We’ve been talking extensively about a wide range of kosher animals and what makes them treifot, and therefore unkosher. On today’s daf, the rabbis share their insights into other kinds of creatures.
Rav says: There is no one-day-old mosquito, and there is no one-year-old fly.
Rav’s statement is about insect lifespans. He insists that mosquitoes don’t live more than one day and flies live no more than one year. Fun fact, Rav is half right. While female mosquitoes can actually live up to eight weeks (male mosquitoes live 10 days or less), flies actually live for half that — up to about a month.
But while my instinct is to verify or challenge Rav’s opinion based on modern empirical evidence, Rav Pappa had a different problem with this statement.
Rav Pappa said to Abaye: But don’t people say the female mosquito revolted against the male mosquito seven years, since she said to him: I saw a townsman swimming in the water, and he came out and wrapped himself in sheets, and you sat on him and sucked [blood] from him, and you did not inform me?
Today, we know that male mosquitoes don’t actually bite humans, but you would need a microscope to determine that. And so in Rav Pappa’s time, there was a popular saying or folktale about a dramatic encounter between male and female mosquitoes, initiated when a male mosquito didn’t share the bounty of an unwitting victim. Since this initial provocation led to a seven-year battle of the sexes, Rav Pappa sees the saying as evidence that mosquitoes do live for longer than a day.
[Abaye] said to him: And according to your reasoning, what about that which people say: Six thousand iron dinars hang in a mosquito’s mallet? Is there really such a thing? How much does the mosquito itself weigh?
Another popular saying apparently described a mosquito’s mouth as holding a thousand iron dinars. Rashi explains that this phrase describes the “weight” or severity of a mosquito’s bite. Turns out, ancient Babylonia had a lot of popular sayings about mosquitoes. Abaye insists that Rav Pappa is taking these popular sayings too literally since a mosquito couldn’t actually carry a thousand iron dinars in her mouth. Or could she? Abaye continues:
Rather, to hundreds of their own dinars. Here, too, to their own years.
Abaye doesn’t insist that these adages must be understood figuratively. Instead, he charmingly agrees that the popular sayings are correct, but thinks that we must understand them to be discussing how time and weight are experienced by mosquitoes themselves. A mosquito might only live for a day in human years, but that might be a lifetime of seven or more years in the mosquito’s own experience of time. And a mosquito couldn’t carry one thousand human dinars, but in their system of weights, measures and money, a thousand dinars weighs a lot less. (Yes, it seems that according to Abaye’s read of the situation, mosquitoes have weights, measures and money. Which is adorable.)
The rabbis were offering their best understanding of their world, given that they didn’t have microscopes, labs or harmonic radar tags. In doing so, Abaye offers us an important reminder of the power of empathy and imagination. At their best, mosquitoes are annoying; at their worst, they are genuinely terrifying disease vectors. And yet Abaye takes the time to consider life from the mosquito’s perspective. He hints at a world more complicated than the human eye can see and the human mind can comprehend. And yet he tries to comprehend it, seeing that understanding other groups and species — even those that we experience as negative — is a valuable endeavor.
Read all of Chullin 58 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on June 27, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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