Sanhedrin begins!
(And cheetahs never prosper)
Only a short post for today, aside from the weekly article, to welcome the new masechta.
As Daf Yomi begins Sanhedrin, we encounter a daunting Mishnah that extends the entire first perek. This is so even in the printings.
Often on Hachi Garsinan, when reaching a Mishnah, there’s a note “Change of Order” for manuscripts because they align with the Vilna Shas’ order, which breaks up Mishnayot into the relevant Gemaras, while the actual manuscripts list all the Mishnayot together, with the Geonic-era piskaot (think “the two dots”) telling where each sugya ends. This isn’t the case here, because for some reason the printers decided to put all the Mishnayot at the start, just for this perek.
One exception is the Yad HaRav Herzog manuscript. Note “Change of order” working in the opposite direction.
Here’s what that manuscript looks like, with the shorter Mishnah followed by the Gemara, as circled in red:
We also see such breakups in e.g. the parallel Yerushalmi, and in the Rif and the Rosh. This might have been an easier way to break into this masechta.
Also, check out this post at Rationalist Judaism about the bardelas:
A short quote:
The word bardelas is not Hebrew or Aramaic - it is quite obviously a transliteration of the Greek pardalis. This name originally referred to the leopard, but cannot refer to the leopard here, since the Mishnah lists the leopard separately. In the Mishnah, it therefore presumably refers to another spotted cat — the cheetah.
However, while the authors and audience of the Mishnah, living in the land of Israel, were familiar with such Greek terms, the same was not true of the sages in Babylon, who had far less exposure to Greek culture. The Babylonian Talmud therefore asks what type of animal the bardelas is, and concludes that it is the hyena:
And he continues with that definition.
With that in mind, let’s ask ChatGPT to translate our Mishnah. First, here is the Koren translation, under Rav Steinsaltz’s direction, which translates as follows:
שׁוֹר הַנִּסְקָל – בְּעֶשְׂרִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״הַשּׁוֹר יִסָּקֵל וְגַם בְּעָלָיו יוּמָת״. כְּמִיתַת בְּעָלִים כָּךְ מִיתַת הַשּׁוֹר. הַזְּאֵב וְהָאֲרִי, הַדּוֹב וְהַנָּמֵר וְהַבַּרְדְּלָס וְהַנָּחָשׁ – מִיתָתָן בְּעֶשְׂרִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה. רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר אוֹמֵר: כׇּל הַקּוֹדֵם לְהוֹרְגָן זָכָה. רַבִּי עֲקִיבָא אוֹמֵר: מִיתָתָן בְּעֶשְׂרִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה.
Similarly, an ox that is to be stoned because it killed a person is judged by twenty-three judges, as it is stated: “But if the ox was wont to gore in time past, and warning has been given to its owner, but he did not guard it and it kills a man or a woman the ox shall be stoned and also its owner shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:29). From this verse it is derived that just as the manner of the death of the owner, so is the manner of the death of the ox. The same halakha applies in the case of a wolf or a lion, a bear or a leopard, or a cheetah, or a snake that killed a person: Their death is decreed by twenty-three judges. Rabbi Eliezer says these dangerous animals do not need to be brought to court; rather, anyone who kills them first merits the performance of a mitzva. Rabbi Akiva says: Their death is decreed by twenty-three judges.
So it is rendered as “cheetah”, matching what Rabbi Slifkin said is the true meaning at the time. The alternative would be this hyena, as the gemara in Bava Kamma renders it.
I ask ChatGPT to translate and it also gave it as cheetah. I asked it to explain and it did; though it also hallucinated that the sugya in Bava Kamma identified the bardelas as a namer! Once I gave it correct text, it translated it as hyena.
This translation might be an instance of semantic shift. Since in Modern Hebrew it is cheetah, ChatGPT would gravitate towards translating it as cheetah, not hyena.