When a condemned woman died under Roman sentence, the students of Rabbi Ishmael made an unusual decision. They performed one of the earliest recorded forensic examinations in Jewish tradition. They counted the bones.
Rabbinic medicine had inherited a teaching that the human body contained 248 bones — corresponding to the 248 positive commandments of the Torah. The students of Ishmael, working systematically through the corpse, came to a different number: 252.
When they examined the body of a man for comparison, they counted 243.
The difference intrigued them. Women, by their count, carried additional bones — perhaps those of the hips or the delicate bones of the hands. The textual tradition preserves a long enumeration of the 253 bones in the human body, suggesting the Rabbis later averaged or revised the count, trying to reconcile the observed anatomy with the theological number 248.
The Talmud (Bekhorot 45a) and Gaster's Exempla #231 preserve the episode. The Rabbis cared about facts. When the tradition said 248 and the body said 252, they did not throw out the body. They opened a long argument about how to read both — the text and the flesh — so that Torah and the created world could keep speaking to each other.