Kosher meat comes from an animal that has been slaughtered in accordance with Jewish law. This means that meat from an animal that dies a natural death is not kosher. This seems fairly cut-and-dried, but a mishnah on yesterday’s daf considered a gray area: If an animal is nearly dead and then ritually slaughtered, how do we determine its cause of death? The answers were a bit gruesome:
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: The slaughter is valid only in a case where after the slaughter it convulses with its foreleg and with its hind leg.
Rabbi Eliezer says: It is sufficient if blood spurted from the neck.
Rabbi Shimon says: In the case of one who slaughters at night and the next day he awoke and found walls full of blood, the slaughter is valid, as it is clear that the blood spurted, and this is in accordance with the rule of Rabbi Eliezer.
And the rabbis say: It is valid only in a case where it convulses with its foreleg or with its hind leg, or in a case where it wags its tail.
We have here essentially two different ideas of how to prove the animal was alive at the time of slaughter. Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Shimon say that if blood spurts from the animal’s neck, the meat is kosher. Spurting blood is evidence that the circulatory system was working at the time to slaughter. (Rabbi Shimon imagines a scenario in which the animal is slaughtered at night and it is difficult to see whether the blood spurts, so he thinks it is sufficient to see the blood on the wall the next morning.)
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel, by contrast, holds that the sign of life we are looking for is convulsion of the animal’s limbs. The rabbis concur, but they require the convulsion of only one limb. In this case, the sign of life comes from the muscles and reflexes.
The mishnah has established that we need to see a sign of life during the process of slaughter to be assured that the animal died from the slaughter and not natural causes. The Gemara, for its part, takes up the question of precisely when we need to see these signs of life. Is it at the beginning of slaughter, as the knife pierces the first siman (either the esophagus or trachea)? Or must we see a sign of life even as the slaughter is being completed, as the second and final siman is severed?
Several answers are given in the Gemara. Rav Nahman bar Yitzhak, who is more lenient, says this:
The convulsion that the sages said is an indication of life is a convulsion even at the beginning of the act of slaughter.
Even if the only convulsion takes place as the knife makes contact with the animal, says Rav Nahman, we are still confident that the animal died by kosher slaughter (and not from old age). Rav Nahman is not making an argument about biology. Rather, he understands this to be the best reading of the mishnah.
Recall that in the mishnah Rabbi Shimon said blood found on the walls next day after slaughter was a reason to declare the meat kosher. In the Gemara, Shmuel understands the walls in question not to be the walls of a house or courtyard, but rather the “walls” of the neck of the animal. In other words, the next morning, when we see the dried blood on the neck of the animal, we can declare it kosher. Rashi explains that blood on the wall reveals something about when it spurted: Blood from the initial cut spurts high, while blood that comes later spurts low. But the neck does not reveal this information. When you see blood on the neck of the animal, you have no way to know when it spurted. That means that finding blood on the neck the next day proves only that some came out at the beginning of slaughter. We cannot know if the blood also spurted later.
Through Shmuel, Rav Nahman reasons that the mishnah means you only need to see blood spurting at the beginning of slaughter. And if the mishnah accepts blood spurting at the beginning of slaughter as a basis for declaring that the animal died by slaughter, the same standard should be applied to convulsing: Convulsing early in slaughter is adequate evidence that the animal did not die of old age.
In the end, Rav Nahman’s reading of the Mishnah is not accepted. Yes, we just spent considerable time wrapping our heads around a losing halakhic argument. That was very talmudic of us.
The prevailing opinion says that the sign of life must appear at the end of the process (the argument in favor of this read of the mishnah can also be found on our daf). Given the prohibition against eating meat from a dead animal, and perhaps also the ick factor, it makes sense that the rabbis would choose a stricter standard, one that ensures that it was the slaughterer that ended the animal’s life and not some other cause.
Read all of Chullin 38 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on June 7, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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