This essay is part of a review panel of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that took place at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. Read the full panel here.
Rafe Neis tells us at the start of When a Human Gives Birth to a Raven that it pursues three lines of inquiry: 1) “the patterns of likeness, difference, and multiplicity” (2) through which late ancient people made sense of their world; 2) the late ancient division of life into what we call species; and 3) the ancient understanding of reproduction. Rafe points out that reproduction is a less good word than generation to describe the way that ancients thought about the emergence of new life. They didn’t take it as a given that children simply “reproduce” or replicate the likeness of their parents.
In preparing these comments, I was considering whether I wanted to open up door number 1, 2, or 3, patterns of likeness and difference, species and speciation, or biological reproduction. I came to the conclusion that I want to open up door number 4. I’ve been wondering for a while how Rafe’s interest in the fluidity of species intersects with my own interest in animal kinship, so in these comments I wish to see what’s behind door number 4, where species fluidity meets kin relations. My plan in this response is to explore the implications of Rafe’s book for kin relationships or what we conventionally call family. I’m going to do this through a passage in Bekhorot, a rabbinic tractate that is central to Rafe’s book though I’m going to present a passage that Rafe doesn’t treat.
Let me first lay out what I understand Rafe to be doing in the book. Rafe argues in the book that, for the rabbis, the human is not set apart from other life forms but blurred together with them. In the rabbis’ world, a human can give birth to a raven, a fish, or a fly. In the rabbis’ world, there exists a wild-animal version of a human who operates in parallel with so-called civilized humans. In the rabbis’ world, the human is not a particularly unique bipedal animal. Rafe conveys to us a messy rabbinic world of “genuine reproductive uncertainty” and “species and sexual strangeness” (190). Tractates Niddah, Bekhorot, and Kilayim are the major sponsors of this messy world. These rabbinic texts feature what Rafe calls “anomalous deliveries” (43), exemplified by the human giving birth to a raven of Rafe’s book title. These texts also feature animal hybrids, which, Rafe shows, did not actually bother the Rabbis in the way many scholars have thought.
Here is my question. We see from Rafe’s book that the world of the rabbis is one in which a woman can give birth to a raven, a cow can give birth to a donkey, a donkey can give birth to a horse, and so on. But what happens afterwards? I imagine that some of these babies would not be viable. But what if the baby lives? Is the world of the rabbis one in which a human could not only give birth to a raven but also raise it as their child? Could the cow who delivers the donkey also nurse that baby donkey and care for it with their other calves? I’m asking about how the fluidity of species shapes the fluidity of family. What are the implications of categories of classification for networks of care? What is the meaning of maternity and paternity, parenting, and family in the rabbis’ species-fluid universe?
In other words, I want to pick up where Rafe leaves off, once this interesting new little animal is born. I take you to tractate Bekhorot, which treats the biblical requirement that firstborn male animals and humans be donated to God. Mishnah Bekhorot 3:2 features cases in which it is unclear whether a mother animal has ever given birth before. If she hasn’t, her male baby needs to go to the priest; if she has, then she is exempt from donation. Here is the mishnah:
רַבָּן שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן גַּמְלִיאֵל אוֹמֵר, הַלּוֹקֵחַ בְּהֵמָה מְנִיקָה מִן הַנָּכְרִי, אֵינוֹ חוֹשֵׁשׁ שֶׁמָּא בְנָהּ שֶׁל אַחֶרֶת הָיָה. נִכְנַס לְתוֹךְ עֶדְרוֹ וְרָאָה אֶת הַמַּבְכִּירוֹת מְנִיקוֹת וְאֶת שֶׁאֵינָן מַבְכִּירוֹת מְנִיקוֹת, אֵינוֹ חוֹשֵׁשׁ שֶׁמָּא בְנָהּ שֶׁל זוֹ בָּא לוֹ אֵצֶל זוֹ, אוֹ שֶׁמָּא בְנָהּ שֶׁל זוֹ בָּא לוֹ אֵצֶל זוֹ:
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: One who purchases a nursing animal from a gentile need not be concerned that her child was that of another. One who enters amidst his flock and sees first-time mother animals who are nursing and animals who gave birth before who are nursing need not be concerned that the child of this one came to that one and the child of that one came to this one.
Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel here considers the possibility that an animal found nursing a baby may not actually be that baby’s mother. The scenario is that a Jew has bought a nursing animal from a non-Jew, who presumably would not inform the Jewish buyer of the animal’s birth history (or couldn’t be relied on to do so). In the second scenario, there is a possible switcheroo in which mother animals are nursing each other’s babies. The Mishnah in the end says not to worry: it’s fair to assume that an animal who is nursing a baby gave birth to that baby.
Let me highlight two important ideas in this mishnah. One is that animals have families. It sounds silly to say this, since of course they do, but in our contemporary context most of us do not encounter the families of animals and so likely do not think much about them. So it’s worth mentioning that in the Mishnah there are animal parents and children and those relationships have legal import. The second idea in this mishnah that is of interest is that animal families are not straightforward biological units. In the animal world as the rabbis represent it, there are babysitters or aunties or “allomothers,” the term introduced by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her work on monkeys.
The mishnah’s parallel in Tosefta Bekhorot 2:14-15 takes this further:
הלוקח בהמה מניקה מן הנכרי הבא אחריה בכור מספק שמרחמת את שאינה יולדת רשב"ג אומר הרי הוא בחזקתו וכן היה רשב"ג אומר הנכנס לתוך עדרו בלילה וראה כעשר כחמש עשרה מבכירות שילדו ולשחרית בא ומצא זכרים תלואים בזקינות ונקבות במבכירות אינו חושש שמא בנה של זו בא אצל זו ושמא בנה של זו בא אצל זו.
One who purchases a nursing animal from a gentile, the one born after it is considered a first-born out of uncertainty regarding whether she had compassion (merahemet) for one to whom she did not give birth. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: The matter stands in its presumptive status. And similarly, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel would say: One who entered amidst his flock at night and saw about ten or about fifteen who were giving birth to firstborn children, and in the morning came and found male (babies) hanging on elders (i.e., not first-time mothers), and female (babies) hanging on the first-time mothers, one need not be concerned that the child of this one came to nurse from that one.
In contrast to the mishnah, in the Tosefta, there is an anonymous consensus position, and that position holds that an animal may indeed choose to nurse a baby whom she did not give birth to and in fact she should be presumed to have done so. The verb is merahemet, which one might translate as “she has compassion on” another baby, though one might say that she is literally “wombing” another mother’s baby since the root rehem refers to the womb. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel’s position is also a little different in the Tosefta, where he envisions the farmer making an evening foray into the flock and finding a veritable hospital delivery ward, with ten or fifteen animals all giving birth at once. When the farmer returns in the light of day to find all the little newborn babies telu’im, latched on, to nursing animal mothers, Shimon ben Gamliel says one can assume that the babies are nursing from their own mothers and not other mothers even if it means, as it does in the envisioned case in which all the male babies are nursing from seasoned mothers, that the priest gets nothing. Shimon ben Gamliel doesn’t say it can’t happen that mothers nurse each other’s babies, just that we shouldn’t assume it.
I’ll mention the Babylonian Talmud’s commentary on this material and then leave us with a few questions. Bekhorot 24a features not just biological crossing but also species crossing:
ארבב"ח אר"י ראה חזיר שכרוך אחר רחל פטורה מן הבכורה ואסור באכילה (הושע י, יב) עד יבא ויורה צדק לכם
Rabba bar bar Ḥana says that Rabbi Yoḥanan says: If one saw a pig who is clinging to a ewe, she is exempt from [the law of] the firstborn. And [the pig] is forbidden for consumption “until he comes and instructs righteousness to you” (Hosea 10:12).
Rabbi Yohanan describes a case where the mother is a sheep and the baby is a pig. (It is a scene straight out of Dr. Seuss’s Are You My Mother?). The piglet is karukh ahar, clinging to, the ewe. Rabbi Yohanan rules that for the purposes of donation the piglet is considered the ewe’s child and therefore exempts the ewe from the requirement of first-born donation of her future children. For the purposes of kashrut, however, the piglet is considered a pig like any other and therefore is prohibited for a person to eat, at least “until he comes and instructs righteousness,” a scriptural reference meant to indefinitely defer a species categorization for this little animal. The ruling attracts a good deal of talmudic back-and-forth because of its surprising claim that a pig can be the child of a sheep at the same time that it can still be a pig. The discussion ends with teyku, let the matter stand.
What are the implications of this ruling and the Mishnah and Tosefta that precede it? These rabbinic passages reflect an understanding of motherhood that transcends biological relationship and that also transcends species categorization. The most tempting question to raise with respect to these texts is what these maternal crossings might mean for humans but it’s so human to always take it back to the human so I’ll resist that temptation. Let’s ask instead about the little pig who has been adopted by a sheep. Why a pig? Jordan Rosenblum’s recent Jewish cultural history of the pig shows that Jews don’t tend to like pigs very much (Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig, NYU Press, 2024). In light of that aversion, it’s striking here that a quintessential kosher animal, a sheep, has a baby who’s a quintessential trayf animal, a pig. What does this scenario say about the line between kosher and trayf?
Let me also put the key concerns of Rafe’s book, knowledge and science, into conversation with these passages. What sort of rabbinic knowledge about families emerges from these texts? What science of the family is found there? The short answer is that the rabbinic notion of family is far from straightforward. Let me propose, with these passages from Bekhorot in mind, that Rafe’s arguments apply not only to reproductive models but to relational models as well. Rafe’s book invites us to revisit what it meant in the rabbinic world to take care of another being, to rely on and be relied upon, and to be enmeshed with another being physically and psychically.
I’d encourage us, in closing, to apply Rafe’s approach to the full matrix of relationships that the rabbis envisioned. Rafe says in the book that rabbinic texts stimulate “alternate ways of seeing and being” (21) and that they “can allow us to loosen our grip on what we think of as knowledge, as science, as species, as sexgender, as “reproduction,” and as sources of authority (ancient and present)” (196). I want to highlight this because I think Rafe captures here very compellingly why people continue to study rabbinic literature so many centuries after its composition. The rabbis plunge us into an alternate universe that gets us thinking about our own world differently. But it’s only through books like Rafe’s that we’re able to actually access and absorb these alternate ways of seeing and being. So I want to thank Rafe for unlocking these alternatives for us. I hope to have shown at least one way we can unlock them still further.
Beth A. Berkowitz is Ingeborg Rennert Chair of Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College