Eggs and BabiesWhat strikes me about this passage is that this sort of thing came up often enough to be an issue. It is hard for us to image what a brutal world the ancients lived in.
This week’s Talmud study reveals legal debates that refine the limits and nature of inherently abstract concepts
By Adam Kirsch|November 19, 2012 7:00 AM|
This week’s Talmud reading was largely devoted to the legal concept of muktzeh, a category of items that may not be moved or used on Shabbat. It is a fairly technical discussion, but in the course of it, in Shabbat 43b, the Talmud comes up with a bizarre image that makes all the abstractions immediately memorable: a baby or a loaf of bread placed deliberately on top of a dead body. This is Rav’s solution to one of the difficult Shabbat-related cases the rabbis consider: What can you do on Shabbat with a corpse that is decomposing in the sun? “One should place a loaf of bread or an infant on the corpse and then move it,” Rav says.
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Earlier Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.