Sanhedrin 127

2:
Our mishnah presumes the following scenario. In a township somewhere in Israel there is a dispute among the judges of the local Bet-Din as to the correct interpretation of the law. The court here is not acting as a court of justice but as a rabbinical assembly whose task it is determine Halakhah by hermeneutic interpretation of the text of the Written Torah. The main thrust of learning in mishnaic times was first to consult whatever teachings in such a matter had been received from previous generations of sages. (This was one of the main tasks of the Talmid Ĥakham, the student of the sage: to pass on, unaltered, his teacher's teaching, which, of course, he in his turn had thus received from his own teacher – and so in a theoretic unbroken chain of tradition back to "Moses at Sinai".) Only if no teaching in the matter under discussion had been received was there room for the sages of the present generation to innovate their own interpretations. Our mishnah presumes a situation in which the majority of the sages agree to an accepted interpretation of the law, but one of their number insists that they are wrong and that his interpretation of the law is the correct one (probably because that it what he received or thinks he received from his teacher).

3:
Our mishnah requires all the members of that Bet-Din to present themselves before the Bet-Din that convened at the entrance to the Temple Mount. (Mostly people entered the precincts of the Bet Mikdash through the Ĥuldah Gates: the grand staircase leading up to this main entranceway has been excavated at the southern wall of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Ĥuldah Gates gave entrance to another set of steps that led upwards underneath the buildings above them, finally exiting – rather like a modern subway entrance – into the main plaza of the Temple Mount. This was open to all people (including non-Jews): see Sanhedrin 122, explanation #3 for more details. It was in this spacious plaza that the first of the three Batei-Din mentioned in our mishnah convened.

4:
The recalcitrant sage expounded before this Bet-Din how he interprets the law and how his interpretation differed from that of his colleagues. If the members of this Bet-Din had a received tradition as to what the law should be they would announce this. If they did not have such a tradition – or if the sage refused to accept their opinion as well – they all repaired to the Bet-Din of the next instance, which met at the entrance to the Azarah. Here the scene would repeat itself. If necessary, all involved would lastly repair to the court of highest instance, the Great Sanhedrin which met in the Gazit Hall off the Azarah. In Sanhedrin 022 we explained the functioning of this Supreme Court.

To be continued.

Jeffrey Bennet Smith comments:

The Sages may have been conciously differentiating themselves from Roman law, which viewed the father as having absolute power over his children, even when they were adults with their own families, even with the right of ordering their death; and this power was ended only by the father's death or by a procedure which was in essence the same used to manumit slaves. Later law softened this around the edges, but the principle remained valid throughout Roman history.