The Transition from Makkot to Shevuot
A few years back, an acquaintance visited a mekubal and asked if he had any advice for shalom bayit. The mekubal replied that a good segulah is to learn masechet Makkot. This acquaintance gave him a look. The mekubal laughed and said that, even so, kabbalistically, this was so.
There’s another tale told about Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg and his younger brother, Rabbi Pinchas the author of the Hafla’ah, that when they were young, on the second night of Pesach, their father asked them what they should learn in preparation for Shavuot? (After all, there is a principle that one begins studying thirty days before a chag – see Pesachim 6a.) They replied that they should learn masechet Shevuot. Their father asked, “Do you think that masechet Shevuot has to do with the holiday of Shavuot?” They answered that because Shavuot commemorates the giving of the Torah on Har Sinai, and we are all under oath from Har Sinai (see e.g. Shevuot 27a), we need to understand the parameters of oaths.
As we prepare for Shavuot, we take our leave of Makkot and begin masechet Shevuot. The Talmudic Narrator (Shevuot 2b) asks about this Mishnaic ordering. “Consider: the Tanna left from Makkot; why should he teach Shevuot / Oaths?” He connects it to a Mishnah appearing early in Makkot’s final chapter, on Makkot 20a, regarding rounding the edges of one’s head.
The words תַּנָּא מִמַּכּוֹת סָלֵיק, מַאי שְׁנָא דְּתָנֵי שְׁבוּעוֹת suggests to me that this Talmudic Narrator regards Makkot as a tractate of its own, and Shevuot as a tractate of its own.
^^^ This was the start of an article, but I decided to advance a different article instead. I’ll therefore shift to less formal writing. I apologize for the scattered nature of my comments.
סליק is the word we use when leaving a tractate.
As Facebook’s translate feature recently rendered it, “And I’ll slick you a beating mask.”
The sequence within a Seder does not need to make logical sense (see Tosafot here). We have places where the Talmudic Narrator asks the question, e.g. regarding Nazir and Sotah. But generally not, unless it is Tosafot trying to figure it out. See Pnei Yehoshua for a different take.
The Talmudic Narrator asked a similar question at the start of Makkot, not about the order, but about the content of the first Mishnah which was explained given that the preceding tractate was Sanhedrin.
The real answer for this sequence is that masechtot in a Seder appear in descending order by number of perakim. To cite Wikipedia’s listing of tractates:
The first three were one large 30 chapter tractate called Nezikin; Pirkei Avot is really 5 chapters with the sixth being brayta rather than Mishnah. Note that Makkot is then out of order. This endorses the idea that it was really initially part of masechet Sanhedrin. Also, the titles of the perakim, with perek 2 and 3 beginning with אלו הן about lashes, exile, matches well with the אלו הן regarding the four capital punishments meted out by the court.
Still, an order that we happen to encounter, or that the Talmudic Narrator encounters, does not need to be absolute. There could be a general rule but someone might have reordered things. If Makkot were somehow a standalone — particularly if it were a standalone single perek, I could imagine it being grouped together with other perakim so that it wouldn’t get lost. Or, the relationship of lashes administered by the court to Sanhedrin could have influenced someone to move it earlier in the sequence, rather than placing it after pirkei avot. At any rate, while knowing what the “real” ordering and “real” titles is useful, my concern is more along the lines of: from the perspective of party A (Mishnah author / redactor, Babylonian Amoraim, Israeli Amoraim, Talmudic Narrator, Geonim, etc.), how did they regard the tractate X (as Makkot, Sanhedrin, swapped order of perakim, etc.)
There is also a logical order evident, in grouping Shevuot close to Makkot and Sanhedrin. After all, the Sanhedrin administers oaths for witnesses, which is the topic of one of the chapters.
What is also remarkable is the structure of the first Mishnah, as linking to the next two chapters. Our first Mishnah begins (Shevuot 2a):
מַתְנִי׳ שְׁבוּעוֹת – שְׁתַּיִם שֶׁהֵן אַרְבַּע.
יְדִיעוֹת הַטּוּמְאָה – שְׁתַּיִם שֶׁהֵן אַרְבַּע.
and does not explain how each of these are two that are really four.
In our printed Bavli, all the Mishnayot of the first perek appear as a single initial lengthy Mishnah. But those Mishnayot in the first perek do not elaborate on oaths. Rather, they focus on lack of knowledge beforehand and after (more associated with knowledge of impurity, perhaps) and the role of various sacrifices for knowing and unwitting ritual impurity while eating sacrificial foods or entering into the Temple. This has very little to do with Shevuot.
Not only that (and the Talmudic Narrator kind-of alludes to this in one of the questions, in terms of which phrase should lead), the whole second perek of Shevuot also has nothing to do with oaths either. Rather, it again has to do with יְדִיעוֹת הַטּוּמְאָה.
My suspicion is as follows: these two chapters would stand alone, and be lost. (And, in Bavli, there is no Seder of Taharot, where it might appear.) Therefore, they had to be grouped in with some other collection.
Now, there is an association in terms of korban oleh veyored between shevua and tum’ah, and both have a ne’elam mimenu component to trigger the korban. Thus, it could be associated. We have 6 of 8 perakim in tractate Shevuot already. So how do we link them together?
Simple. Start the first perek with a statement about Shevuot, oaths, so that at least nominally, it is part of the collection. Don’t elaborate on it. Rather, the third perek is named identically, שְׁבוּעוֹת – שְׁתַּיִם, where the phrase is unpacked in its first Mishnah. It is a hyperlink. The next phrase, יְדִיעוֹת הַטּוּמְאָה – שְׁתַּיִם… makes the logical association between the two topics, but it is also a hyperlink. Thus, the second perek is named identically to this phrase. And the rest of the chapters already naturally fit into a tractate on oaths.