Worrying About Flying Camels (article summary)
My article from this past Shabbos in the Jewish Link is available in the image below, or here in the Scribal Error Substack, the Jewish Link website, or in flipbooks. Bullet outline below the image.
In Makkot 5a, Rava has a series of statements about the edge cases of eidim zomemim. For several of these, the Talmudic Narrator objects “Peshita! This is obvious!” and then resolves it by explaining what the non-obvious case Rava is coming to reject. I fundamentally disagree with this approach. Taken together, this corpus of Rava statements present a way of thinking about the parameters and contours of eidim zomemim, and that is its purpose.
We go through each of these cases.One Rava statement was that if the witnesses said “Ploni killed someone on Sunday morning in Sura” and a second set said that the first witnesses were with them in Nehardea on Sunday night, then we check if traveling that distance so quickly is possible. If so, they are not eidim zomemim. If not, they mustn’t have been in Sura in the morning and therefore are eidim zomemim.
To this, the Talmudic Narrator objects that it is obvious, then explains that Rava is implicitly rejecting the possibility of fast travel via flying camel.Sura and Nehardea are placeholder names, or else Rava would not need to direct continually, to investigate if such travel was possible. Yet, there was a parallel concrete case about a get written in Sura by person X of Nehardea, but someone by the same name (Person X of place A) was observed that day in Nehardea. Need we be concerned he made the trip? There, Rava does express concern.
Rishonim grapple with this seeming inconsistency in Rava. I’d endorse that, of the several reasons given for Rava’s concern, the primary was that he “sent his words” directing writing and delivering a get. Further, this matchup isn’t coincidental. There are only two places that the gamla parcha / flying camel appears in the Talmud, so this was known.What is the true distance, as the camel flies? (Heh.) 180 km, assuming we have the modern places right. Google Maps puts this as a bit over 2.5 hours, but that is by car on highways. I think this would need to be on camel by desert, often following along paths of rivers. I write that A highly trained, light-loaded Arabian racing camel might have a sustained speed of 16 km / hr, or even 40 km / hr for one hour. Perhaps switching steeds and they get tired, one could make this Sura → Nehardea trip much faster.
I suggest that instead of camels, maybe they could travel by river, and especially by canal. This was an instance nishteneh hateva, nature or reality changed. During certain generations of Amoraim, the Sasanian government constructed a series of canals connecting the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, so that one could travel from one place to another. This might be what Rava intended by checking if such speedy travel was possible. This could also explain the Shev Shmayta, the seven rulings of Rav Chisda, that were transmitted on Shabbat from Sura to Pumbedita in a seemingly supernatural way.