Mishna Middos
Oct. 15th, 2024 09:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSomeone else claimed the rest of Kilayim for the siyum, so when I finished the first 4 perakim of Kilayim with time to go, I claimed Maseches Middos. I'm going to work through the rest of Kilayim, though, over the next month or two. because I'm still unclear if Bulbasaur is kosher
The siyum mishnayos was on Tzom Gedaliah, and it was very powerful. It felt good to have done something, one if the most challenging parts of the last year has been the feeling of helplessness, of the pull of forces bigger than us.
Middos means measurements, it's also commonly used metaphorically to refer to personal traits like honesty or kindness, with the idea being I guess that we're asking how well we measure up as a person. In any case, this tractate is about the measurements of the Beis Hamikdash, specifically the second Beis Hamikdash.
I thought it'd be interesting because I find measurements and the challenge of reporting measurements clearly super interesting, and it was interesting on those terms, but I hadn't realized how sad a book it would be.
Scholars put the creation of the Mishna at around 200 CE, and the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed in 70 CE, so you are at the edge of the range where a person who was very young in the Temple era could have as a very old man known Yehuda HaNasi when he was young. And in fact, Maseches Middos is full of the testimony of Rabbi Eliezer Ben Yaakov, who seems to have seen the Beis Hamikdash and whose uncle served as a priest, but who also is recorded many times in the masechta as not remembering the function of various parts of the Temple complex. You very much get the sense of an old Eliezer Ben Yaakov telling stories of the glory of the Temple to his young disciples, and them struggling to fit together the inconsistencies in the old man's tales and imagining this wondrous place they only know as a devastated ruin. It's so heartbreaking.
The other thing I found really noteworthy is how lived-in and functional the Temple feels in Maseches Middos. The placement of the drains, the placement of the storage lockers, the well to supply water for cleaning, whether the doors go in or out and if they're too heavy to push. The sense is not of a distant holy place, but a very practically organized workplace.
Oh, a third thing that is fascinating is how often the Mishna quotes Yechezkel as a source. Yechezkel's prophecy clearly does not match the second Beis Hamikdash, so the traditional explanation is that he was describing the Third Temple, but it seems like whenever possible, the Rabbis wanted to suggest that Yechezkel's prophecy was consistent with the second Temple too? Or maybe that the builders of the second Temple, even though they didn't totally follow Yechezkel, followed him whenever they found it practical?
Perek 1
This chapter is about the watches in the Beis Hamikdash, and how that relates to the layout overall of various entranceways. Artscroll says this wasn't so much about security as about observing a ceremonial watch to honor the Temple, but I'm not so sure. The text in subsequent chapters has a lot of anxiety about people being in the wrong places... Israelites in the priestly areas, women in the all-male areas, and most significantly, non-Jews anywhere in the Azarah. The Yevanim breached the Azarah's outer wall in thirteen places and even though they were subsequently repaired, the Sages instituted a policy of bowing whenever you passed one of those breaches, showing how grievous a psychic wound that represented. And I recall the story in Toldot Yeshu of Yeshu sneaking into the Beis Hamikdash to steal the secret name of God. I don't think this guard was a military contingent, but I do think they had a serious practical charge.
Mishna 1:1
The details of which gates the overnight guards would watch. There were three Kohanim on watch, at specific locations and 21 Leviim covering all entryways.
Mishna 1:2
We get the delightful detail that if the watch leader found a guard asleep he would strip him naked and burn his clothes to make a lesson out of him. And that R' Eliezer Ben Yaakov's uncle said this happened to him once.
Mishna 1:3
Details of the five outer gates on Herod's wall that were among the 21 sites guarded by Leviim. Two gates in the south, one in the north, one in the west (On what we now call the Kotel, though in the last century of the second Beis Hamikdash, all four outer walls were Kotel) and one in the East, which is what the procession for the red heifer used.
Mishna 1:4
Details the 7 gates of the Azarah that were also guarded by the Leviim. On the East side is the Nicanor Gate, probably the most famous gate because the Beis Hamikdash has an east to west workflow from most mundane uses in the easternmost parts of the courtyard to most holy uses in the kodesh hakodashim in the westernmost part of the heichal.
Mishna 1:5
The north of the Azarah had the gate of sparks- which had a chamber where they kept a fire from which to light the various fires needed in the avodah. This was guarded below by a levite, but above there was a chamber where a kohen guarded, maybe to make sure the fire didn't go out? Next on the north side was the shaar korban, where animals were brought in to be sacrificed, and next to that was the chamber of fire.
Mishna 1:6
The chamber of fire straddled the wall of the Azarah, so half was on holy ground and half wasn't- a stone marker indicated the boundary. On the less holy side, they stored the stones the Yevanim used in their idolatrous worship, which the Hasmoneans had removed but since they had been part of the Beis Hamikdash, they still had some inherent sanctity and weren't destroyed. Or maybe they weren't sure the appropriate way to destroy them, so they kept them.
Apparently this was the chamber of fire because it included, among other functions, a bath for the priests to immerse themselves in and the bath was heated.
Mishna 1:7
Since the chamber straddled the line between courtyard and Har Habayis, it had doorways on either side leading both in and out of the Azarah.
Mishna 1:8
The main area of the chamber of fire had a vaulted ceiling and was used as a sleeping area for priests on service. There seems to have been a hierarchy in sleeping arrangements where senior priests got better spots.
Mishna 1:9
They kept the keys to the gates in the chamber of fire, and at night a priest would make sure everyone who wasn't supposed to be in overnight was out, and then lock the gates.
Perek 2
The overall layout of the Temple on Har Habayit. Important today of course because of politics and because most religious Jews still think we are bound not to set foot in the Temple grounds especially if we are tamei, so knowing the specific geography is important if we are going to be in the area. Though this sense of kavod and care seems to be getting subsumed by right wing politics in recent years.
Mishna 2:1
The Temple mount is sized as 500 cubits by 500 cubits. It is, of course, not really square, but this goes to what I said about how measurement is fascinating. To some useful degree of precision Har Habayis was a 500x500 square. At some level, measurements are a story we tell about a physical object, what we call a model rather than an absolute truth about reality. Since the Beis Hamikdash represents an interface between these physical compromises, and the infinite Holy One, it's especially interesting to think about the ways measurements fall short in this context.
The Temple was not centered on the mountain, but more to the northeast, and it was oriented with the long side east to west, so the biggest open area on the mount was south of the temple and the second biggest open area was east of the temple.
Mishna 2:2
Har Habayis had two gates in the south, as mentioned in Perek 1. The more southeastern gate was the standard entry point for most people, the more southwestern gate was the standard exit point. But mourners would enter and leave through the southwestern gate, possibly so that people entering and seeing them leave would have an opportunity to see them, recognize them as mourners, and offer comfort.
Mishna 2:3
Surrounding the Temple was the Soreg, a short fence serving as the boundary of thr Temple. Non-Jews were not allowed to cross the Soreg. As I mentioned, the Yevanim created 13 breaches in the Soreg, which even after their repair the Jews marked as psychic wounds in the Temple, bowing when they passed them.
Inside the Soreg was a 10 amos gap called the Hel, from the same root as Hol in Kodesh l'hol. So it's a sort of neutral unconsecrated boundary space between the holiness of the Temple and the rest of the world.
At some point, presumably during Herod's renovation, all the gates were refinished in gold, except the Nicanor Gate, which was the main public entrance to the Azarah, for an obscure reason that has something to do with it already being sufficiently decorative. Possibly a miracle made its copper shine like gold, or possibly the miracle turned them into gold. There's something homiletically appealing to me about the main gate being of less valuable material that nonetheless looked as good or better.
Mishna 2:4
The Eastern Kotel outer wall was shorter than the other walls so that a kohen on the Mount of Olives with the parah adumah could see what was happening in the Azarah and appropriately synchronize the timing of the ritual.
Mishna 2:5
The easternmost 135 amos of the azarah was called ezrat nashim because it was the only part that woman could go into. It also had various sections for nazirim, for kohanim with mums, for metzoraim, and another chamber R' Eliezer Ben Jacob couldn't remember the use of, I believe this is the first time we see this device, which again reinforces how tragically fragile a memory game this sefer is.
Originally men and women mingled in the ezrat nashim, but at some point they built a balcony for the women so they wouldn't have to mingle. This really emphasizes that the segregation of men and woman was not biblical, that most of the laws of tzniut are contextual to the society you live in, and so at some point in the late second Temple period the patriarchal ideas became more enmeshed and then were enshrined mistakenly in halacha.
On the west of the ezrat nashim are the famous fifteen steps to the ezrat yisrael, where the leviim would sing the 15 Shir Hamaalos as they ascended.
Mishna 2:6
As we move west from the ezrat nashim, we ascend to the ezrat yisrael and then to the ezrat kohanim, both of which are comparatively narrow at only 11 amos wide each, and which are each higher than the previous area- you literally ascend to holier parts of the Temple, metaphors are not subtle. Below the ezrat yisrael was storage for the levites' musical instruments.
Abba Yose Ben Hanan argued against the Mishna in the last Perek that the Azarah didn't have 7 gates, it had 13. The discrepancy seems to involve how you count- the Nicanor Gate had two little side gates, for example, that the 7 count just included with the main gate, and maybe there were some small gates nobody really used that weren't in the original count.
Perek 3
The layout of the mizbeach. This is very much not the Torah's vague build an altar commandment, this is how you run an altar that is being used day in and day out for many kinds of sacrifice, some of them quite messy. It seems the mizbeach was expanded in the second Temple compared to the first, suggesting the kohanim had Notes.
Mishna 3:1
The mizbeach's measurements are described from outside to in, starting with its overall 32x32 amot size and then demarcating different zones moving inwards by their width. This is a design approach I've used many times when my design is constrained to fit within a certain footprint; it's also sometimes a clear and straightforward way to describe an existing structure, but for that purpose it's a little less intuitive than inside to out. So I wonder if thr description is coming from a designer perspective.
The various zones include walkways for kohanim to use to avoid going into the Holy areas unnecessarily, as well as ledges that seem to have both practical function to channel materials and are constrained by the Torah's requirements of where to perform different parts of various sacrifices.
Rabbi Yose teaches that the first beis hamikdash had a 28x28 altar, and it was expanded to 32x32 in the second temple to match Yechezkel. The addition was done not by evenly adding two amos to each side, but by adding a 4x4 ell shape in the northwest, but since the Rabbis seem to have been more familiar with Greek alphabet than Roman, they say gamma shaped.
MIshna 3:2
At the base of the mizbeach structure, at the southwest corner, there was a drain, because some sacrifices involved blood pouring down the south and west sides of the mizbeach and this directed those streams of blood into the drain.
Mishna 3:3
There was an access panel by this drain hole so every so often, they could go in and clean the drain of concealed blood and dirt.
Mishna 3:4
The stones of the mizbeach were not touched with iron, either in their fabrication or in their cleaning, because iron is associated with weapons and war and death, and the mizbeach is about extending our connection to God and our life.
This of course leads to the midrashim about the shamir, the magic worm Solomon found that can cut through stone, which was one of my favorite stories as a child, and I think somewhere deep in my ao3 I wrote shamir fic.
Mishna 3:5
North of the altar was all of the equipment for doing the sacrifices- rows of rings to tie the animals to, pillars for hanging the slaughtered animals, I think while their blood drained, and tables for butchering the animals.
Mishna 3:6
South of the mizbeach was the kiyor, the basin used for handwashing. Which was possibly a magical place where pi equals 3, but probably pi was just its normal value.
Mishna 3:7
West of the mizbeach was the Heichal, which opened into the Ulam, an entry chamber with a big, big doorway. 40 amos high, with five wood bbeams atop it as a decoration, in an inverted pyramid with the shortest beam at the bottom and the longest beam at the top.
Mishna 3:8
The Ulam had cedar beams supporting it extending from the main part of the Heichal. There was a chain of gold shaped like a grapevines hung from the roof of the Ulam, and rich donors would donate additional gold chain, and then when they needed to buy things for the maintenance of the Heichal they would take from the gold, so it was sort of like a very visible sacred piggy bank.
Perek 4
The layout of the Heichal, the central building containing the Kodesh and Kodesh Hakadoshim. Famously only the High Priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and only on Yom Kippur, so... that makes maintenance a lot harder. Also it makes reconstructing its layout from memory a lot harder.
Mishna 4:1
The doorway from the Ulam into the Kodesh was like an airlock with two sets of two doors, inner doors and outer doors. There's a debate between the Tanna Kamma and R' Yehuda about how the doors opened but they're designed to cover certain less pretty walls when they're fully opened.
Mishna 4:2
In addition to this main doorway, there were smaller doorways into the Kodesh north and south. The south door was never used, maybe it was part of construction and locked when the Beis Hamikdash was consecrated, or maybe it will be used in the time of Moshiach. The north door was a service access, according to the Tanna Kamma it was used because the main doors needed (either for ritual or practical reasons) from the inside so the priest would duck in through the little north door and open the doors from the inside. According to R Yehuda, the priest would go through the north door to in between the two sets of doors and open both from the middle.
Mishna 4:3
There were 38 storage cells along the walls of the Heichal, in three rows height wise. Many of the cells had openings connecting them to the cells above, below, and to the sides so things could be moved cell to cell.
Mishna 4:4
The cells got wider as they got higher, which Artscroll has a nice picture arguing has a practical reason in terms of how they stacked and were supported, but maybe also is connected to the decoration at the doorway of the Ulam, and an overall theme of the Heichal and ascent.
Mishna 4:5
This might be my favorite mishna. There was a stairway wrapping around the outside if the Heichal. Why? Sometimes the Kodesh Hakadoshim needed maintenance but nobody could go inside, so the workmen would climb to the roof and use hooks to pull things out of the Heichal and to return them after cleaning or repair. I love the mix of awe and practicality at play here. Look, the Kodesh Hakadoshim might be God's resting place among Israel, but it's also a physical place and entropy exists.
Mishna 4:6
The Mishna says the Heichal was 100 amos by 100 amos by 100 amos, which might make you think the Heichal was a cube, but that's not the case. It was a more complex shape, but the overall footprint fit within a 100x100x100 cube. The roof had various fences and spikes which were possibly ornamental but possible also were safety features so when workmen were on the roof lifting heavy objects they were less likely to fall.
Mishna 4:7
Some breakdowns of those 100 amos into sections. The Mishna says the Heichal was lion shaped- broad at the front at the Ulam and narrowing in the body. This explains a poetic reference in Isaiah to Jerusalem as Ariel, the lion of God.
Perek 5
Wrapping up with some overall dimensions and some details for other things in the courtyard not previously mentioned.This perek is only four mishnayos and it's a lot less specific than the third and fourth perakim.
Mishna 5:1
Overall dimensions of the Temple complex. From east to west 187 amos, from north to south 135 amos. The 135 is the consistent number we got for each part of the Azarah, the 187 is gotten by adding up all the sections east to west. I think the only new information you couldn't calculate from earlier mishnayos is that there are 11 amos behind the heichal, which the mishna calls the kapores for obvious reasons.
Mishna 5:2
The mishna calculates out the 135 amos north to south in the area of the mizbeach, so this locates the mizbeach and the rings and tables and pillars for shechitah in relation to the walla of the azarah.
Mishna 5:3
There were six chambers in the azarah, clearly meaning the ezrat kohanim, because it doesn't include the 4 chambers in the ezrat nashim. In the north was the salt storage chamber, the carcass salting chamber, and the carcass washing chamber.
Mishna 5:4
In the south of the ezrat kohanim was the wood chamber the kohen gadol used for preparation, the chamber of the exiles which had a well in it that supplied water for all ritual uses, and a stone chamber where the sanhedrin or at any rate some halachic authority would inspect kohanim to see if they were qualified to serve. Since this is presumably in the ezrat kohanim, the sanhedrin member(s) must have been kohanim, which I feel potentially helps explain some of the sadduccee/pharisees conflict. If the pharisees knew the law better but had to rely on sadduccees to enforce it...
If the inspection revealed no flaw, they would have a feast and bless the kohanim.
Hadran alach Maseches Midos....
The siyum mishnayos was on Tzom Gedaliah, and it was very powerful. It felt good to have done something, one if the most challenging parts of the last year has been the feeling of helplessness, of the pull of forces bigger than us.
Middos means measurements, it's also commonly used metaphorically to refer to personal traits like honesty or kindness, with the idea being I guess that we're asking how well we measure up as a person. In any case, this tractate is about the measurements of the Beis Hamikdash, specifically the second Beis Hamikdash.
I thought it'd be interesting because I find measurements and the challenge of reporting measurements clearly super interesting, and it was interesting on those terms, but I hadn't realized how sad a book it would be.
Scholars put the creation of the Mishna at around 200 CE, and the Beis Hamikdash was destroyed in 70 CE, so you are at the edge of the range where a person who was very young in the Temple era could have as a very old man known Yehuda HaNasi when he was young. And in fact, Maseches Middos is full of the testimony of Rabbi Eliezer Ben Yaakov, who seems to have seen the Beis Hamikdash and whose uncle served as a priest, but who also is recorded many times in the masechta as not remembering the function of various parts of the Temple complex. You very much get the sense of an old Eliezer Ben Yaakov telling stories of the glory of the Temple to his young disciples, and them struggling to fit together the inconsistencies in the old man's tales and imagining this wondrous place they only know as a devastated ruin. It's so heartbreaking.
The other thing I found really noteworthy is how lived-in and functional the Temple feels in Maseches Middos. The placement of the drains, the placement of the storage lockers, the well to supply water for cleaning, whether the doors go in or out and if they're too heavy to push. The sense is not of a distant holy place, but a very practically organized workplace.
Oh, a third thing that is fascinating is how often the Mishna quotes Yechezkel as a source. Yechezkel's prophecy clearly does not match the second Beis Hamikdash, so the traditional explanation is that he was describing the Third Temple, but it seems like whenever possible, the Rabbis wanted to suggest that Yechezkel's prophecy was consistent with the second Temple too? Or maybe that the builders of the second Temple, even though they didn't totally follow Yechezkel, followed him whenever they found it practical?
Perek 1
This chapter is about the watches in the Beis Hamikdash, and how that relates to the layout overall of various entranceways. Artscroll says this wasn't so much about security as about observing a ceremonial watch to honor the Temple, but I'm not so sure. The text in subsequent chapters has a lot of anxiety about people being in the wrong places... Israelites in the priestly areas, women in the all-male areas, and most significantly, non-Jews anywhere in the Azarah. The Yevanim breached the Azarah's outer wall in thirteen places and even though they were subsequently repaired, the Sages instituted a policy of bowing whenever you passed one of those breaches, showing how grievous a psychic wound that represented. And I recall the story in Toldot Yeshu of Yeshu sneaking into the Beis Hamikdash to steal the secret name of God. I don't think this guard was a military contingent, but I do think they had a serious practical charge.
Mishna 1:1
The details of which gates the overnight guards would watch. There were three Kohanim on watch, at specific locations and 21 Leviim covering all entryways.
Mishna 1:2
We get the delightful detail that if the watch leader found a guard asleep he would strip him naked and burn his clothes to make a lesson out of him. And that R' Eliezer Ben Yaakov's uncle said this happened to him once.
Mishna 1:3
Details of the five outer gates on Herod's wall that were among the 21 sites guarded by Leviim. Two gates in the south, one in the north, one in the west (On what we now call the Kotel, though in the last century of the second Beis Hamikdash, all four outer walls were Kotel) and one in the East, which is what the procession for the red heifer used.
Mishna 1:4
Details the 7 gates of the Azarah that were also guarded by the Leviim. On the East side is the Nicanor Gate, probably the most famous gate because the Beis Hamikdash has an east to west workflow from most mundane uses in the easternmost parts of the courtyard to most holy uses in the kodesh hakodashim in the westernmost part of the heichal.
Mishna 1:5
The north of the Azarah had the gate of sparks- which had a chamber where they kept a fire from which to light the various fires needed in the avodah. This was guarded below by a levite, but above there was a chamber where a kohen guarded, maybe to make sure the fire didn't go out? Next on the north side was the shaar korban, where animals were brought in to be sacrificed, and next to that was the chamber of fire.
Mishna 1:6
The chamber of fire straddled the wall of the Azarah, so half was on holy ground and half wasn't- a stone marker indicated the boundary. On the less holy side, they stored the stones the Yevanim used in their idolatrous worship, which the Hasmoneans had removed but since they had been part of the Beis Hamikdash, they still had some inherent sanctity and weren't destroyed. Or maybe they weren't sure the appropriate way to destroy them, so they kept them.
Apparently this was the chamber of fire because it included, among other functions, a bath for the priests to immerse themselves in and the bath was heated.
Mishna 1:7
Since the chamber straddled the line between courtyard and Har Habayis, it had doorways on either side leading both in and out of the Azarah.
Mishna 1:8
The main area of the chamber of fire had a vaulted ceiling and was used as a sleeping area for priests on service. There seems to have been a hierarchy in sleeping arrangements where senior priests got better spots.
Mishna 1:9
They kept the keys to the gates in the chamber of fire, and at night a priest would make sure everyone who wasn't supposed to be in overnight was out, and then lock the gates.
Perek 2
The overall layout of the Temple on Har Habayit. Important today of course because of politics and because most religious Jews still think we are bound not to set foot in the Temple grounds especially if we are tamei, so knowing the specific geography is important if we are going to be in the area. Though this sense of kavod and care seems to be getting subsumed by right wing politics in recent years.
Mishna 2:1
The Temple mount is sized as 500 cubits by 500 cubits. It is, of course, not really square, but this goes to what I said about how measurement is fascinating. To some useful degree of precision Har Habayis was a 500x500 square. At some level, measurements are a story we tell about a physical object, what we call a model rather than an absolute truth about reality. Since the Beis Hamikdash represents an interface between these physical compromises, and the infinite Holy One, it's especially interesting to think about the ways measurements fall short in this context.
The Temple was not centered on the mountain, but more to the northeast, and it was oriented with the long side east to west, so the biggest open area on the mount was south of the temple and the second biggest open area was east of the temple.
Mishna 2:2
Har Habayis had two gates in the south, as mentioned in Perek 1. The more southeastern gate was the standard entry point for most people, the more southwestern gate was the standard exit point. But mourners would enter and leave through the southwestern gate, possibly so that people entering and seeing them leave would have an opportunity to see them, recognize them as mourners, and offer comfort.
Mishna 2:3
Surrounding the Temple was the Soreg, a short fence serving as the boundary of thr Temple. Non-Jews were not allowed to cross the Soreg. As I mentioned, the Yevanim created 13 breaches in the Soreg, which even after their repair the Jews marked as psychic wounds in the Temple, bowing when they passed them.
Inside the Soreg was a 10 amos gap called the Hel, from the same root as Hol in Kodesh l'hol. So it's a sort of neutral unconsecrated boundary space between the holiness of the Temple and the rest of the world.
At some point, presumably during Herod's renovation, all the gates were refinished in gold, except the Nicanor Gate, which was the main public entrance to the Azarah, for an obscure reason that has something to do with it already being sufficiently decorative. Possibly a miracle made its copper shine like gold, or possibly the miracle turned them into gold. There's something homiletically appealing to me about the main gate being of less valuable material that nonetheless looked as good or better.
Mishna 2:4
The Eastern Kotel outer wall was shorter than the other walls so that a kohen on the Mount of Olives with the parah adumah could see what was happening in the Azarah and appropriately synchronize the timing of the ritual.
Mishna 2:5
The easternmost 135 amos of the azarah was called ezrat nashim because it was the only part that woman could go into. It also had various sections for nazirim, for kohanim with mums, for metzoraim, and another chamber R' Eliezer Ben Jacob couldn't remember the use of, I believe this is the first time we see this device, which again reinforces how tragically fragile a memory game this sefer is.
Originally men and women mingled in the ezrat nashim, but at some point they built a balcony for the women so they wouldn't have to mingle. This really emphasizes that the segregation of men and woman was not biblical, that most of the laws of tzniut are contextual to the society you live in, and so at some point in the late second Temple period the patriarchal ideas became more enmeshed and then were enshrined mistakenly in halacha.
On the west of the ezrat nashim are the famous fifteen steps to the ezrat yisrael, where the leviim would sing the 15 Shir Hamaalos as they ascended.
Mishna 2:6
As we move west from the ezrat nashim, we ascend to the ezrat yisrael and then to the ezrat kohanim, both of which are comparatively narrow at only 11 amos wide each, and which are each higher than the previous area- you literally ascend to holier parts of the Temple, metaphors are not subtle. Below the ezrat yisrael was storage for the levites' musical instruments.
Abba Yose Ben Hanan argued against the Mishna in the last Perek that the Azarah didn't have 7 gates, it had 13. The discrepancy seems to involve how you count- the Nicanor Gate had two little side gates, for example, that the 7 count just included with the main gate, and maybe there were some small gates nobody really used that weren't in the original count.
Perek 3
The layout of the mizbeach. This is very much not the Torah's vague build an altar commandment, this is how you run an altar that is being used day in and day out for many kinds of sacrifice, some of them quite messy. It seems the mizbeach was expanded in the second Temple compared to the first, suggesting the kohanim had Notes.
Mishna 3:1
The mizbeach's measurements are described from outside to in, starting with its overall 32x32 amot size and then demarcating different zones moving inwards by their width. This is a design approach I've used many times when my design is constrained to fit within a certain footprint; it's also sometimes a clear and straightforward way to describe an existing structure, but for that purpose it's a little less intuitive than inside to out. So I wonder if thr description is coming from a designer perspective.
The various zones include walkways for kohanim to use to avoid going into the Holy areas unnecessarily, as well as ledges that seem to have both practical function to channel materials and are constrained by the Torah's requirements of where to perform different parts of various sacrifices.
Rabbi Yose teaches that the first beis hamikdash had a 28x28 altar, and it was expanded to 32x32 in the second temple to match Yechezkel. The addition was done not by evenly adding two amos to each side, but by adding a 4x4 ell shape in the northwest, but since the Rabbis seem to have been more familiar with Greek alphabet than Roman, they say gamma shaped.
MIshna 3:2
At the base of the mizbeach structure, at the southwest corner, there was a drain, because some sacrifices involved blood pouring down the south and west sides of the mizbeach and this directed those streams of blood into the drain.
Mishna 3:3
There was an access panel by this drain hole so every so often, they could go in and clean the drain of concealed blood and dirt.
Mishna 3:4
The stones of the mizbeach were not touched with iron, either in their fabrication or in their cleaning, because iron is associated with weapons and war and death, and the mizbeach is about extending our connection to God and our life.
This of course leads to the midrashim about the shamir, the magic worm Solomon found that can cut through stone, which was one of my favorite stories as a child, and I think somewhere deep in my ao3 I wrote shamir fic.
Mishna 3:5
North of the altar was all of the equipment for doing the sacrifices- rows of rings to tie the animals to, pillars for hanging the slaughtered animals, I think while their blood drained, and tables for butchering the animals.
Mishna 3:6
South of the mizbeach was the kiyor, the basin used for handwashing. Which was possibly a magical place where pi equals 3, but probably pi was just its normal value.
Mishna 3:7
West of the mizbeach was the Heichal, which opened into the Ulam, an entry chamber with a big, big doorway. 40 amos high, with five wood bbeams atop it as a decoration, in an inverted pyramid with the shortest beam at the bottom and the longest beam at the top.
Mishna 3:8
The Ulam had cedar beams supporting it extending from the main part of the Heichal. There was a chain of gold shaped like a grapevines hung from the roof of the Ulam, and rich donors would donate additional gold chain, and then when they needed to buy things for the maintenance of the Heichal they would take from the gold, so it was sort of like a very visible sacred piggy bank.
Perek 4
The layout of the Heichal, the central building containing the Kodesh and Kodesh Hakadoshim. Famously only the High Priest can enter the Holy of Holies, and only on Yom Kippur, so... that makes maintenance a lot harder. Also it makes reconstructing its layout from memory a lot harder.
Mishna 4:1
The doorway from the Ulam into the Kodesh was like an airlock with two sets of two doors, inner doors and outer doors. There's a debate between the Tanna Kamma and R' Yehuda about how the doors opened but they're designed to cover certain less pretty walls when they're fully opened.
Mishna 4:2
In addition to this main doorway, there were smaller doorways into the Kodesh north and south. The south door was never used, maybe it was part of construction and locked when the Beis Hamikdash was consecrated, or maybe it will be used in the time of Moshiach. The north door was a service access, according to the Tanna Kamma it was used because the main doors needed (either for ritual or practical reasons) from the inside so the priest would duck in through the little north door and open the doors from the inside. According to R Yehuda, the priest would go through the north door to in between the two sets of doors and open both from the middle.
Mishna 4:3
There were 38 storage cells along the walls of the Heichal, in three rows height wise. Many of the cells had openings connecting them to the cells above, below, and to the sides so things could be moved cell to cell.
Mishna 4:4
The cells got wider as they got higher, which Artscroll has a nice picture arguing has a practical reason in terms of how they stacked and were supported, but maybe also is connected to the decoration at the doorway of the Ulam, and an overall theme of the Heichal and ascent.
Mishna 4:5
This might be my favorite mishna. There was a stairway wrapping around the outside if the Heichal. Why? Sometimes the Kodesh Hakadoshim needed maintenance but nobody could go inside, so the workmen would climb to the roof and use hooks to pull things out of the Heichal and to return them after cleaning or repair. I love the mix of awe and practicality at play here. Look, the Kodesh Hakadoshim might be God's resting place among Israel, but it's also a physical place and entropy exists.
Mishna 4:6
The Mishna says the Heichal was 100 amos by 100 amos by 100 amos, which might make you think the Heichal was a cube, but that's not the case. It was a more complex shape, but the overall footprint fit within a 100x100x100 cube. The roof had various fences and spikes which were possibly ornamental but possible also were safety features so when workmen were on the roof lifting heavy objects they were less likely to fall.
Mishna 4:7
Some breakdowns of those 100 amos into sections. The Mishna says the Heichal was lion shaped- broad at the front at the Ulam and narrowing in the body. This explains a poetic reference in Isaiah to Jerusalem as Ariel, the lion of God.
Perek 5
Wrapping up with some overall dimensions and some details for other things in the courtyard not previously mentioned.This perek is only four mishnayos and it's a lot less specific than the third and fourth perakim.
Mishna 5:1
Overall dimensions of the Temple complex. From east to west 187 amos, from north to south 135 amos. The 135 is the consistent number we got for each part of the Azarah, the 187 is gotten by adding up all the sections east to west. I think the only new information you couldn't calculate from earlier mishnayos is that there are 11 amos behind the heichal, which the mishna calls the kapores for obvious reasons.
Mishna 5:2
The mishna calculates out the 135 amos north to south in the area of the mizbeach, so this locates the mizbeach and the rings and tables and pillars for shechitah in relation to the walla of the azarah.
Mishna 5:3
There were six chambers in the azarah, clearly meaning the ezrat kohanim, because it doesn't include the 4 chambers in the ezrat nashim. In the north was the salt storage chamber, the carcass salting chamber, and the carcass washing chamber.
Mishna 5:4
In the south of the ezrat kohanim was the wood chamber the kohen gadol used for preparation, the chamber of the exiles which had a well in it that supplied water for all ritual uses, and a stone chamber where the sanhedrin or at any rate some halachic authority would inspect kohanim to see if they were qualified to serve. Since this is presumably in the ezrat kohanim, the sanhedrin member(s) must have been kohanim, which I feel potentially helps explain some of the sadduccee/pharisees conflict. If the pharisees knew the law better but had to rely on sadduccees to enforce it...
If the inspection revealed no flaw, they would have a feast and bless the kohanim.
Hadran alach Maseches Midos....
(no subject)
Date: 2024-10-15 03:58 pm (UTC)Does Chanina sgan hakohanim show up?
This "fallibility of memory and also this person didn't actually measure anything" is how I feel about the whole height of the stairs thing.
I remember stuff about the maintenance problems in Yoma, too. It really brings in that this was a functional space and had functional needs.
(no subject)
Date: 2024-10-15 05:21 pm (UTC)I haven't spent a lot of time with Middos and I had never thought of it this way, but wow, yeah, that is heartbreaking.
At some level, measurements are a story we tell about a physical object, what we call a model rather than an absolute truth about reality.
Ok that is fascinating to me. I am 100% not an engineer and I had never thought of measurements in this way.