Today’s daf continues its emotionally difficult discussion of pregnancy loss. The mishnah on yesterday’s daf taught:
A woman whose fetus died in her womb and the midwife extended her hand and touched it: The midwife is impure with seven-day impurity, and the woman is ritually pure until the offspring emerges.
Within the rabbinic system, impurity is contained when completely sealed inside a living being. This is true of a dead fetus as well as a piece of impure jewelry that was inadvertently swallowed (at least, until it inevitably comes out the other end). The dead fetus in utero is enclosed, so it does not convey corpse impurity. According to this mishnah, however, when the midwife breaches the enclosure, the corpse’s impurity spreads to her — and only to her — until the fetus is birthed. At this point, its impurity can spread to others. On today’s daf, the rabbis of the Gemara try to identify the source of this law, and in the course of that debate surface an earlier rabbinic tradition.
As it is taught in a beraita: “And in the open, anyone who touches a person who was killed by the sword or who died naturally, or a human bone, or a grave, shall be impure seven days” (Numbers 19:16). This is to exclude the fetus in its mother’s uterus, according to Rabbi Ishmael. Rabbi Akiva said: This is to include the stone placed on top of a gravesite, and the grave’s frame.
Two early rabbis, Akiva and Ishmael, read the first words of Numbers 19:16, “in the open,” as teaching two different biblical laws about the spread of corpse impurity. According to Rabbi Ishmael, this phrase is meant to teach us that a dead fetus in utero (that is not “in the open”) cannot transmit corpse impurity. According to Rabbi Akiva, however, the phrase “in the open” instead teaches us that corpse impurity derives not only from the body itself but also from the accoutrements of the grave which are accessible above ground. A careful talmudic reading of Rabbi Akiva’s position might thus conclude that, without a biblical verse to exclude it, Rabbi Akiva thinks that a dead fetus in utero does transmit corpse impurity in utero.
Mishnahs and beraitas, like the two texts we just examined, are from the second and third centuries CE. So we know that this debate over whether a dead fetus in utero spreads corpse impurity dates back to that period. But Talmud scholar Dr. Vered Noam has demonstrated that the debate is in fact significantly older. It’s part of a Jewish discussion dating back to before the rabbis, to the Second Temple period.
Some of our best textual evidence for the Second Temple period comes from a remarkable cache of documents that together comprise one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the 20th century: the Dead Sea Scrolls. One of the hundreds of scrolls discovered in the caves at Qumran, nicknamed the Temple Scroll, describes an idealized Jewish Temple and the kinds of sacrifices and rituals that should take place in it. And because it describes service in the Temple, the scroll spends some time discussing the heightened state of purity that service in the Temple requires.
According to the Temple Scroll, “if a woman is pregnant and her child dies in her womb, all the days on which it is dead inside her, she is unclean like a grave, and every house she comes into is unclean, with all its furnishings, for seven days…” As Noam argues, this text is later echoed in the ways that the Talmud reads Rabbi Akiva’s position. It likely dates to somewhere in the second century BCE, predating the Mishnah at least 300 years.
Throughout our journey through the Talmud, we’ve seen profound rabbinic creativity as the rabbis offer halakhic rulings in light of new situations that arise and respond interpretively and theologically to particular political moments. Putting today’s talmudic conversation in its historical and textual context reminds us that the rabbis are the heirs to extensive oral (and even written!) traditions. Sometimes, the rabbis cite those traditions explicitly. Other times, as in this case, careful scholars can only surface this prehistory when new texts are discovered. The rabbinic world is in some ways older and deeper than we give it credit for, but our understanding of it is always expanding in light of new archeological discoveries.
Read all of Chullin 72 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 11, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
Help us keep Jewish knowledge accessible to millions of people around the world. With your help, My Jewish Learning can provide endless opportunities for learning, connection and discovery.
