While in a state of impurity, you’ll earn yourself karet (a difficult-to-define punishment usually translated as excision) if you intentionally eat sacrificial meat or if you enter the Temple. These laws derive directly from the Torah, which is relatively clear, but the Gemara on today’s daf is still troubled by how the second prohibition is phrased:
Regarding an impure person who enters the Temple, there is a punishment, as it is written: “He has rendered impure the Tabernacle of the Lord, and that soul shall be excised.” (Numbers 19:13) And there is a prohibition, as it is written: “And they shall not render their camp impure.” (Numbers 5:3)
But with regard to a ritually impure person who ate sacrificial food, granted, a punishment is written: “And the soul that eats from the flesh of a peace-offering that pertains to the Lord and his impurity is upon him, and that soul shall be excised.” (Leviticus 7:20). But from where is a prohibition derived?
In the case of the first act, entering the Temple in a state of impurity, the Torah states both that it is prohibited (Numbers 5:3) and that it incurs the punishment of karet (Numbers 19:13). But in the case of the second act, eating sacrificial meat in a state of impurity, the Torah prescribes a punishment but does not explicitly prohibit the action. Logically, we might be willing to infer that the prescription of a punishment implies the action is prohibited, but the rabbis want a more solid basis for making that judgment. So the Gemara asks how we can biblically derive the prohibition and Rabbi Yohanan, citing an authority named Bardela, supplies the answer:
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Rabbi Yohanan says that a sage named Bardela teaches: The matter is derived from “his impurity” and “his impurity.”
Bardela uses a common rabbinic interpretive technique called a gezerah shavah. This is accomplished when the rabbis use a verbal congruity between two disparate verses — such as the appearance of the same word on both contexts — to establish a conceptual analogy between them. In this specific case, the word “his impurity” (tumahto), which is found in both sources, establishes that just as entering the Temple in a state of impurity is prohibited, so too eating sacred meat in a state of impurity is prohibited — even though the text was not explicit on this second point.
To a modern way of thinking, this may seem rather strange. Isn’t it simpler to just say that the presence of a prescribed punishment is strong evidence the action in question is forbidden? Moreover, a gezerah shavah hangs a great deal of hidden meaning on a not-necessarily-so-surprising repetition of a word or phrase. Given that the Torah, like any text, has countless repeated words and phrases, indiscriminate use of gezerah shavahs could be used to justify just about anything. So how meaningful is the tool, really?
The rabbis were sensitive to this second problem. Their solution was to limit the scope of gezerah shavah to received traditions only. As Rashi notes on Pesachim 66a, “a person cannot judge based upon a gezerah shavah that they created themselves, rather to use a gezerah shavah as the basis of their judgement, they must have learned it from their teacher.” While future rabbis are free to make use of other tools of rabbinic interpretation as they make judgments about Jewish law and how to apply it, creating a new gezerah shavah is off the table, and has been for over a millennium.
But now let’s address the earlier concern: Wouldn’t it have been simpler to use logic to infer from the presence of a severe punishment like karet that eating sacred meat in a state of impurity is forbidden? To us moderns, perhaps. But for the rabbis, textual proof is better than logical proof every time. That’s the whole point of revelation. Likewise, the authority for a gezerah shavah comes from its source and not from our ability to explain it.
Read all of Makkot 14 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on April 22, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
