Deuteronomy 17:6 instructs: “A person shall be put to death only on the testimony of two or three witnesses; they must not be put to death on the testimony of a single witness.” According to the rabbis, judges are required to interrogate each of the witnesses individually, searching for discrepancies that would disqualify their testimony. What discrepancies are disqualifying? On today’s daf, Rav Hisda teaches:
In a case where one of the witnesses says: “The murderer killed the victim with a sword,” and one of the witnesses says: “The murderer killed the victim with an ariran (another weapon),” — this is not congruent. But if one of the witnesses says: “The murderer’s garments were black,” and one of the witnesses says: “The murderer’s garments were white,” — this is congruent.
We might extrapolate from this that Rav Hisda differentiates between details directly connected to the crime (e.g., the murder weapon) and those that are incidental (like the color of the murderer’s clothes). For their testimony to be admissible, witnesses must agree on the former, but do not have to agree on the latter. Now the Gemara cites a beraita that appears to indicate otherwise:
If one witness says: “The murderer killed the victim with a sword,” and one says: “The murderer killed the victim with an ariran;” or if one of the witnesses says: “The murderer’s garments were black,” and one of the witnesses says: “The murderer’s garments were white,” — all of these are not congruent testimony.
Rav Hisda is an amora, a later rabbi, so the beraita, an earlier tannaitic text, carries more authority. We might conclude that Rav Hisda has been overruled, but instead the Gemara turns its attention to resolving the tension between the two positions. Sometimes, when faced with this kind of task, the Gemara presents a second beraita from which Rav Hisda derives his opinion and reframes the debate as one between two tannaim who, because they are chronologically aligned, have equal standing. From there, the debate moves forward. But on today’s daf, the Gemara finds a different resolution, explaining how Rav Hisda might interpret the beraita in line with his position:
Rav Hisda interpreted that beraita as speaking about a scarf with which the murderer strangled the victim.
If the garment about which the witnesses’ testimony differs is not an incidental piece of clothing but in fact the murder weapon — a scarf used to strangle — then the beraita no longer challenges Rav Hisda’s position that only testimony relevant to the actual crime must perfectly align in order to be accepted in court.
The Gemara goes on to juxtapose Rav Hisda’s opinion to several other cases, including one in which the witnesses disagree about the appearance of some figs clutched in the murderer’s hand. Figs are not often employed as a murder weapon, yet in this case the rabbis determine that the incongruity in testimony disqualifies the witnesses. This teaching appears to contradict what we’ve learned — that only details relevant to the crime matter — that is, until Rami bar Hama tells us:
This was a case where the accused was being tried for picking a fig on Shabbat.
There are few capital offenses in Judaism. Murder, adultery, idolatry are among the top ones, but so is intentionally violating Shabbat. In this scenario, the figs are analogous to a murder weapon — and therefore discrepancies in witness accounts are disqualifying.
After reading this talmudic dispute, one could conclude that the rabbis of the Gemara were invested in adopting Rav Hisda’s position that testimony about murder weapons must be congruent and testimony about clothing need not be, and used their creativity to read earlier traditions that appear to contradict Rav Hisda so that they no longer do. This is definitely a possibility. It’s also possible that what is important here is not whether the testimony is about weapons or clothing, but how those objects played a part in the crime. If this is the case, Rav Hisda might have inadvertently confused us by using language that appears to, but does not really, categorically allow us to disregard discrepancies in testimony about clothing. Given that we only have access to the source materials after they have been shaped by the talmudic editors, it is hard to determine which is more likely to be the case. As such, a dispute between two contemporary readers about what is going on here becomes yet another layer of talmudic discourse.
Read all of Sanhedrin 41 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on January 27, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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