Let’s quickly review: The Talmud includes two separate works, the Mishnah and the Gemara. The former, which is older and written in Hebrew, tersely articulates Jewish law and practice; the latter, written in Aramaic, presents centuries of rabbinic conversations seeking to clarify and explain the Mishnah. While its primary purpose is to uphold, explain and expand on the Mishnah, sometimes the Gemara appears to upend it. An example of this appears on today’s daf.

A mishnah on today’s daf presents a dispute about the Torah’s prohibition on kidnapping, a capital offense:

One who abducts a Jewish person is not liable to be executed unless they bring the abductee into their domain. Rabbi Yehuda says: They are not liable unless they bring them into their domain and exploit them, as it is stated: “If a person shall be found abducting one of their brethren from the children of Israel, and they exploited him and sold him, then the abductor shall die.” (Deuteronomy 24:17)

The tanna kamma, the anonymous first opinion, says that the abduction becomes a capital offense when the captive is brought back to the abductor’s property. Rabbi Yehuda reads the Torah’s law differently. He argues, based on a close reading of Deuteronomy 24:7, that the kidnapper is subject to the death penalty only if they bring their prisoner home and also put them to work.

The translation of Deuteronomy 24:7 given above supports Rabbi Yehuda’s opinion, but it is not the only way to read the verse. It can also be translated as follows: “If a person shall be found abducting one of their brethren … whether in order to exploit or sell them, then that abductor shall die.” Read this way, the act of kidnapping in and of itself, no matter the purpose or what follows, incurs the death penalty. 

Rather than attribute the difference of opinion between the tanna kamma and Rabbi Yehuda to different interpretations of the verse, the Gemara appears to accept Rabbi Yehuda’s explanation. This leads to the following objection:

And does the tanna kamma not require exploitation? 

In other words, given that the verse mentions exploitation explicitly, doesn’t the tanna kamma have to include it as a required action for the death penalty to be in play? Otherwise, the tanna kamma’s opinion does not follow what the Torah says — an impossibility from the perspective of the Gemara.

This dilemma is resolved by Rabbi Aha son of Rav who asserts that both the tanna kamma and Rabbi Yehuda agree that there must be some exploitation involved for the death penalty to be on the table. What they disagree about is how much: He suggests that the tanna kamma holds that any amount of exploitation, even the most minimal amount, makes this a capital offense, while Rabbi Yehuda holds that one is subject to the death penalty only if the benefit that one derives from the exploitation is equal to one peruta — the value of the smallest coin; “a penny’s worth,” we would say today.

In reading the mishnah this way, Rabbi Aha resolves the Gemara’s problem: The tanna kamma no longer appears to be in opposition to the biblical verse. At the same time, his reading changes how we understand the mishnah. Taken on its own, the mishnah presents a disagreement about whether it is enough for a kidnapper to bring the person that they kidnapped onto their property in order for them to be sentenced to death for their action or if they must also have them do some forced labor while they are there. According to the Gemara however, the debate is about how much labor the person must do.

Traditional commentators are likely to take the Gemara’s reading into account and claim that the mishnah says exactly what the Gemara says it says. A more contemporary understanding of these sources might allow for the possibility that the Gemara has explained what the mishnah originally intended but would call our attention to the possibility that the Gemara has changed the original intention of the mishnah altogether.

Read all of Sanhedrin 85 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on March 12, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.