Nazir 52: Contact With Creatures That Impart Tamei

A skink is one of the eight creeping/swarming animals spoken of in Leviticus 11:30.   It might be a snail without a shill or  it might be a reptile with few or no limbs.  The rabbis explore how much of a creature must be touched or ingested to impart tamei, ritual impurity - must it have all of its limbs?  Must it be larger than a lentil bulk?  must it have a soul?  What if its spine and skull are not attached? What if its ribs are missing?

A story about a box of spines teaches us that spines do not impart tamei unless they are intact.  Todos the doctor and other doctors inspected the box and confirmed that there was no problem.  

There are six items that Rabbi Akiva says are tamei and the Rabbis say are tahor, ritually pure.  These are:

• a limb from a corpse that is together with:
• two corpses
• a severed limb from a living person/that comes from two living people
• a half-kav of blood  that comes from two corpses
• a uarter-log of blood that comes from two corpses
• a bone that is a barley-grain-bulk even from only one body that is divided into two parts
• the spine and skill from two corpses

The rabbis state their disagreements with Rabbi Akiva.  Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai have a disagreement about this as well.  Beit Shammai say that the quarter-kav of bones that impart tamei under a roof must come from more than one bone.  Beit Hillel say that the quarter-kav of bones must  come from the same body either from the majority of the structure of the body (two shins, two thighs, lower body) or from the majority of the 248 bones in the body.  Rabbi Yehoshua says that these schools actually agree with each other:  Beit Shammai's 'more than one bone' can refer to two sins and one thigh or two thighs and one shin.  That is the majority of a body's height.  Beit Hillel's majority of bones include the hands and feet.  Shammai includes a bone from the spine or skull.  The rabbis disagree, as Beit Shammai is stringent.

Today's daf ends with a discussion about a quarter-kav of bones that come from a spine and a skull.