Study Bekhorot folio 22A with parallel Hebrew-English text, traditional commentary, and modern study tools. Free access to Babylonian Talmud online.
The Talmud answers: It must be buried in order to publicize that the animal is exempt from having its future offspring counted a firstborn.
The Talmud notes with regard to the ruling of the Mishnah that the animal is exempt from having any future offspring counted as firstborn: That is to say that the expelled mass is a full-fledged offspring. But if so, why doesn’t it impart ritual impurity, neither through physical contact nor through
The Talmud comments: And R' Yoḥanan follows his line of reasoning in this regard, as R' Yoḥanan says: R' Eliezer ben Yaakov and R' Shimon both said the same thing, i.e., they both issued rulings based on the same principle. The relevant statement of R' Eliezer ben Yaakov is that which we said previ
And what is the statement of R' Shimon to which R' Yoḥanan was referring? It is as we learned in a Mishnah (Nidda 18a): If a woman miscarried and the afterbirth is in the house, the house is impure. The reason is not that the afterbirth itself has the status of an offspring, but that there is no af
§ The Talmud continues discussing the ritual impurity imparted by a fetus. We learned in a Mishnah elsewhere (Oholot 7:4): If a fetus dies in its mother’s womb, it imparts ritual impurity from when the womb opens. Yet deceased fetuses do not impart ritual impurity in this manner even during the open