For the source text click/tap here: Bava Batra 154
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Our Gemara relates a story that occurred in Bnei Brak, where someone who inherited property from his father sold it and died soon afterwards. Family members then claimed in court that the person who sold the property was underage at the time that it was sold, and that the sale should be cancelled.
Rabbi Akiva heard the case together with the suggestion that the body be exhumed in order to ascertain whether he had reached maturity before he died. Rabbi Akiva ruled that he could not allow for nivul ha-met – desecration of the dead – in such a case; furthermore, he argued that the physical condition of the body changes after death, so that examining the body would not offer a definitive clarification of the situation.
We explore the Halachic ramifications of autopsies a a look at the talmud fro a post modern literary (Bakhtin) perspective.