Sanhedrin 135

Today's Shiur is dedicated by Harry K. Pick on the occasion of his mother's Yahrzeit which falls today.

1:
We have now reached the last mishnah of our present chapter. The first mishnah in this chapter [Sanhedrin 123] gave a list of all those whose mode of execution is death by strangulation if found guilty. After two long excursuses on the insubordinate sage and the false prophet our present mishnah seeks to wrap up the discussion on the remainder of that list. There are three items in our mishnah, which can therefore be conveniently divided into reisha, emtza'ita and seifa [first, middle and last sections] respectively.

2:
The seifa of our mishnah is concerned with the idolatrous prophet. You will recall that we have already distinguished between the false prophet and the idolatrous prophet. The false prophet claims to be an agent of God when that is not the case; the idolatrous prophet claims to be the prophetic agent of some other (false) deity. The term used by our mishnah is the generic term avodah zarah which in Hebrew means "strange worship", but always has the connotation of idolatry. It is a curiosity of rabbinic parlance that the term avodah zarah was turned into a kind of noun (as in our present mishnah) which is why I have translated the term here as "idol". Obviously, in doing so the sages were intending to imply something akin to our own reference to "a deity", meaning a deity other than Israel's God.

3:
The Torah origin of the law of the idolatrous prophet is to be found in Deuteronomy 18:20 –

And we have mentioned several times in this chapter that when the Torah requires the death penalty without stipulating which of the modes is applicable ("that man shall die") the "default mode" of strangulation is to be applied. All our present mishnah seeks to add to the Torah outline is that a person is to be deemed an idolatrous prophet if they claim that the source of their authority is what Jewish tradition calls a false god. The content of their message is immaterial. Even if the message that they proclaim is identical to that sanctioned by Jewish tradition they are nevertheless to be considered an idolatrous prophet from the moment that they attribute their message to a false deity.

4:
The emtza'ita of our mishnah is concerned with fornication, which may be defined in this context as a man copulating with a woman who is legally married to some other man.

Our mishnah seeks to establish that the term "married woman" does not refer only to a woman living conjugally with her husband, but indicates any woman who is legally married. A conjugal relationship is created between a man and a woman from the moment that she accepts from him kiddushin. This involves the transfer of an object of at least minimal value from the man to the woman, accompanied by his declaration that her acceptance of this object will make her his wife. (A more complete understanding of this procedure can be gleaned from our study of Tractate Kiddushin [November 1995 onwards].) There are other ways of effecting kiddushin, but to this day the overwhelming majority of marriages are effected by "him" giving "her" a ring and she accepting it of her own free will. Kiddushin can be effected through the principals ("him and her") or through their legally appointed agents. It could thus come about that a woman would be "legally married" even though she had never even met her husband! Furthermore, In earlier times kiddushin created what seems to us an anomalous situation: although the couple were "affianced" and were considered a married couple for almost all intents and purposes, they did not live together as man and wife until about a year later, and she remained for this period "in her father's house". At the end of the year a second ceremony was held during which the bride was escorted to her husband's abode and the Seven Marriage Benedictions were recited. Sometime after the Talmudic period this "waiting period" was deemed intolerable and the two ceremonies were conflated into one, as they are to this day. It is customary to artificially separate the two ceremonies by the public reading of the ketubah [Marriage Deed], an act which halakhically is quite unnecessary.

5:
We can now approach the seifa of our mishnah. The Torah stipulates one very simple rule for the treatment of perjured witnesses:

The Torah thus creates one very simple guideline: someone guilty of perjuring themselves in order to ensure the conviction of a litigant must be punished with whatever punishment the other would have suffered if he had been convicted. Rambam describes this in sweeping terms (a free translation):

6:
We have now successfully completed our study of this chapter and may proceed next time to the study of the last chapter of this tractate. The end is in sight!

Ed Frankel writes that in our last Shiur we mentioned

the prophet who would not eat with Jeroboam, and his subsequent eating at the urging of another who claimed to have brought God's word. I have read this portion frequently, and even taught it. I understand that at its heart, the prophet erred. I realize that if he could represent God directly to give a message to the king of Israel, that God could have also directly recalled His ban on eating and drinking. Still, in the episode I also see a terrible injustice. If the prophet was not accustomed to his role, could he know whence God's word would arrive? If not, could he not have believed that the second "prophet" did in fact come to bring God's word? If that is the case, would it not have been fitting to eat? I am not sure an adequate explanation exists.

I respond:

Ed is quite right. I have been able to find only one classical commentator who relates at all to the verse in question [I Kings 13:24]. Ralbag [Rabbi Levi ben-Gershon] suggests that it was odd that the lion should have killed the man and not his animal and that maybe this was to serve as a warning to Jeroboam: if God was prepared to exact punishment from his own prophet for so comparatively minor offence surely He would all the more exact punishment from Jeroboam for all his major sins.

Like Ed, I find this entirely inadequate – and that's an understatement!