Review of Sunday Evening's Opening Shiur

Thanks to all of you who put up with the technical difficulties we ran into early on!  Hopefully, we've put these behind us....

 

We discussed some of the assumptions with which the mishna began - and that is the standard scenario of עדים זוממים and the halacha traditionally associated with them. 

To review:

Edim Zomimin are witnesses whose testimony is contradicted by a second set of witnesses, who declare that the first set could not have seen the legal event regarding which they are testifying, since the first set was with the second set in a completely different location at the time of the purported event. 

For a reason we did not delve into, the Torah believes the second set of witnesses over the first set.

Our mishna states that in the case of edim who become zomimin after having testified that Reuven was a כהן חלל- invalid Kohen - the edim do not themselves (though they are Kohanim) receive the status of חלל themselves (even though that would be the normative penalty for such a case), but rather they receive lashes.

In a similar vein, the mishna states that edim who become zomimin after having testified that Reuven killed someone accidentally and was therefore obligated to be exiled to a city of refuge/עיר מקלט - do not receive the punishment of exile themselves, but rather lashes.

The mishna does not tell us the reason for the difference in consequences.  This will be dealt with by the Gemara.

There are two difficulties with the text of the mishna, and they are the first problems raised by the Gemara:
a) If the phrase כיצד העדים נעשים זוממים means -'what is an example of edim suffering the consequences they intended to cause Reuven?' - then the mishna does just the opposite: It brings examples where those consequences are not suffered by the edim zomimin
b) If the phrase instead means - 'what is the process by which edim become edim zomimin?' - then the mishna has failed to do so.  There is no explicit process mentioned, describing how the testimony of the original edim would be challenged.

It is this "disconnect" between the mishna's question and the rest of the text of the mishna that Rashi was referring to when he said בגמרא מפרש מאי קאמר - the Gemara will explain what the mishna is saying.

• For Tuesday's shiur, see if you can find both a) and b) in the Gemara.
• Where do the Gemara's questions start and stop, respectively?
• What does the Gemara answer - and how does that answer relate to the two questions?