Masechet Chullin Daf 78-83

Back from Arizona after a 5 hour flight delay!

Daf 78-83 in one go

Conveniently the whole run of Daf Yomi while I was away consisted of the entirety of Perek Hei of Chullin, which was concerned with Oto v'et b'no, the commandment in Leviticus 22:28 not to slaughter a parent and a child animal on the same day. There are some fascinating oral law d'rashes of the verse that are completely counterintuitive to how you would just read the pasuk. At only 5 pages but covering a range of interesting but fairly self-contained halakhic issues, I think this would be a great perek of Gemara for someone just dipping their toes into learning Talmud.

To start with, oto is in the masculine, but the Gemara reasons that the mitzvah must be a prohibition on slaughtering a mother and her child (of either sex), not a father, because the clear intention of the mitzvah is similar to shiluach haken, the much more well known and much weirder mitzvah of sending away the mother bird before taking her eggs. The mother and her child are a clear family unit, in the case of the domesticated species the mitzvah is talking about, the father is rarely an active participant in raising the child, so the majority opinion is that we don't consider the father's seed as really having any connection to the child.

This then leads the Gemara on an interesting detour into the halakhos relating to mules and other crossbred animals, where in some cases where it matters, some Rabbis say that we similarly don't consider the father's seed as having any connection to the child, so that a mule with a mare parent is considered to be more a horse than a donkey, for example when it comes to whether you can yolk it with a mule who has a jenny for a parent.

And similarly the Gemara discusses the koy, an animal that according to some is the crossbred offspring of a domesticated animal and a wild animal, and some say on the same principle that whether it's considered domesticated or wild depends on the mother (for purposes of offering it as a Temple sacrifice, or for the halakha of covering the blood that will come in Perek Zayin.)

Later on there's some interesting halakhic questions about when and if you can incur multiple penalties for the same act, and when you can incur a lesser penalty instead of a greater penalty when committing an act that violates multiple issurs. This comes up because the act of oto v'et b'no inherently consists of two acts, the first of which is not an issur- killing the first animal, and the second of which is an issur- killing the second, related animal. So the Gemara asks a series of questions about cases where either the first act also transgresses a separate issur, or where the second act transgresses a separate issur, and how the two aveiros interact.

A big one that creates complicated interactions is shechting a consecrated animal outside the Temple courtyard, because there's a major disagreement about whether it incurs lashes or kares or nothing if it's done at a time when the animal is not permitted to be offered. So if you shecht the mother and then the child is consecrated, some hold that since you are not permitted to offer the son as a sacrifice that day because of oto v'et b'no, you do not incur the penalty for offering it outside the Temple courtyard, though you do incur the penalty of oto v'et b'no.


There's a lot more cases, I wish I'd been blogging daily during this perek, it was a lot of fun to learn, but I think I have to accept that I'm unlikely to have the time to give it any more detail here, so I'm just going to move on.

Perek Zayin will be about the mitzvah of covering the blood.