[Parah] perek 1

[magid]

The first chapter is all about how old a cow has to be for it (well, her) to be a candidate for a red heifer (note that the Hebrew uses the word "parah" which is closer to cow, I think. Feel free to correct me, though :-). It's definitely over a year old (otherwise she'd still be a calf), actually thirteen months and a day, but there are a variety of opinions of maximum allowable age (big surprise). And even in the first mishnah, we start wandering off into other topics, based on similarly-worded phrases that R' Yehoshua remembers. Which is why, I suppose, the second mishnah seems a recap of the first. Also touched on are minimum ages for other sacrificial animals, depending on what kind of sacrifice they are (to fulfill a vow, as the first-born male of an animal, as a holiday offering, etc.).

As usual, it's not where I'd start with the topic, were I compiling the mishnah. I wonder why this is their start place.


[ETA: This is all based on Numbers, chapter 19.]

Comments

[bitty.livejournal.com]

NUMB3RS might be more consistently good were it based on the Book of Numbers.
Hm. Maybe I should pitch that to CBS.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Heh. I haven't seen the show, but there's a lot of weird stuff in Numbers. A lot of it is just so alien.
(And it's technically the same religion I'm in now. But we don't deal with levels of ritual purity, or Temple rituals, things that were huge back then. I wonder how I'd cope back then, or someone from then would deal with now...)