Bava Kamma 55a ~ Does a Goose have a Scrotum?

בבא קמא נה,א

אמר שמואל אווז ואווז הבר כלאים זה בזה ... מאי טעמא ? אמר אביי זה ביציו מבחוץ וזה ביציו מבפנים

Shmuel said "a domestic goose and a wild goose are kilayim with one another"...what is the reason [to classify them as two distinct species]? Abbaye explained, the male wild goose has testicles that are external, but the male domestic goose has testicles that are internal...(Bava Kama 55a)

The Emden goose, a species of domestic goose.

The Koren Talmud on Wild and Domestic Geese

In today's Daf Yomi page of Talmud, we enter a brief discussion of the biblical prohibition of כלאים - kilayim - which is the prohibition of cross breeding two different species, be they plant or animal.  According to the great talmudic sage  Abbaye (died c. 339 CE), cross breeding a domestic goose and a wild goose is forbidden as well, because they seem to be two different species as evidenced by their anatomy: "the male wild goose has testicles that are external, but the male domestic goose has testicles that are internal."  Here is the background note found in The Koren Talmud. 

Today, these two types of birds are treated as one species. The wild goose is classified as the Anser anser, also known as the greylag goose, and the domestic goose is classifeid as the Anser anser domestica. Although the differences between them are not always apparent, they do differ in several ways, such as in their appearance, voice, and behavior. In terms of their appearance, they differ in color, as the wild goose is usually gray and the domestic goose white, and the neck of the domestic goose is shorter than that of the wild goose.
Another difference is that the male organ of the wild goose is more recognizable than that of the domestic goose. As for laying eggs, the wild goose lays fewer eggs than the domestic goose, which can lay more than ten eggs at a time.

All of this is very helpful indeed, but it does not address the claim that was made by Abbaye and which Rashi clarifies: "ביצי הזכרות ניכרין באווז הבר מבחוץ"  - that the testes of wild geese may be seen outside of the body.  Is that the case? Let's see what the geese experts have to say.

The Handbook of Bird Biology

The avian urogenital system. From  Lovette IJ. and Fitzpatrick JW. The Handbook of Bird Biology, Wiley-Blackwell 2016, 198.

Here are the ornithologists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology on the location of bird testes:

Oval or elliptical in shape, avian testes are paired and lie within the body cavity at anterior end of each kidney.

In most birds the the intestinal, urinary, and generative canals open into a cavity called the cloaca.  However the Cornell Handbook notes that a few species including ostriches, ducks and geese, have a more advanced copulatory organ, the cloacal phallus. "Although often called a 'penis', this structure differs from the mammalian equivalent: since it lacks an internal urethra, sperm must travel along the external surface of the phallus." Good to know.

The Manual of Ornithology: Avian Structure and Function

The authors of the 1993  Manual of Ornithology are an interesting duo: on is a professor of biology, and the other, a radiologist. Here is their description of  where bird testes are located:

Male birds have paired testes within the abdominal cavity just anterior and ventral to the lobes of the kidneys. During much of the year the testes may be difficult or impossible to find because of their small size, but during the breeding season the testes may grow to several hundred times their non-breeding size, resembling two bean-shaped organs lying next to the kidneys on the dorsal abdominal wall...Some birds experience a nightly drop in body temperature that allows sperm development in males.  In other species the male develops a cloacal protuberance, a swelling of the terminal end of the vas deferens.  This functions like a mammalian scrotum, holding the developing sperm away from the high temperatures within the abdomen. 

To be clear: there are no testes on the outside of the body, as Abbaye claims; the closest we get to this is a small swelling during the mating season. 

Goose Production

The last reference book we will look at is Goose Production, published in 2002 by Food and Agriculture  Organization of the United Nations. Chapter Five addresses the male (and female) reproductive system found in geese:

There are two bean-shaped testicles inside the body cavity which produce both spermatozoa and male hormones. They are highly vascularized and change in size and position according to whether the gander is sexually active or not...the copulatory organ of the gander is very well developed. It is invaginated, spiral-like, and is about 15cm in length.

To recap: Geese testes are only located within the body cavity. No birds - geese included - have a scrotum, though sometimes the cloaca may swell to hold the maturing sperm.  And of course there is no difference between the natural and wild goose in any of these anatomical facts.

So what Did Abbaye mean?

What then, are we to make of Abbaye's testicular error? A couple of options spring to mind:

1. The translation of  אווז - avaz - as a goose is wrong, and he was referring to another species. The problem with this is (1) there is no dispute as to the translation and identification of this word and (2) even if Abbaye was referring to another species of bird, in no species do the testes reside in any place other than snugly inside the abdomen.

2. The geese in Abbaye's time were different.  There is no way to determine if this claim is true, though based on what we know about evolution it would be a pretty remarkable evolutionary change in the space of less than  two millennia.  Wait a minute, you say: what about the article in The New York Times with the title 'Evolution Is Happening Faster Than We
   Thought'? Perhaps two millennia is enough time for a change like this to occur?  Well, it is true that certain evolutionary changes may happen more quickly than scientists had previously expected, but this only happens "as long as natural selection — the relative benefit that a particular characteristic bestows on its bearer - is strong." One place where this happens is within our cities, where, for example, the temperature can be much higher or the ambient light much brighter, than in the surrounding countryside. However no such selective pressure is known to have occurred for geese living betwen Abbaye's time and our own.  Absent this evolutionary pressure, the suggestion that the internal anatomy of geese has changed is without any merit. 

3. Abbaye was wrong.  Abbaye was descended from a family of priests, and after the death of his parents was raised by an uncle and a kindly foster mother.  As a young man Abbaye spent some time in poverty: he worked at night irrigating agricultural canals so that he could be free during the day for study. Eventually his fortune changed and he became a wine trader and a farmer with tenants of his own. But there is no record of his having worked closely with animals, and animal husbandry would be an unlikely occupation for the head of the rabbinic academy in Pumbedita, a position that he occupied for the last five years of his life. It is very likely then, that wise as he was, Abbaye simply had no factual experience on which to base his claim that wild and domesticated geese have different male sexual organs. It is always best to speak with authority only about that which you are certain is correct.  Abbaye was certainly in authority as a great leader of a great rabbinic academy. But being in authority, and being an authority are by no means the same. That's a great lesson to remember.

Testes of pheasant during the reproductive season.  From here.

Bava Kamma 50 ~ Ten Tefachim to Death

משנה, בבא קמא נ, ב

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 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 profound.  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 theses 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 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 the Mishnah

The Mishnah rules that only a pit more than 30 inches (ten tefachim) deep is lethal should someone  - or some animal - fall in. We have seen that this has no medical validity. But that doesn't really matter for a legal system.

Consider the legal limit for alcohol allowed when driving. In my home state of Maryland, it is 0.08%, (though of course your ability to drive safely is impaired at levels considerably lower). So what happens if a driver is stopped and his blood alcohol content is 0.07%? Well, it's simple: he is not legally impaired and so may continue to drive.  Is this an indictment of the Maryland drunk driving laws? Not really. Maryland, like all other states, sets its blood alcohol limit; if a driver is close, but below the limit, no penalty follows.

Jewish law too, has to set limits and measures, below which legal penalties do not apply.  The Mishnah's ruling that a pit is only fatal if it is more than 30 inches deep is a legal one - not a medial one.  It works to set limits and insure public safety. A person who digs a pit only 9.5 tefachim deep is not legally liable, and a pit that is a full 10 tefachim deep is certainly rarely lethal if a person accidentally falls in.  But for the sake of public safety a ruling  - arbitrary though it is - had to be made.  So be careful when you dig your pit in a public thoroughfare.

Talmudology on the Parsha, Vayigash: Confessions and False Confessions

44:18-20 בראשית

וַיִּגַּ֨שׁ אֵלָ֜יו יְהוּדָ֗ה וַיֹּ֘אמֶר֮ בִּ֣י אֲדֹנִי֒ יְדַבֶּר־נָ֨א עַבְדְּךָ֤ דָבָר֙ בְּאזְנֵ֣י אֲדֹנִ֔י וְאַל־יִ֥חַר אַפְּךָ֖ בְּעַבְדֶּ֑ךָ כִּ֥י כָמ֖וֹךָ כְּפַרְעֹֽה׃

אֲדֹנִ֣י שָׁאַ֔ל אֶת־עֲבָדָ֖יו לֵאמֹ֑ר הֲיֵשׁ־לָכֶ֥ם אָ֖ב אוֹ־אָֽח׃

וַנֹּ֙אמֶר֙ אֶל־אֲדֹנִ֔י יֶשׁ־לָ֙נוּ֙ אָ֣ב זָקֵ֔ן וְיֶ֥לֶד זְקֻנִ֖ים קָטָ֑ן וְאָחִ֣יו מֵ֔ת וַיִּוָּתֵ֨ר ה֧וּא לְבַדּ֛וֹ לְאִמּ֖וֹ וְאָבִ֥יו אֲהֵבֽוֹ׃

Then Yehuda came near to him, and said, Oh my lord, let thy servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord’s ears, and let not thy anger burn against thy servant: for thou art even as Pharoh. My lord asked his servants, saying, Have you a father, or a brother? And we said to my lord, We have a father, an old man, and a child of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone is left of his mother, and his father loves him.

As Yehudah pleads with Joseph (who still appears to be an Egyptian) to spare the life of Benjamin, he confesses that one of his brothers had died. This was not true. It was a false confession, as Rashi notes:

ואחיו מת. מִפְּנֵי הַיִּרְאָה הָיָה מוֹצִיא דְּבַר שֶׁקֶר מִפִּיו, אָמַר אִם אוֹמַר לוֹ שֶׁהוּא קַיָּם, יֹאמַר הֲבִיאוּהוּ אֶצְלִי

AND HIS BROTHER IS DEAD — He uttered this untruth out of fear. He thought: if I tell him that he is alive he may say “Bring him to me”.

When faced with alternatives that are not palatable, people will confess to things that are not true, and often, as Rashi notes, they do so “out of fear.”

Forced Confessions in the Talmud

Abaye and Rava

While Joseph did not physically coerce Yehuda’s false testimony, he certainly played a clever psychological trick on his older brother. In the Talmud, there are several incidents in which torture (or according to some, the threat of torture) was used to obtain a confession of a crime. In two (בבא בתרא קסז, א, Abaye suspected that bills of sale had been forged. "כפתיה ואודי" - Abaye  bound the suspects to a post, and faced with the threat of physical torture, they confessed. In the third case it was Rava who suspected that his own signature and that of the elderly Rav Acha bar Adda had been forged. Rava too, bound the suspect to a post, after which not only did the suspect confess to forging both signatures, but he went on to explain how he had forged that of the elderly Rav Acha, whose hands had a tremor. 

 אנחי ידאי אמצרא ואמרי לה קם אזרנוקא וכתב

I placed my hands on the rope of a bridge while signing. Others say he stood on a skin bottle and signed.

Mar Zutra “The Pious”

In Bava Metzia Mar Zutra The Pious had coerced a student to confess to his crime.

בבא מציעא כד, א

מר זוטרא חסידא אגניב ליה כסא דכספא מאושפיזא חזיא לההוא בר בי רב דמשי ידיה ונגיב בגלימא דחבריה אמר היינו האי דלא איכפת ליה אממונא דחבריה כפתיה ואודי

Mar Zutra the Pious was involved in an incident in which a silver cup was stolen from his host. Later, Mar Zutra saw a certain student wash his hands and dry them on his friend's garment. Mar Zutra said: "this is the one who stole the cup, for he has no consideration for his friend's property. Mar Zutra bound the student to a post and coerced him, and he confessed to the crime (Bava Metzia 24a).

…And One More

For completeness, we should note that there is a fourth passage in the Talmud (Niddah 25b) that also uses the language of כפתיה ואודי.  In that passage, a man was accused on having intercourse with his wife when she was ritually impure. He too was bound and confessed, though it is not clear who was ordering the binding.

He was bound and he confessed

Courtesy of Wikimedia.

The phrase that is used in all four cases is כפתיה ואודי "they bound him and he confessed." The root of the word to bind is כפת, which is used in rabbinic literature to mean to tie or to bind. Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel (Germany ~1250-1327), known as the Rosh, is certain that the suspect was tortured. In his commentary on the passage in Bava Metzia, he wrote וכפתיה בשוטי עד דאודי "he flogged him with rods until he confessed." (As in חושך שבטו שונא בנו ואהבו שחרו מוסר "spare the rod and spoil the child," from Proverbs 13:24.) Rabbi Betzalel ben Avraham Ashkenazi (Israel ~1520-1594) in his commentary to Bava Metzia called Shitah Mekubetzet agrees that coercion was used, although he is unsure if it was physical or psychological:

כפתוהו ואודי. יש מפרשים כפתוהו על העמוד והלקוהו בשוטים. ויש מפרשים כפתיה בדברים שנדוהו אם לא יודה האמת

Some explain that he was tied to post and flogged. Others explain that he was verbally coerced (and threatened with excommunication) until he confessed.

False Confessions

In a 2010 paper published in the Stanford Law Review, Brandon Garett notes that DNA testing has now exonerated over forty people who falsely confessed to rapes and murders. He wonders how an innocent person could convincingly confess to a crime he never committed. For example, in 1990  Jeffrey Deskovic a seventeen-year-old, was convicted of rape and murder. Deskovic was a classmate of the fifteen-year-old victim, had attended her wake, and was eager to help solve the crime. During one of several police interrogations he “supposedly drew an accurate diagram,” which depicted details concerning “three discrete crime scenes” which were not ever made public. "In his last statement, which ended with him in a fetal position and crying uncontrollably," wrote Garrett, "he reportedly told police that he had “hit her in the back of the head with a Gatoraid [sic] bottle that was lying on the path.” Police testified that, after hearing this, the next day they conducted a careful search and found a Gatorade bottle cap at the crime scene."

“Scholars increasingly study the psychological techniques that can cause people to falsely confess and have documented how such techniques were used in instances of known false confessions.”

— Garrett, B.L. The Substance of False Confessions. Stanford Law Review 2010. 62 (4): 1051-1119.

Deskovic was convicted of rape and murder and served more than fifteen years of a sentence of fifteen years to life. Then in 2006, new DNA testing not only excluded him, but also matched the profile of a murder convict who subsequently confessed and pleaded guilty. So how did Deskovic know all the details of the crime to which he confessed? Here is what the District Attorney noted in the post-exoneration inquiry:

...Given Deskovic’s innocence, two scenarios are possible: either the police (deliberately or inadvertently) communicated this information directly to Deskovic or their questioning at the high school and elsewhere caused this supposedly secret information to be widely known throughout the community.

Another paper, this time in the North Carolina Law Review, analyzed 125 cases of "proved interrogation-induced false confessions, which, the authors note with some pride, is "the largest cohort of interrogation-induces false confession cases ever identified and studied in the literature." It makes terrifying reading.  

It is of course really hard to study in the laboratory the psychological effects of torture and coercion and how they produce false confessions.  But scientists try anyway. For example, a very recent paper from a team from the New School for Sociological Research in New York and the University of California studied the effect of sleep deprivation on false confessions.  When compared to those who had rested, participants were over four times more likely to sign a false statement if they were deprived of one night's sleep.  In another recent peer-reviewed paper, (Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime) psychologists used suggestive retrieval techniques on some rather nice Canadian undergraduates. They found that up to 70% of those interviewed 

were classified as having false memories of committing a crime (theft, assault, or assault with a weapon) that led to police contact in early adolescence and volunteered a detailed false account. These reported false memories of crime were similar to false memories of noncriminal events and to true memory accounts, having the same kinds of complex descriptive and multisensory components.

They continue: 

Our finding that young adults generated rich false memories of committing criminal acts during adolescence supports the notion that false confessions and gross confabulations can take place within interview settings. The Innocence Project has shown that about 25% of false convictions are attributable to faulty confession evidence...The kind of research presented here is essential in the quest to help prevent memory-related miscarriages of justice.

False Memories Become Real

In a recent article in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv reported on the remarkable story of how DNA evidence exonerated six convicted killers. Despite this, two of them had detailed memories of the killing that they didn't commit. One was a woman named Ada Taylor who confessed to a woman’s murder in 1989 and for two decades believed that she was guilty.

She served more than nineteen years for the crime before she was pardoned. She was one of six people accused of the murder, five of whom took pleas; two had internalized their guilt so deeply that, even after being freed, they still had vivid memories of committing the crime. In no other case in the United States have false memories of guilt endured so long. The situation is a study in the malleability of memory: an implausible notion, doubted at first, grows into a firmly held belief that reshapes one’s autobiography and sense of identity.

Of course murder is not the same as forging a document, but the lesson for those in criminal justice is the same. People confess to all sorts of things - especially when they are coerced or tortured- and can even forge false memories of the crimes of which they were accused.  

Permitted Coercion in Jewish Law

In the Code of Jewish Law, the שולחן ערוך, the passage in Bava Basra is the basis for the legal right to extract a confession from a person suspected of forging business documents.

שולחן ערוך חושן משפט מב, ג

ואם צריך לכוף בעל השטר ולהכותו כדי שיודה יעשה כדי שיוציא הדין לאמיתו

If it is necessary, the owner of the document (who is suspected of forgery) may be beaten in order for him to confess and the truth to come out...

This certainly made me feel uncomfortable, but let's put this into some context. Torture has been a part of many judicial systems, and was a feature of  Roman law.  Perhaps most notoriously it was used by the Inquisition, after Pope Innocent IV issued a papal bill Ad extirpanda in 1252 which authorized its use by the Church.  Closer to home, the US has recently grappled with, and condemned cases in which the Central Intelligence Agency tortured prisoners, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (partially) revealed in 2014. But among the thousands of legal decisions in the Babylonian Talmud, there are only four rabbis who are named as having tortured or coerced a suspect to confess. And that low number, though it is not zero, should provide us with some solace.

As for Yehudah’s lie - well, it seems to have been a gamble that paid off. Joseph could not continue to hide his true identity, and he revealed himself to his brothers. There never had been a brother who had died. Just one who had been estranged for a very long time.

Bava Kamma Bonus ~ What Is An Ox, and Why You Should Not Daven Close To One

As the Talmud addresses the responsibility for the injuries of one cow caused by another, today we will look at the dangers of praying too close to these usually gentle animals. Back in Masechet Berachot, there is a discussion of the circumstances under which a person may interrupt her prayers because of a threatened physical danger. Getting too close to snakes is not a good idea, but cows are a problem too.

ברכות לג, א

אָמַר רַבִּי יִצְחָק: רָאָה שְׁווֹרִים — פּוֹסֵק. דְּתָנֵי רַב הוֹשַׁעְיָה: מַרְחִיקִין מִשּׁוֹר תָּם — חֲמִשִּׁים אַמָּה, וּמִשּׁוֹר מוּעָד — כִּמְלוֹא עֵינָיו 

Rabbi Yitzchak said: One who saw oxen coming toward him, he interrupts his prayer, as Rav Hoshaya taught: One distances himself fifty cubits from an innocuous ox [shor tam], an ox with no history of causing damage with the intent to injure, and from a forewarned ox [shor muad], an ox whose owner was forewarned because his ox has gored three times already, one distances himself until it is beyond eyeshot.

So today we will discuss injuries from oxen and cows. But first, just what is an ox?

Just what is an ox?

The Hebrew word used in the Talmud is shor - (שור, rhymes with shore). Consider the following verse from Leviticus 22:27:

שור או כשב או עז כי יולד והיה שבעת ימים תחת אמו 

Here are some of the ways it is translated into English:

• When a bull or a goat is born, it shall be seven days under its mother... (Robert Alter. The Five Books of Moses. [Alter seems to have forgotten to translate the word כשב]).

• When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall be seven days under its mother...(S.R. Hirsch. The Pentateuch, translated into English by Isaac Levy.)

• When any of the herd, or a sheep, or a goat is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under its dam..(The Pentateuch, translated into English by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silberman.)

• When an ox or a sheep or a goat is born, it shall stay seven days with its mother...(The JPS Torah Commentary, ed. N. Sarna.)

• When a bullock or a sheep or a goat is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under its dam...(Koren Jerusalem Bible.)

• When a calf, a lamb or a goat is born, it is to remain with its mother for seven days...(New International Version.)

• When a bullock, or a sheep, or a goat, is brought forth, then it shall be seven days under the dam...(King James Bible)

There are more, but you get the point. The word shor (שור) has been translated as a bull, an ox, a calf, a bullock and as a collective, any of the herd.  The Koren Talmud and the Soncino Talmud translate it as ox.  The ArtScroll Schottenstein Talmud as a bull. Confused? Me too.

Here are some of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary definitions of an ox:

1. The domestic bovine quadruped (sexually dist. as bull and cow); in common use, applied to the male castrated and used for draught purposes, or reared to serve as food.

2. Zool. Any beast of the bovine family of ruminants, including the domestic European species, the 'wild oxen' preserved in certain parks in Britain, the buffalo, bison, gaur, yak, musk-ox, etc.

In his late nineteenth century translation of the Jerusalem Talmud into French, Moise Schwab translated the word shor as "le bouef" (rather than "le teureau"). De Sola's English translation of the Mishnah, published in 1843, uses the word ox. So does the 1878 compendium by Joseph Barclay, and the first complete English translation of the Talmud, by Michael Rodkinson, published between 1896 and 1903.  The translation of shor as ox is goes back to these early translations, but the suggestion that the meaning of the word is a 'castrated male bovine quadraped' is certainly wrong. Jews are forbidden to castrate their animals, and a castrated bull would have been ineligible to use as a sacrifice. And so we must conclude that the best translation of the word shor (שור) is a bull (well done, ArtScroll!).  

The delightfully named lecturer Dr. Goodfriend from California State University recently published a lengthy paper (in this book) on the various terms for cattle in the Bible, and the question of whether a castrated bull (a gelding) could have been offered as a sacrifice in the Temple.  The good professor Goodfriend concludes that indeed the prohibition against the castration of animals "would have placed the Israelite farmer at a disadvantage as fewer suitable animals would have been available for his use." One possible way to overcome come this (other than to use cows for ploughing) would have been to import castrated bulls from those who lived outside of Israel.  

And having sorted that out, let’s turn to the fun topic of the day. Injuries from cows.

“Cow-related trauma is a common among farming communities and is a potentially serious mechanism of injury that appears to be under-reported in a hospital context. Bovine-related head-butt and trampling injuries should be considered akin to high-velocity trauma.”

— Murphy, CG. McGuire, CM. O’Malley, N. Harrington P. Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Injury 2010. 41: 548–550.

Injuries from Domestic bulls (and Cows too)

Mechanisms of injury from cows. From Murphy, CG. McGuire, CM. O’Malley, N. Harrington P. Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Injury 2010. 41: 548–550.

Much of the fourth chapter of the Talmud in Bava Kamma addresses injuries from domestic bulls and cows. In Masechet Berachot Rabbi Yitzchak reminded the devout not to get too lost in their prayers if there are cows (or bull or oxen) in the vicinity. It turns out that they cause all kinds of injuries even today. In 2009, orthopedists from Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Ireland published a fascinating paper entitled Cow-related trauma: A 10-year review of injuries admitted to a single institution. Over a decade, the hospital admitted 47 people with cow related trauma, most of whom sustained their injuries from kicking (unlike matadors, who suffer from horn related injuries). And next time you feel like walking across a field containing some gentle-looking cows, remember this: one of the patients was admitted with a head injury, a hip fracture and hypothermia after being trampled on by his herd of cattle in a field and found a number of hours later. (There are no details as to whether the injury occurred during shacharit or mincha).

“If a bull be a goring bull and it is shown that he is a gorer, and he does not bind his horns, or fasten the bull, and the bull gores a free-born man and kills him, the owner shall pay one-half a mina in money. If he kills a man’s slave, he shall pay one-third of a mina.””

— Code of Hammurabi, Articles 251–252.

In another paper - Blunt Bovine and Equine Trauma - from La Crosse Lutheran Hospital in Wisconsin, researchers provided this illustrative case:

A 57-year-old male was pinned to the ground by a 2,000 pound dairy bull and repeatedly knocked to the ground forcefully at least seven times before he was able to crawl from the pen…Examination revealed the following injuries: bilateral flail chest, 13 rib fractures, bilateral hemopneumothoraces, renal contusion, two forearm fractures, left shoulder dislocation, bilateral scapula fractures, and dental alveolar fractures. The patient was treated by...mechanical ventilation for 15 days…His hospital course was complicated by Klebsiella pneumonia and at 16-month followup he remained severely dyspneic, unable to perform his usual farm work.

Finally, we should note a report published a few months ago in The Times (of London) about Scottish farmer Derek Roan, who was killed by one of his cows. Roan, whose family had farmed in the area for some 125 years, born on the farm had also appeared in a BBC documentary series This Farming Life.

Sheriff Joanna McDonald, who conducted a fatal accident inquiry, wrote that Mr Roan had died

… from extensive thoracic injuries as a result of an accident involving a cow whilst working on the farm. His death is certified in the post-mortem report as having been primarily the result of severe chest trauma.

Mr Roan intended to move a cow and its calf to join the main herd. The cow, a black Galloway beef cow weighing around 550kg, along with her calf, had been separated from the main herd a few days earlier due to suckling issues with the calf, who was approximately a week old at the time of the accident.

The farm vet, Dr Graham Bell, stated that it was good husbandry to deal with this issue in the way that Mr Roan had, to ensure that the calf was managing. The cow, who was aged around ten to 12 years, had never shown any signs of aggression before.

Cattle look gentle, and for the most part, they are.  But they are large beasts with incredible strength. Hikers, (and farmers) beware. Please pray safely.