Anonymous asked Staff ago Hello.
Do you know about this bit of nonsense:
“A male hayena, after seven years, turns into a bat, and a bat after seven years turns into a vampire” (Bava Kama 16a).
Similarly, do you know where in the Talmud or anywhere else it is written that the hyena changes sex (from male to female and the opposite)?
Yossi
jsadmin Staff answered 21 years ago
Dear Yossi,
The Babylonian sages identified the bardelas written of in the Mishnah (Bava Kama 1:4): “The wolf and the lion and the bear and the tiger and the bardalis and the snake are animals which are warned” as the male hyena, which changes into a bat after seven years (Bava Kama 16a). The authors of the Mishneh, who lived in the Land of Israel under Roman rule, knew the bardalis as a type of swift and daring tiger. Its Latin name was Pardalis, a word composed of two words — pard (tiger) and allia (other)–another tiger. (Menachem Dor, “Fauna in the Era of the Scriptures, the Mishnah, and the Talmud,” entry bardalis.) The change in location (from the Land of Israel to Babylon) and of era (from the time of the Mishnah to that of the Amoraim) lead to many distortions; this is even truer as the location and era undergo greater changes.
In the Palestinian Talmud they said that once in seven years G-d changes His world. The louse, after seven years, becomes a scorpion, the male hyena a female, and the mountain mouse becomes a wild boar (Shabbat chapter 1, page 3, column 2, halacha 3).
It is on nonsense like this that yeshiva students exhaust their intellectual prowess, with the funding and support of the enlightened society in the State of Israel.
Sincerely,
Daat Emet