Sanhedrin – “Assembly”

Sanhedrin – “Assembly” – Judging You

• • The Sanhedrin itself was a council of 71 Jewish sages during the Roman era, who adjudicated major disputes, somewhat like a supreme court. The word is a loan word from Greek. This tractate focuses on the court system and civil law for the most part, with a section on criminal particularly around discussions of capital punishment.
  • 12/19/24, Chapter 1, Page 2 – We jump right in with the make-up of the courts. Most court cases are to by tried by a panel of three judges. Cases that might involve capital punishment are heard by a panel of 23 judges (a “Lesser Sanhedrin”), cases regarding land and estate valuation are judged by nine judges, and cases which involve a suit against an entire tribe, community, town, city, or other similar groups are to be heard by a “Great Sanhedrin”, a full 71 judges.
  • 12/20/24, Page 3 – In most civil cases, like personal injury, the three judge panel is to be chosen from qualified judges – experts in both law and the genre of the case. There is one exception – cases related to the lending of money. Here, the three judges are laypeople, with no expertise in either law or finances. Why? Because, say the sages, if lenders knew they’d have to explain their lending practices to experts, they’d never lend anyone money, thus depriving needy borrowers of any source of loans.
  • 12/21/24, Page 4 – The fact that scriptural Hebrew is written without vowels often leads to differing interpretations of passages. Here we have the same issue, as some of the words regarding the penalties in civil cases could be interpreted as either singular or plural, depending on the missing vowel endings. Or even just general commandments – the four compartments of the traditional tefillin are based on a passage that enumerates three, but a group of rabbis decided that one of them was plural, so four. Why not five, or six, or….?
  • 12/22/24, Page 5 – Harking back to page 3, where the three judges are not required to be experts in monetary matters. If, however, one of them claims to be an expert, he can recommend that he, solely, be the judge in the case, as the other two are not. If the litigants accept this, his judgement is final. If they decline, and he pronounces judgement anyway, he is liable for the costs of any errors he makes, since he claimed to be an expert.
  • 12/23/24, Page 6 – Let’s see, you have to have an odd number of judges, so that a tied ruling is not possible. Once the litigants have accepted the judges, they are required to accept their ruling. No mediation or negotiation after the fact is allowed, unless the judges order it, in fact, the rabbis determine, once they, as judges, have issued a ruling, anything that changes that ruling is a sin, and punishable, even if the litigants are both in agreement. Just a bit self-important, no?
  • 12/24/24, Page 7 – When it is appropriate to compromise in regard to taking the righteous path? What it really boils down to in the eyes of the Talmudic sages is that there is always a correct choice to make if you keep your faith. Compromising your faith, your beliefs, your principles, is like cutting a slit in a hose, it’s just going to get worse, it’s never going to mend itself. An interesting analogy, but seems awfully fatalistic in regard to the possibility of redemption for doing something wrong.
  • 12/25/24, Page 8 – A judge who is selected for a panel, regardless of how many are on the panel, must recuse himself if he knows either of the litigants socially or professionally, he also must consider if one or the other is in an economic or social situation that makes him feel uncomfortable to be a part of judging, and, if he feels, or finds, that the matter before him is, in modern parlance, above his paygrade, he should immediately refer the case to a higher level judge.
  • 12/26/24, Page 9 – Qualifying witnesses to a crime: First, there must be at least two. Second, none of the witnesses can be close relatives of the accused, unless one can prove that they tried to stop him from committing the crime, but only one of them can fall into that category. Third, you can’t be a witness against yourself, so no testimony you give that implicates you in a crime is considered valid.
  • 12/27/24, Page 10 – If witnesses testify that a certain man engaged in either adultery or bestiality, without identifying the woman or beast, they are put to death. If they testify to not just that, but identify the woman or beast, they have to pay a fine to the woman’s family, or the beast’s owner, prior to being put to death, along with said woman or beast.
  • 12/28/24, Page 11 – A series of stories are posited, in which someone leading or teaching an assembled group of others, finds something objectionable going on – a smell, a sound, something in the room that shouldn’t be – and demands to know who caused it, clearly with the intent of embarrassing the person. In each case, those assembled know who did it, and en masse, they all take the blame so that no one is embarrassed. The rest of the page is all about how leap months are calculated.
  • 12/29/24, Page 12 – Most of today’s page is dedicated to a discussion of when an intercalated month (leap month) can occur and who and how it is calculated. But a side story about a couple of cloth dyers who were specialists in the famous blue dye (from murex snails) cloth being apprehended by the Romans, and then released because of how revered these dyers were, caught my eye. I just recently read the definitive, and fascinating, book on the topic… out of the blue.
  • 12/30/24, Page 13 – When we add a leap day to the calendar every four years, it’s only serious impact is on 0.06% of the world’s population, those born on February 29th. But when you’re adding an entire leap month, there are some things to consider. For example, the autumn equinox festival, Sukkot, has to remain more or less at the autumn equinox, and the sages determine that a 16 day variance is the maximum allowed when determining whether to add a leap month for the year.
  • 12/31/24, Page 14 – We end the Gregorian calendar year with a look back at the oppression of the Jewish people in Israel by the Romans, 2000 years ago. As part of their attempt at (an actual) genocide, they decreed that anyone who ordained another as a rabbi or teacher would be put to death, along with the person ordained, and the entire town where it took place. Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava, in his last act, took a group to the mountains, ordained them, and told them to flee to other lands. The Romans tracked him down and killed him by sticking him with spears 300 times, until “he looked like a sieve”.
  • 1/1/25, Page 15 – Okay, they’re just high again. The discussion starts at the point of a woman engaging in bestiality with an ox, and that she and the ox are to be stoned to death. One rabbi tosses out the question of whether it’s the same for a man, and does it depend on whether he’s… the top or the bottom? And are they being judged for bestiality or homosexuality at that point? It then segues into whether two oxen that engage in sex are to be judged for homosexuality… or bestiality?
  • 1/2/25, Page 16 – A long series of examples that the rabbis debate over whether they constitute sufficiently “great matters” that require judgement by the Great Sanhedrin of 71 judges, or just a regular Sanhedrin of 23. In the midst of it all, we have a tangent, and guess who’s back? David, again. Here, his advisors let him know that supplies for the kingdom are running low. His response? “Go expand our borders, kill some people, take their stuff.” Someone needs to write a real expose of just what a “piece of work” David really was.
  • 1/3/25, Page 17 – In another tangent there’s a note about “creeping animals” being impure, non-kosher. Leviticus 11:42 states “all animals that crawl on the ground, on their bellies or all four legs. But here, it is noted that snakes are not impure, and that Leviticus 11:29 is quite specific about what creeping animals are: mole, mouse, dab lizard, gecko, land-crocodile, lizard, skink, and chameleon. Nonetheless, rabbinic tradition is to honor the more general later statement, treating the former as “just some examples”.
  • 1/4/25, Chapter 2, Page 18 – While most people are required to give testimony in court when summoned, there are those who are not. The High Priest, kings, elderly people whose dignity would be compromised, wealthy people who have better things to do with their time. All fall into the category of “it’s not worth their time to stop what they’re doing and give testimony”. Reminiscent of the apocryphal story of Bill Gates and the $100 bill on the sidewalk. (Apocryphal because it’s actually the opposite of what he said, but is used to make a point about his wealth.)
  • 1/5/25, Page 19 – Okay, I have just discovered the two millennia old origin of women’s bathroom etiquette. Rabbi Yosei declared that women who are in public bathhouses must constantly talk with each other. Why? You might ask. Because, he explains, if a man with ill-intent were to enter the women’s bathhouse, he would be scared off by the constant chatter of the women and not carry out his evil plans, thus keeping them safe from harm.
  • 1/6/25, Page 20 – They’re doing a lot of tangents this time. I don’t even want to touch (pun intended) the whole comparison of Boaz’ and Joseph’s levels of restraint when seeing a beautiful woman (Joseph, apparently, became as hard as a turnip head and barely tore himself away from raping a friend’s wife). Today, however, I learned about using dried shark or ray skin as sandpaper (“shagreen”) to polish wood, and, a new word for my vocabulary.
  • 1/7/25, Page 21 – It’s moments like these that I wonder about the editing of the Hebrew Bible. Today, the rabbis are discussing the story of Ammon raping his half-sister Tamar, from II Samuel 13. Now, I remember reading that in my “other” study project, but I don’t remember the story ending with Tamar having “tied a hair around his penis and severing it” being his reason for hating her. And there’s no reference to this that I can find online. But the rabbis talk over this whole scene, discussing it as the ending of the story written in that chapter.
  • 1/8/25, Page 22 – So much on this page. The infamous mene mene tekel upharsin that only King David could read, or could he? Because maybe it was encoded?! Or that each person is born with a soulmate and will only be complete after having intercourse with his/her designated (while in the womb) partner, all the rest is just sex and leaves one unfulfilled? Or, perhaps, the blaming of the priests with long hair who got drunk and that somehow that led to the destruction of the Temple (leading to the Nazarenes – shave their heads and never touching grapes or wine)?
  • 1/9/25, Chapter 3, Page 23 – You may recall from page 3 that in financial matters, a panel of three judges is selected, but they don’t have to be experts in the field of finances. So, how are they selected? Each litigant selects one person to be one of the judges, and those two judges select the third. Each litigant can disqualify the other’s choice of judge if it can be shown that they are related to the other litigant, or have a conflict of interest in the case. Once the judges are agreed on, the panel is locked in, even if a conflict or relationship is later discovered.
  • 1/10/25, Page 24 – Like judges, witnesses may be excluded because of conflict of interest or their relationship to one or the other of the litigants. Too, solo witnesses, with no corroborating evidence, may be disqualified. And then there are the professional reasons – gamblers are disqualified from being witnesses, as are loan sharks, and those who trade in sabbatical year goods – remember, we’re talking about financial cases here. And then the oddity – those who raise pigeons. No reason for the last is given.
  • 1/11/25, Page 25 – Oh, we’re getting into the pigeons today. Basically, three of the categories for disqualifying witnesses that we saw yesterday are based on the prohibition on gambling. They weren’t talking about simply raising pigeons, but raising them to race them. The prohibition on gambling, racing animals (not just pigeons, they were an example), and loan sharking, are based on that no one should be put in a position of owing money to another without clear amounts, date, and outcomes, with no duress involved.
  • 1/12/25, Page 26 – Today we’re off on a tangent about Shebna, advisor to King Hezekiah. While Hezekiah was busy dismantling the Jewish way of life and religion, in support of some young upstart named Jesus, Shebna was busy parading about making grand pronouncements about his own importance and how he was going to change the world by shaking things up, and treating Hezekiah as a means to reshape things to his vision. It didn’t go well for him, as Hezekiah wasn’t up for being overshadowed. Does this sound at all similar to a modern day situation?
  • 1/13/25, Page 27 – A couple of witnesses testify to an event. Some time after their testimony, two other witnesses testify that they first pair are lying. Who is to be believed? Abaye says that the Torah says the second set are always to be believed, and disqualifies their past testimony. Rava says that it should only apply to future testimony, and of both pairs of witnesses, because… who knows which pair is lying? He doesn’t address the past testimony’s veracity.
  • 1/14/25, Page 28 – How far does the disqualification of a relative to be a witness go? One generation, say the rabbis – which includes one’s siblings and half-siblings (but not step-siblings), parents, children, spouses, spouse’s siblings or children from a previous marriage (but not spouse’s parents, interestingly), uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. As soon as you hit grandchildren or grandparents of your self or your siblings or your spouse, they’re not included.
  • 1/15/25, Page 29 – Someone who is known to love or hate one of the litigants is also disqualified from giving testimony. What all this is boiling down to is something long established in various parts of the Talmud – witnesses for pretty much anything have to be impartial, there has to be at least two witnesses and/or corroborating evidence, and there can’t be other impartial witnesses discrediting their testimony.
  • 1/16/25, Page 30 – In order for a boy or girl to be considered as an adult for testifying purposes, they must have gone through at least the start of puberty. How is that determined? Either one must have a minimum of two pubic hairs. And how is that determined? There have to be two adult witnesses who have examined their genitals to see if they have those two hairs. This seems a bit shady to me, agents of the State examining children’s genitals to determine their status, we’d never allow that today… oh wait… yeah, we’re allowing that today.
  • 1/17/25, Page 31 – Most of today’s page is about whether secondary details from eyewitnesses matter – was man’s shirt black or white – which, for the most part, they deem irrelevant if not germane to the crime. Of note to me, they reiterate that a panel of judges must present a united front when delivering a verdict. No dissenting opinions are to be offered, no interviews about why they disagree with their colleagues, no commentary on the case to anyone, or they lose their judgeship and are punished financially.