Our new sugiyah, וְאֵלּוּ הֵן הַנִּשְׂרָפִין (“and these are to be burned”), is a compendium of substantive criminal law rulings debating the definition of offenses punishable by burning and by beheading. The first page and a half, to which we turn here, addresses people committing various forms of incest and thus liable to be burned.
We’re not going to go into all the details, but we’ll discuss two principles of statutory interpretation employed by the sages to figure out which familial relationships pass the test of propriety and which do not.
Logical Inferences from Other Contexts: Dun Mina – דּוּן מִינַּהּ
This Talmudic rule has to do with situations in which the appropriate rule for a situation that appears in Context A of the Talmud is derived via analogy from a situation that appears in Context B. Oftentimes, this has to do with a similar turn of phrase. For example, in our issue, the appearance of the term ״זִמָּה״ (lewdness) in different rules leads the sages to infer that if one sexual liaison is forbidden, so is the other. Thing is, these sorts of prohibitions are very common in the biblical and mishnaic text, and they appear in a variety of contexts.
Let’s assume that we need to figure out what the rule is in case 1, which appears in the Talmud in context A. Case 1 shares some unique linguistic feature with case 2, which appears in context B–and we know what the rule in case 2 is. Because of the similarities, we assume that the same rule applies to case 2. But it turns out that there are all kinds of details and adjacent issues in context A that relate to case 1. Should these be resolved according to context A, in which our case is embedded, or in context B, from which we learned the rule? There are two approaches:
- Dun Minah u-Minah (״דּוּן מִינַּהּ וּמִינַּהּ״) is a situation where not only the rule in case 1, but all the relevant details, should be derived from context B, because that’s where we learned the rule (by analogy from case 2).
- Dun Minah ve-Okay be-Atrah (״דּוּן מִינַּהּ וְאוֹקֵי בְאַתְרַהּ״) is a situation where we learn the rule in case 1 from case 2, but the extant details are deduced from context A.
As above, so below
The page deals with lots of relatives from earlier generations and from later generations. In several of these scenarios, we are told that the rule going upward in the family tree must mirror the rule going downward; e.g., the prohibition on getting involved with, say, one’s great-granddaughter implies a prohibition on getting involved with, say, one’s great-grandmother.
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As an aside, the page also admonishes people who sabotage their daughters’ lives by marrying them off inappropriately. A baraita says, ״אַל תְּחַלֵּל אֶת בִּתְּךָ לְהַזְנוֹתָהּ״ (do not prostitute your daughter), and the sages think that an inappropriate marriage can set the stage for this lamentable situation. Rabbi Eliezer thinks that a man who marries his daughter to an old man is profaning her; Rabbi Akiva thinks that it is also inadvisable to delay the marriage of a grown daughter. Rav Yehuda adds the scenario of marrying a young woman to a young boy. They all agree that the righteous way to prevent unhappiness and tragedy is to marry daughters to appropriately-aged men, and at the appropriate time.
Lots more going on here, but much of it is pedantic, lewd, or both, and I’m eager to move along to the interesting matter of causality in murder, which awaits us on page 77.
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