously termed the working of his miracles”

  Of Moses [he] said if there ever was such as man, "to have also learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus; [he] also you have cursed Ezra, Moses, and Jesus, and all men of that sort, affirming the holy Scriptures are so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them".

  For good measure, Aikenhead also apparently denied spirits, and maintained that God, the world, and nature, “are but one thing, and that the world was from eternity.” (Sounds very Spinoza-ish, but then, remember what happened to him). In March 2008, an amendment was passed to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 which abolished the common law offense of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales.

  And here is another fun fact: Visions of Ecstasy is the only film ever banned in the UK for blasphemy. It showed the 16th Century Spanish nun St. Teresa of Avila caresses the body of Jesus on the cross.

Blasphemy Laws in Muslim Countries

In contrast to Western countries, most Muslim countries still have blasphemy laws in place, and in some, the punishment is death.

• Pakistan is perhaps the most notorious of the countries in which blasphemy is a capital crime. As Asma Uddin noted in a her 2011 paper published in The Review of Faith & International Affairs, the bulk of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are contained within Sections 295–298 of the Pakistani Penal Code, titled “Of Offenses Related to Religions:

  “Every infringement under these sections is punishable by imprisonment, either in place of or in addition to a fine. For example, Section 295 relates to the defilement of a place of worship with the “intent to insult the religion of any class” and punishes this crime with a fine and/or up to two years of imprisonment. Section 295A relates to the “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” The statute states that such infringements include spoken and written words, as well as visible representations. The punishment for such insults is a fine and/or imprisonment for up to 10 years.

  Section 295C14 punishes derogatory remarks about the Prophet Muhammad with the death penalty or life imprisonment, in addition to a fine. The offender can commit such defamation through spoken or written words—by “visible representation or by any imputation, innuendo, or insinuation” which “directly or indirectly” defames the Prophet.

  And now for a not-fun-at-all-fact. In 2010 On November 8, 2010, the Sheikhupura District Court found Aasia Bibi, (who also used the family name Noreen) a Christian woman, guilty of blasphemy. The court ruled that there were “no mitigating circumstances,” and sentenced her to death by hanging. Her “crime”? She had got into an altercation with fellow farm workers who refused to drink water she had touched, contending it was "unclean" because she was Christian. It was alleged that she had said “The Quran is fake and your prophet remained in bed for one month before his death because he had worms in his ears and mouth. He married Khadija just for money and, after looting her, kicked her out of the house.” The Pakistani Supreme Court later acquitted her, and in 2019 she was finally allowed to leave for Canada, where she now lives. In 2011, the Governor of Punjab Salman Taseer was assassinated by a member of his own security team, because of his defense of Aaisa and his opposition to the blasphemy law.

• Indonesia’s Blasphemy Act makes it unlawful to “intentionally, in public, communicate, counsel, or solicit public support for an interpretation of a religion ... that is similar to the interpretations or activities of an Indonesian religion, but deviates from the tenets of that religion.” Uddin helpfully explained that “one of the purposes of the Act is to help the government protect Indonesia’s six recognized religions—Islam, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism—by punishing those who encourage conversion away from one of these religions or preach “deviant” interpretations of the recognized religions. The six official religions each have government-funded religious bodies that decide what is an acceptable belief for that religion and what is not.” There are countless examples of prosecutions under the Blasphemy Act. Most recently, a Muslim cleric named Panji Gumilang, 77, who runs the Al-Zaytun boarding school in the district of Indramayu in West Java, Indonesia, was arrested on charges of blasphemy and hate speech. His “blasphemy:” a decision to allow women to preach and pray beside men.

• Blasphemy under the Palestinian Authority. Waleed Al-Husseini, from the West Bank town of Qalqilya had left Islam to become an atheist, and had openly challenged and ridiculed religion online. In 2010, Al-Husseini was charged with three counts of incitement according to the Palestine Military Code of Justice, namely: "inciting religious hatred" (Article 177), "insulting religious leaders" (Article 225 and 226/B), and "offending religious views" (Article 230/A). As The New York Times reported,

  “in his hometown, the reaction seems to be one of uniform fury. Many here say that if he does not repent, he should spend the rest of his life in jail. “Everyone is a Muslim here, so everyone is against what he did,” said Alaa Jarar, 20, who described himself as not particularly pious. “People are mad at him and will not respect the Palestinian Authority if he is released. Maybe he is a Mossad agent working for Israel.”

  I’m getting tired, but you can find the same sorts of laws in Saudi Arabia (where in 2008 “at least 102 men and women, 39 of them foreign nationals, were executed. Many were executed for non-violent offenses, including drug offenses, "sodomy", blasphemy and apostasy. Most executions were held in public); Sudan (home of the infamous 2007 teddy bear blasphemy case) and the United Arab Emirates (here’s a suggestion: please don’t have a Pesach program there).

Blasphemy Laws and Terrorism

In 2017 Nilay Saiya, then from the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the State University of New York, published an intriguing paper titled Blasphemy and terrorism in the Muslim world. In it he argued that “blasphemy laws encourage terrorism by creating a culture of vigilantism in which terrorists, claiming to be the defenders of Islam, attack those they believe are guilty of heresy.” To test his thesis, he performed a “time-series, cross-national negative binomial analysis of 51 Muslim-majority states from1991–2013.” He found that “that states that enforce blasphemy laws are indeed more likely to experience Islamist terrorist attacks than countries where such laws do not exist,” and claimed not just an association, but causation:

In summary, the empirical analysis finds that the enforcement of blasphemy laws is significantly related to the number of Islamist terrorist attacks across all four models, as are a country’s level of wealth, size of population, presence of civil war, and level of fragility. The alternative hypotheses tested here do not receive support. To be sure, none of this suggests that the existence of blasphemy laws is the sole or most important state-level variable behind Islamist terrorism, only that the existence of such laws tends to fuel terrorism more often than not.

Negative binomial regressions of blasphemy enforcement and Islamist terrorism. Model 1 presents the results for the main hypothesis of the study without the inclusion of either alternative hypothesis. Model 2 runs the same analysis, this time including the variable for number of religious minorities as a proxy for the clash of civilizations hypothesis that religiously heterogeneous countries are more conflict-prone than homogenous ones. In Model 3, the second alternative hypothesis is considered; it tests whether countries under foreign occupation are subject to more terrorist attacks than unoccupied countries. Finally, Model 4 considers all of the explanatory variables together, including the two alternative hypotheses. From N. Saiya. Blasphemy and terrorism in the Muslim world. Terrorism and Political Violence 2017; 29 (6); 1087-1105.

Let Yosi smite Yosi

Let’s end with the words of the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 56a) with which we opened:

בְּכל יוֹם דָּנִין אֶת הָעֵדִים בְּכִינּוּי, ״יַכֶּה יוֹסִי אֶת יוֹסִי״

On every day of a blasphemer’s trial, when the judges judge the witnesses, i.e., interrogate the witnesses, they ask the witnesses to use an appellation for the name of God, so that they do not utter a curse of God’s name. Specifically, the witnesses would say: “Let Yosi smite Yosi”

Rabbi Alexander Kohut (1842-1894), who, among other accolades began to write a German dictionary of Talmudic phrases, (but gave up after the third letter of the alphabet when he found that the work would never be finished) was intrigued by the use of the word יוֹסִי - Yosi. In a brief paper published in 1891in The Jewish Quarterly Review he wrote that he didn’t like the suggestion that Yosi had a double meaning as both a Greek and Hebrew word. “The first Yosi sounds a bit like υἱός, pronounced huiós, meaning a son or child in ancient Greek, while the second Yosi is “יוסף, i.e., Joseph, the father of Jesus, so that " Yosi smote Yosi" imparts the idea: The son smote the father, implying that the son is mightier than the father.” Instead, he thought it all had something to do with Zeus.

In my opinion יוסה is certainly a foreign god, used as a substitute for the Tetragrammaton. The choice is suggestive, as the four letters recall the mystic number, four, of י–ק–ו–ק, three of which being identical, as Rabbi Nathan explains. The choice was furthermore a happy one, as Zeus (יוסה), the chief deity of the Greeks, was well-known all over Asia, and the witnesses, in order not to repeat the blasphemy, could with impunity cast their contempt at him. The verb יכה, conveying the idea of blasphemy, is also appropriate and in accordance with the Biblical expression, "And he smites the earth with the rod of his mouth.''

The meaning of “Yosi smote Yosi”-that is, Zeus smote Zeus -is therefore that he blasphemed the highest deity with the highest deity, whereby the highest Jewish deity being expressed by the highest Greek deity, and י–ק–ו–ק substituted by Jose (Zeus), the blasphemy was made a fitting subject of discussion during the examination of the witnesses. That יוכה is not chosen by a mere chance, but for a substitute of י–ק–ו–ק', is expressly remarked by R. Acha b. Jacob in the Talmud, and that blasphemy was only punishable when י–ק–ו–ק by י–ק–ו–ק was blasphemed, or, speaking our formaula, Zeus with Seuz (Yosi with Yosi) has already been mentioned…

Benjamin Mussafia goes so far as to maintain that the name of the small coin זוז was called thus for bearing the profile of Zeus, and therefore R. Menachem bar Simai never looked at this coin [seee Avodah Zara 50b]" Zeus' name being so widely spread, we can easily understand why it served as a typical substitute in the case we have been considering.

What Rabbi Kohut didn’t mention was the irony of the ineffable Jewish deity being substituted by the Greek one, as the court listened to the blasphemy uttered against the Jewish God. Perhaps the rabbis didn’t really care if, while pursuing a case of blasphemy against the God, they blasphemed Zeus. Which only demonstrates how one religion’s blasphemy is another religion’s praise, and how fortunate we are to live at a time and in a place where blasphemy has been replaced by a better societal norm: the right to free speech.

Sanhedrin 55a ~ When a Man (or Woman) Loves an Animal

First, A Warning

As we noted, the Talmud often discusses hypothetical cases. But not all unusual cases are hypothetical, even if they seem to be so. So please be advised that this post will discuss sexual relations between people and animals. If this is something that you would rather not read over breakfast, please skip this post, as well as page 26 of Sotah, (and pages 59a-b and bits of 63a of Yevamot).

This page of Talmud discusses details about bestiality.

סנהדרין נה, א

וְהָאִשָּׁה הַמְּבִיאָה אֶת הַבְּהֵמָה עָלֶיהָ, בֵּין כְּדַרְכָּהּ בֵּין שֶׁלֹּא כְּדַרְכָּהּ – חַיָּיב. דָּרַשׁ רַב נַחְמָן בַּר רַב חִסְדָּא: בְּאִשָּׁה שְׁנֵי מִשְׁכָּבוֹת, וּבִבְהֵמָה מִשְׁכָּב אֶחָד. מַתְקֵיף לַהּ רַב פָּפָּא: אַדְּרַבָּה, אִשָּׁה דְּאוֹרְחַהּ הִיא אַמִּשְׁכָּב מִיחַיַּיב, אַמִּידַּעַם אַחֲרִינָא לָא מִיחַיַּיב. בְּהֵמָה דְּלָאו אוֹרְחָא הִיא, לִחַיַּיב עֲלַהּ עַל כל נֶקֶב וָנֶקֶב

Rav Naḥman bar Rav Ḥisda taught: With regard to a woman there are two manners of lying. A woman who engages in intercourse with an animal, whether it is vaginal or anal intercourse, is liable. But with regard to a man who engages in intercourse with an animal there is only one manner of lying, i.e., vaginal intercourse.Rav Pappa objects to this opinion: On the contrary, a woman, whose typical manner of intercourse is vaginal, is rendered liable for lying with an animal only in that manner; she is not rendered liable for something else, i.e., for engaging in anal intercourse with an animal. With regard to a man who engages in intercourse with an animal, by contrast, since it is not its typical conduct to engage in intercourse with a man, he should be rendered liable for engaging in intercourse with it through each and every orifice.

ּBack when we studied Sotah, the Talmud sought to determine whether a woman can undergo the Sotah ordeal if she is suspected, not of adultery, but rather of bestiality, which is a legal a term for sexual relations between a human and an animal. (The preferred psychiatric term is zoophilia.) This ruling is derived from the Mishnah that we learned two days ago, which teaches that a husband cannot forbid his wife against seclusion “with one who is not a person [lit. a man].”

סוטה כו, ב

וְאֶלָּא לְמַעוֹטֵי מַאי? אָמַר רַב פָּפָּא: לְמַעוֹטֵי בְּהֵמָה, דְּאֵין זְנוּת בִּבְהֵמָה

Elsewhere there are other questions that pertain to bestiality. For example….

What about a Cohen?

In Yevamot we learned that according to Rabbi Shimi bar Hiyyah, a woman who had relations with an animal may marry a Cohen (though he does not clarify why the Cohen would want to marry such a woman). This is learned from that phrase again “one who is not a person.”

יבמות נט, ב

אָמַר רַב שִׁימִי בַּר חִיָּיא: נִבְעֲלָה לִבְהֵמָה — כְּשֵׁרָה לַכְּהוּנָּה. תַּנְיָא נָמֵי הָכִי: נִבְעֲלָה לְמִי שֶׁאֵינוֹ אִישׁ, אַף עַל פִּי שֶׁבִּסְקִילָה — כְּשֵׁרָה לַכְּהוּנָּה

Rabbi Shimi bar Hiyya said: A woman who had intercourse with an animal is permitted to marry into the priesthood. This is also taught in a baraita: If a woman had intercourse with one who is not a person, i.e., an animal, although she is liable to stoning if she did so intentionally and in the presence of witnesses who forewarned her of her punishment, she is nevertheless fit for the priesthood.

Moving right along, the Talmud in Yevamot then relates this very disturbing story:

מַעֲשֵׂה בְּרִיבָה אַחַת בְּהַיְתָלוֹ שֶׁהָיְתָה מְכַבֶּדֶת אֶת הַבַּיִת, וּרְבָעָהּ כֶּלֶב כּוּפְרִי מֵאַחֲרֶיהָ, וְהִכְשִׁירָהּ רַבִּי לַכְּהוּנָּה. אָמַר שְׁמוּאֵל: וּלְכֹהֵן גָּדוֹל. בִּימֵי רַבִּי כֹּהֵן גָּדוֹל מִי הֲוָה? אֶלָּא — רְאוּיָה לְכֹהֵן גָּדוֹל

There was an incident involving a certain girl [riva] in the village of Hitlu who was sweeping the house, and a village dog sodomized her from behind. And Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi permitted her to the priesthood,as she was not considered a zona. Shmuel said: And Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi permitted her even to a High Priest, as she was still considered a virgin. The Gemara is puzzled by this comment: Was there a High Priest in the days of RabbiYehuda HaNasi? Rather, Shmuel meant that she is fit for a High Priest.

Just to be clear: this incident is not cited as a hypothetical “what would happen if?” kind of case. It actually happened, or was believed to have been true.

It’s Time not to be WEIRD

Almost all of the readers of Talmudology, you included, are likely to have fall into the WEIRD demographic, where WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. But WEIRD people represent only about 12% of the current population of the world, and certainly did not exist during the era in which the Talmuds were written. To appreciate the rest of this post, we need to leave behind our WEIRD mindsets. Just because we can’t imagine, doesn’t mean it ain’t so.

The Case of William HAtchett

Buried in the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England for 1642, just after the granting of 600 acres of land to a Mr. Stephen Day, and right before the authorization to publish some new law books, is the following sentence:

William Hatchet, for beastuality with a cowe, is condemned to bee hanged, and the code to bee slayne & burnt or buried

The historian John M. Murrin, in his classic paper Bestiality in Colonial America, described what happened next:

Only then did Hatchet confess "the full completing this foul fact, and attempting the like before." He became so penitent that his execution was postponed an extra week to let the grace of the Lord complete its work. "There is no doubt to be made but the Lord hath received his soul to his mercy," Winthrop affirmed.

In March 1643 the Court of Assistants sentenced an Irish servant, Teagu Ocrimi, to stand at the place of execution with a halter around his neck and to be severely whipped "for a foule, & divilish attempt to bugger a cow of Mr. Makepeaces."

Whether or not William Hatchet was really guilty of the crime is not known. Remember, he was tried by the same people who brought you the Salem witch trials, in which over two hundred people were accused of being witches. Nineteen were hung. But bestiality was certainly on the minds of the Puritan settlers of New England, and it is the topic of at least two fascinating scholarly papers (one here, the other here). John Carnup, the author of one of these papers noted that William Bradford (d. 1657) who served as Governor of Plymouth Colony for some thirty years

…was probably right in ascribing the greater evidence of bestiality in Plymouth to the magistrates' diligence in bringing the guilty to trial. And it is possible that the Puritans' intense biblical-mindedness, especially in their reading of Leviticus, encouraged them to detect and prosecute crimes that justices in England were more inclined to ignore. Two years after Samuel Danforth inquired into the cry of Sodom, a writer in England remarked that 'such crimes as these are rarely heard of among us.' Rarely heard of does not mean rarely committed. Bestiality may indeed have been a common practice among young men in England's rural areas, as Thomas Granger hinted when he confessed that he had acquired the habit from a man who, in turn, had picked it up among keepers of cattle in England.

But how widespread was this practice in the rest of the world?

“Bestiality - human sexual relations with animals, has been part of the human race throughout history, in every place and culture in the world.”

— Hani Miletski. A history of bestiality. In Beetz E.M. and Podberscek A.L. Bestiality and Zoophilia. Berg, 2009. 1.

Bestiality: A Very Short History

In the introduction to her article on the history of bestiality, Hani Milestski wrote that “most of the material reviewed and discussed is anecdotal, some is unbelievable, and occasionally authors provide conflicting data. It is important to take into consideration that some of the facts and views presented came from works that are questionable with regard to their validity.” All of which makes for a rather poor foundation on which to build an edifice known as history. But let’s go on.

Bestiality seems to have been part of the very earliest human activities. Among the many cave paintings found at Valcamonica in the Italian Alps paintings is one depicting a man having sex with a horse. The painting may date back to the Paleolithic era, some 8,000 years ago (although it may also be considerably younger, say only 4,000 years old).

Continuing with Dr. Miletski’s study of anecdotal and unreliable sources, she notes that “animal–human sexual contacts are occasionally portrayed on Egyptian tombs. Apparently, “Egyptian men often had sexual intercourse with cattle or any other large domesticated animal, while the women resorted to dogs.” Despite this, bestiality was punishable in Egypt, “by a variety of torture mechanisms, leading to death,” though we have no way to weigh the truth of her claim, based as it is on self-published monographs more than fifty years old. Meanwhile, in ancient Rome,

Emperors, such as Tiberius (AD 14–37), his wife Julia, Claudius (AD 37–41), Nero (AD 54–68), Constantinus (a.k.a. Constantine the Great, AD 274–337), Theodora (Emperor Justinian’s wife, AD 520s), and Empress Irene (AD 797–802), had been known to either engage in bestiality or enjoy watching others engage in bestiality..

We will skip over the records of bestiality in the Middle Ages. There are many of them (and there’s an entire book on Sex in the Middle Ages. It might make a nice Mother’s Day gift). Instead, let’s move to more recent research. One of the first modern studies on the phenomenon was performed by Alfred Kinsey. In his 1940 survey of American sexuality, he discovered that with about 8% of all men reporting a history of sexual activity with animals and nearly half of boys growing up on a farm reporting at least one episode of sexual activity with an animal. In women, 1.5% of respondents had sex with an animal before adolescence and 3.6% had sex with an animal after adolescence. Subjects reported that three-quarters of the animals in these encounters were dogs. “Kinsey's findings” wrote one psychiatrist, “seem to suggest that bestiality may be a relatively common phenomenon.”

Bestiality and Psychiatric Illness

Psychiatrists have also learned that bestiality, or better, zoophilia, is far more common in those with psychiatric illness than it is in the general population. In one 1991 study demonstrated a lifetime bestiality prevalence rate of 30% in a group of 20 randomly selected psychiatric inpatients as compared to 0% in control groups of 20 medical inpatients and 20 psychiatric staff. Before generalizing, remember that this study has a very small sample size “and did not consider the presence of active symptoms of mental or general medical illness such as delusions, disorganized thought process, manipulative personality traits, or delirium that may have influenced their results.” In other words, perhaps some of the patients were making the whole thing up. Another (multi center!) study revealed that zoophilia is also associated with penile cancer.

Before leaving the topic, we should take note of the fact that psychiatrists encounter zoophilia often enough for one of them to have developed a new classification of it. Subtypes include a “zoophilic fantasizer” who only dreams about it, a “regular zoophile” who might turn to humans when animals are unavailable, and perhaps scariest of all, a “homicidal zoophile” whose proclivities extend to preferring to have sex with dead animals over living ones.

From Aggrawal A. A new classification of zoophilia. J Forensic Leg Med 2011;18(2):73–8.

Sometimes that Talmud discusses cases that are most certainly hypothetical. And sometimes it discusses cases that might seem to our WEIRD minds only to be hypothetical, when in fact they do occur. And sometimes it is hard to tell which is which.

“וְאָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר, מַאי דִּכְתִיב: ״זֹאת הַפַּעַם עֶצֶם מֵעֲצָמַי וּבָשָׂר מִבְּשָׂרִי״ — מְלַמֵּד שֶׁבָּא אָדָם עַל כל בְּהֵמָה וְחַיָּה, וְלֹא נִתְקָרְרָה דַּעְתּוֹ עַד שֶׁבָּא עַל חַוָּה

And Rabbi Elazar said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:23)? This teaches that Adam had intercourse with each animal and beast in his search for his mate, and his mind was not at ease, in accordance with the verse: “And for Adam, there was not found a helpmate for him” (Genesis 2:20), until he had intercourse with Eve.”

— Yevamot 63a.

Sanhedrin 45 ~ Stoning and the Height of a Lethal Fall

In today's page of Talmud we continue with the rather gruesome details of judicial execution. Here the Mishnah details the procedure for execution by stoning:

סנהדרין מה, א

 בית הסקילה היה גובה שתי קומות אחד מן העדים דוחפו על מתניו נהפך על לבו הופכו על מתניו ואם מת בה יצא ואם לאו השני נוטל את האבן ונותנו על לבו אם מת בה יצא ואם לאו רגימתו בכל ישראל 

The elevation of the stoning grounds was twice the height of a man. One of the witnesses to the crime pushes him by his hips [so that he falls on his side]. If he falls onto his chest he is turned onto his hips. If he dies [from the fall] the court has fulfilled its obligation. If he is still alive the second witness takes a stone and places it on his chest. If the condemned man dies, the court has fulfilled its obligation.  If he is not dead, he is stoned by all of Israel...

The Talmud states that condemned is standing when he is pushed.  But why push him from twice the height of a person?  According to the Mishnah in Bava Kamma (50b), a fall into a pit that is only ten handbreadths deep is lethal. If this is case, why not push the condemned from that smaller height? Rav Nahman in the name of Rabbah bar Avuha explained that pushing from the greater height insures a quicker and less painful death, thereby fulfilling the biblical requirement of loving your neighbor by choosing a more swift execution. Still, it seems rather improbable that the condemned would be killed merely by falling from a twelve foot platform.  

“ואהבת לרעך כמוך ברור לו מיתה יפה
Love your fellow as yourself, by choosing for him a better way to die”

— Sanhedrin 45a

Let's take another look at what science says about the height of lethal falls, starting with that Mishnah cited from Bava Kamma:

החופר בור ברה"ר ונפל לתוכו שור או חמור חייב אחד החופר בור שיח ומערה חריצין ונעיצין חייב א"כ למה נאמר בור מה בור שיש בו כדי להמית עשרה טפחים אף כל שיש בו כדי להמית עשרה טפחים היו פחותין מעשרה טפחים ונפל לתוכו שור או חמור ומת פטור ואם הוזק בו חייב

If a man digs a pit on public ground and a bull or a donkey falls into it, he is liable for damages. Whether he dug a pit, or a ditch, or a cave, trenches, or wedge-like ditches, he is liable for damages that his digging caused. If so why is pit mentioned in the Torah? It is to teach the following: just as a standard pit can cause death because it is ten tefachim [handbreadths] deep, so too for any other excavation to have sufficient depth to cause death, it must be ten tefachim deep. Where, however, they were less than ten tefachim deep, and a bull or a donkey fell into them and died, the digger would be exempt.  But if then animal was only injured by falling into them, the digger would be liable. (Mishnah, Bava Kamma 50b.)

THE HIGHEST FALL SURVIVED (WITHOUT A PARACHUTE)

According to The Guinness Book of Records, Vesna Vulovic  holds the world record for the highest fall survived without parachute. And how high was that? Really, really high:

Vesna Vulovic (Yugoslavia) was 23 working as a Jugoslavenski Aerotransport hostess when she survived a fall from 10,160 m (33,333 ft) over Srbsk, Kamenice, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic), on 26 January 1972 after the DC-9 she was working aboard, blew up. She fell inside a section of tail unit. She was in hospital for 16 months after emerging from a 27 day coma and having many bones broken...She never suffered any psychological trauma as a result of the incident, and never experienced any fear of flying. She is still alive today, and flies with some regularity. However, Vulovic does not consider herself lucky. Thirty years after the crash, in an interview she said:  ''I'm not lucky. Everybody thinks I am lucky, but they are mistaken. If I were lucky I would never have had this accident and my mother and father would be alive. The accident ruined their lives too."

In my years as an emergency physician I saw countless patients with injuries from falls. Most injuries were relatively minor, but several of my patients died. Is there really a minimum height below which a fall would result in a trivial, or at least a non-fatal injury? Based on my experience, the answer is an unequivocal no.  A fall from any height, however low, can result in a serious or fatal injury, and that includes a fall from standing. But that's just my experience. What does the medical literature say? Does it agree with the assertion of the Mishnah that a fall below 10 tefachim (about 76 cm or 30 inches) cannot result in a fatal injury? Let's take a look...

““At autopsy, classic findings in falls from height include aortic lacerations and vertebral compression fractures, as well as ring fractures of the skull base...Severe head injuries most frequently occurred in falls from heights below 10m and above 25m, whereas in the group that fell from 10 to 25m, few head injuries were seen and they rarely were the cause of death.”

— Turk, EM. Tsokos, M. American Journal of Forensic Medical Pathology 2004;25: 194–199

THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF FALLS

Falls are very common. In the US they make up about a third of the injuries that lead to an ED visit in the each year - that's close to eight million visits.  In keeping with my experience, national data shows that only about 1% of all fall injuries that come to the ED are serious.  And here's another interesting finding that is in keeping with my own clinical experience: it's close to impossible to predict what kind of injury a person will have based on the height of the from which the victim falls. In a paper that examined over six-hundred fatal falls that occurred in Singapore, the authors noted that  

...there was much variability in the injury severity scores, in relation to the height of fall... Thus, a subject who had fallen through a height of 10 m, with primary feet impact, could have sustained complete traumatic transection of the thoracic aorta, with haemorrhage into the pleural cavities but little else by way of serious injury; while another, similar, subject could have fallen through 20 m and had sustained multiple head, thoracic and abdominal injuries...

In fact these authors had a very hard time coming up with a model that describes the height of fall and indicators of injury severity other than to give this rather useless nugget: "Our findings suggested that the height of the fall was significantly associated with ... the extent of injury." Well thanks. But it's one thing to fall 10m or more (that's over 30 feet for those if you not on the metric system). What about falls from less lofty heights?

FALLS DOWN THE STAIRS, AND FALLS FROM STANDING

Let's start with falls down the stairs. German forensic pathologists published a paper in Forensic Science International that addressed this aspect of falls in 116 fatal cases.  The most frequent victim was a man between 50 and 60 years old, and brain and skull injuries were the most common cause of death. About 8% broke their spines as they fell and (shocker) many were intoxicated. So stairs can kill.  

What about falls from standing? Well back to the German forensic pathologists, who this time published a retrospective analysis of 291 fatal falls. Of these, 122 -that's 42% - were falls from standing. About 80% of these ground-level falls were not immediately fatal, and the victim survived anywhere from three hours to almost a year post injury. Almost 60% of the men and 11% of the women who sustained a fatal ground-level fall were (shocker again) intoxicated.  So there we have it. The medical literature demonstrates that falls from standing can certainly be lethal.  Especially after kiddush.

From Thierauf A. et al. Retrospective analysis of fatal falls. Forensic Science International 2010. 198. 92–96. Forgive the English. It wasn't their first language

The US federal government has also weighed in on the matter. OSHA, the Occupational, Safety and Health Administration has a ruled that a duty to erect fall barriers to protect employees only applies when the fall will be more than 6 feet (1.8m).  

“Each employee who is constructing a leading edge 6 feet (1.8 m) or more above lower levels shall be protected from falling by guardrail systems, safety net systems, or personal fall arrest systems.”

— 29 CFR 1926.501

Back to Stoning

How likely then, is it that executing a person by pushing him from a height of about 12 feet will result in his instant death? Not likely at all. We know (and the those German pathologists have shown) that a fall from standing can be lethal, but it doesn't happen very often, and is certainly not likely to be immediate. Remember, the pathologists found that of all lethal falls, about 42% were from a standing position. Which is not the same as saying that 42% of falls from a standing position are lethal.

There is another interesting data source that may help us, and it comes from a 1995 paper titled Fatal Work Related Falls from Roofs, published in the Journal of Safety Research.  It examined 288 falls from roofs and showed that falls from as low as 6-15 feet may be fatal. Again, this is an analysis of fatal falls, not of all falls. 

From Suruda A. Fosbroke D. Braddee R. Fatal work related falls from roofs. Journal of Safety Research 1995;26: 1-8

The LD50 for falls

The LD50 is used to describe toxins or medications, and is the dose which would kill 50% of those who ingested it.  The LD50 can also be used to describe falls, and is the height from which at least 50% of those who fell would die.  According to this medical text, the median lethal distance (LD50) for falls is four stories, which is about 48 feet, or 15 meters. Mortality increases to 90% when the fall is greater than seven stories.  

The Role of Alcohol

In considering the first step of the judicial process of stoning, there is one more factor to consider: the role of alcohol. The Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a) relates that when the convict was taken out to be executed, he would be given a drink of wine and frankincense, כדי שתטרף דעתו – in order to dull his senses. Perhaps this would make the twelve foot fall more likely to be lethal? It turns out not to be so.

While you may be more at risk from a fall if you are drunk, drunk people who fall are not more likely to sustain a lethal injury when compared with those who are sober. Pushing a drunk person off a platform is not more likely to result in their death compared to pushing a sober person, though neither is recommended.

In conclusion, the first part of the penalty of stoning - that push of a twelve foot platform - would only very rarely result in the instant death of the criminal.  This meant that the execution would proceed to the second step - in which a heavy stone was placed on the chest to cause suffocation. The details are horrific, and thankfully have not been practiced in our legal system for nearly two thousand years.