The sages preserved a curious historical note about a girl named Justina, the daughter of Asverus, who was married at the age of six and gave birth to a child at the age of seven.
When this report reached the rabbis, it provoked intense discussion. The accepted wisdom among the sages was that a girl could not physically bear a child before the age of eleven, and most authorities placed the threshold even later. How then could Justina have given birth at seven?
Some rabbis suggested that the case was miraculous — an exception granted by God for reasons known only to Him, much as Sarah had conceived Isaac at the age of ninety (Genesis 21:2). Others argued that the report was exaggerated or that the ages had been miscounted in transmission.
But the majority view was more pragmatic. The sages treated the case of Justina as medical evidence that demanded revision of existing assumptions. If a documented case existed of a girl bearing a child at seven, then the threshold the rabbis had assumed was wrong — or at least, exceptions were possible. The Talmud often records such anomalies not to celebrate them but to establish the outer boundaries of natural law.
The rabbis drew a broader lesson from the case: never assume that what you have not seen cannot exist. The world is full of wonders that fall outside the normal range of experience. A sage who dismisses the extraordinary simply because it is rare is no sage at all.