Chullin 21

How do you call time of death? Is it when the brain dies? The heart stops beating?

In our world today, we have instruments that let us know when someone is no longer alive. But, in the time of the Talmud, these things didn’t exist. Because a corpse imparts impurity, the time of death was still very important to the rabbis. Today, they wonder when we consider someone to have died . . . and in doing so compare various ways of dying to those of animals!

If one ripped a person like one cuts a fish, lengthwise, the halakhic status of the ripped person is that of a corpse even though he is still convulsing, and he imparts impurity in a tent.

If their heads were removed, even if they are convulsing, they are impure like the tail of a lizard that was severed that convulses even though it is not alive.

And, like a bird, If the neck bone of a person was broken and a majority of the surrounding flesh with it was cut, that person imparts impurity in a tent.

Nasty stuff. But, it also makes sense. We need to know when life (at least in it’s physical form) ends. Most of us don’t witness gruesome deaths where a person is filleted, maimed, or partially or completely decapitated. However, farmers will have seen this with animals. They know that chickens still run, even when their head is cut off, fish twitch even when sliced open, and lizard tails wiggle even when separated form the body. So they use this to understand that there may be post mortem movement from human bodies as well.

The gems: 1) we continue to learn so much about life from animals; and 2) determining time of death has always been a question of concern.