Cohn, Jacob. The Royal Table - VWC: Faculty/Staff Web

54 THE ROYAL TABLE
find marks by which cattle can be distinguished from
beasts. A clean beast should have forked horns; or failing
that, its horns should be circular in cross-section, composed
of layers rather than of solid bone, and should have certain
deep indentations near the base. If all three of these conditions
are not present in a beast whose horns are not
forked, that beast is unclean.4 There are only two cases
where the laws concerning the marks of cleanliness are disregarded.
A child of a mother which has the "clean" marks
is clean regardless of their failure to be transmitted to the
offspring. Conversely,
the child of an unclean mother is
unclean, despite any abnormal appearance of the marks
of cleanliness in the young. 5 The child of a trefah, that
is, an animal having certain physical defects to be described
later, is
6
not unclean.
The prohibited birds are few in number, and total but
twenty-four species. 7 The Bible does not tell, in their case,
by which marks the clean can be distinguished from the
unclean, but the oral tradition has made this clear. First,
all birds of prey are forbidden. 8
Birds of prey can be
recognized from the circumstance that when they stand on
a rope, half of their claws are on one side of the rope, and
half on the other. Another characteristic is the picking of
morsels of food right out of the air without waiting for the
food to reach the ground. 9
Once it has been established
that a bird does not prey, it becomes necessary to examine
it further for the following: a forefinger which stands
Hullin ibid Y. D. 80, 1.
Bechorot Sa
Hullin 75a, Beza 6a.
There are a few variations between the lists of Leviticus and
Deuteronomy But run and nT are the same, and irmt means
two species,
Hullin 61b; Y. D. 82, 2.
Y. D. ibid.