As we learned yesterday, so long as a fetus is considered a part of its mother, slaughtering the mother renders the fetus kosher. But once the fetus is considered an independent creature — in other words, once it has been born — it requires its own independent slaughter. This means that defining the moment of birth is halakhically critical.
Today’s daf features a new mishnah that applies this concept to a bekhor, a firstborn male animal. (The next tractate we will study, Bekhorot, is concerned primarily with the halakhah of firstborns.) Properly, every bekhor is given to a priest to be offered in the Temple, and subsequently consumed by the priests and their families. Since bekhorot have this consecrated status, it is forbidden for others to derive benefit from them. If a bekhor dies before being offered, the carcass must be buried, not discarded. Today’s mishnah uses a test case to determine the precise moment when bekhor status is conferred:
If an animal that was giving birth to a firstborn male was encountering difficulty giving birth, he may cut up the fetus limb by limb and cast it to the dogs. If a majority of the fetus had already emerged, if one cut it up, it must be buried. And the mother animal is exempted from having firstborn status conferred to future children.
Yesterday, we discussed the case in which an animal is having difficulty giving birth and the owner chooses to slaughter it, on the assumption it will die anyway. In this case, the owner chooses to kill the fetus in order to save the mother — and it happens to be a firstborn. The mishnah teaches that if the owner cuts up each limb of the fetus as it emerges, the fetus’s carcass can be fed to the dogs. This is the rabbis’ way of expressing that in such a case, the fetus never assumes bekhor status, because it’s never considered to have been “born.” However, once the majority of the fetus has emerged, it’s considered as having been born. Therefore, while one can still kill it to save the mother animal, in such a case it would have already assumed bekhor status, and therefore its body must be buried rather than discarded.
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Commentators disagree over how to interpret the final statement of the mishnah, that future offspring born to the mother would be exempt from firstborn status. Maimonides reads it as applying specifically to the latter case, where the majority of the fetus emerged. Since this calf is considered to have been born and clearly taken on the status of firstborn, any subsequent offspring of the mother is not a firstborn. By contrast, Rashi, the Tosafot, and Bartenura all assume it refers to both clauses. Even in the first case, they argue, because the fetus developed fully, any subsequent offspring would not be “firstborn of the womb.”
The Gemara presents an amoraic dispute touching on this question of when firstborn status is designated:
It was stated with regard to a case in which one-third of a firstborn fetus emerged from the womb and then was sold to a gentile, and subsequently another one-third of the fetus emerged: Rav Huna says it is consecrated, while Rabba says it is not consecrated.
The halakhah elsewhere states that a fetus partially owned by a non-Jew does not assume consecrated bekhor status. But in this bizarre case, the non-Jew’s ownership didn’t take effect until part of the fetus had already emerged from the womb — leading to a split in opinion. The Gemara goes on to explain the substance of their dispute:
Rav Huna says it is consecrated, as he maintains a firstborn is consecrated retroactively. And therefore in this case, once most of it had emerged, it became clarified retroactively that it had already been consecrated from the outset, and so with regard to that which he had sold to a gentile, it arises that he did not actually sell anything at all.
Rav Huna believes that once a firstborn emerges fully from the womb, it’s considered to be consecrated retroactively from the moment it first began to emerge. Therefore, at the time the non-Jew tried to purchase part of the fetus, it already had consecrated status, and the sale is ineffective. By contrast, Rabba believes that firstborn status is only conveyed once the majority of the animal has emerged; therefore, if the non-Jew purchases the first third of the fetus when it emerges, the sale is successful. And since the non-Jew now has partial ownership of the fetus, even when the rest of it emerges, it doesn’t assume the status of a bekhor.
Notably, neither of them disagrees with the ruling in our mishnah, where the fetus is dismembered as it emerges. Rav Huna only believes consecration applies retroactively from the moment any part of the fetus emerges if the fetus is in the end successfully born. In the case of the first clause of our mishnah, the majority of the fetus never emerged alive, so both Rav Huna and Rabba would agree that it never assumes firstborn status.
Read all of Chullin 69 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 8, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
