If one finds a scroll, he may peruse it once in thirty days, but he must not teach out of it, nor may another join him in reading it; if he does not know how to read, he must unroll it.  If a garment be found, it should be shaken and spread out once in thirty days, for its own sake (to preserve it), but not for display.  Silver and copper articles should be used to take care of them, but not for the sake of ornament.  Gold and glass vessels he should not meddle with—­till the coming of Elijah.

Bava Metzia, fol. 29, col. 2.

Rabbi Zira so inured his body (to endurance) that the fire of Gehenna had no power over it.  Every thirty days he experimented on himself, ascending a fiery furnace, and finally sitting down in the midst of it without being affected by the fire.  One day, however, as the Rabbis fixed their eyes upon him, his hips became singed, and from that day onward he was noted in Jewry as the little man with the singed hips.

Ibid., fol. 85, col. 1.

An Arab once said to Rabbah bar Channah, “Come and I will show thee the place where Korah and his accomplices were swallowed up.”  “There,” says the Rabbi, “I observed smoke coming out from two cracks in the ground.  Into one of these he inserted some wool tied on to the end of his spear, and when he drew it out again it was scorched.  Then he bade me listen.  I did so, and as I listened heard them groan out, ’Moses and his law are true, but we are liars.’  The Arab then told me that they come round to this place once in every thirty days, being stirred about in the hell-surge like meat in the boiling caldron.”

Bava Bathra, fol. 74, col. 1.

Rabbi Yochanan, in expounding Isa. liv. 12, said, “The Holy One—­blessed be He!—­will bring precious stones and pearls, each measuring thirty cubits by thirty, and polishing them down to twenty cubits by ten, will place them in the gates of Jerusalem.”  A certain disciple contemptuously observed, “No one has ever yet seen a precious stone as large as a small bird’s egg, and is it likely that such immense ones as these have any existence?” He happened one day after this to go forth on a voyage, and there in the sea he saw the angels quarrying precious stones and pearls like those his Rabbi had told him of, and upon inquiry he learned that they were intended for the gates of Jerusalem.  On his return he went straight to Rabbi Yochanan and told him what he had seen and heard.

“Raca!” said the latter, “hadst thou not seen them thou wouldst have kept on deriding the words of the wise!” Then fixing his gaze intently upon him, he with the glance of his eye reduced to a heap of bones the carcass of his body.

Ibid., fol. 75, col. 1.

He who lends unconditionally a sum of money to his neighbor is not entitled to demand it back within thirty days thereafter.

Maccoth, fol. 3, col. 2.

If a man has lost a relative, he is forbidden to engage in business until thirty days after the death.  In the case of the decease of a father or a mother, he is not to resume work until his friends rebuke him and urge him to return.