Given the complexities of offering up a sacrifice, there are a slew of ways to mess up. You could sprinkle the blood incorrectly, you could collect the blood incorrectly, you could walk incorrectly, or you could engage in any number of other missteps, literally or figuratively. But today’s discussion focuses on one particular error: the slaughterer who intended to offer up or eat the sacrifice outside of its designated time.
As background, some sacrifices come with an expiration date or time. For example, Leviticus 7 tells us that a thanksgiving sacrifice has to be eaten the day it’s offered, while votive and freewill offerings can be eaten that day or the day after, but not the third day. If they were sacrificed with the improper intent to eat them outside of that scope of time, it’s a problem.
Malintent with regard to time is special enough that Mishnah Zevachim 2:3 gives it its own word: piggul, which appears in Leviticus 19:7 and is often translated as “foul thing.” When a person offers a sacrifice that is piggul, the individual and those who eat from the offering are subject to karet, a form of divine punishment. As a distinction, malintent with regard to the manner of the sacrifice has consequences, but karet isn’t one of them.
If piggul is a consequence of bad intentions on time, when in the process does the sacrifice become piggul? In other words, what conditions have to be satisfied for the sacrifice to be considered piggul and for the consequence of karet to kick in? On today’s daf, we learn this:
Now, one is not liable to receive karet unless all the permitting factors have been sacrificed. As the master said: As is the acceptance of a valid offering, so is the lack of acceptance of a disqualified offering: Just as there is no acceptance of a valid offering unless all its permitting factors have been sacrificed, so too, there is no lack of acceptance of a disqualified offering unless all its permitting factors have been sacrificed.
What does “permitting factors” mean, exactly? In essence, for something to be a real and true sacrifice, every single step of the ritual — from slaughtering the animal to offering up the blood — must be completed. If they are not, result doesn’t meet the definition of sacrifice and it can’t be piggul. And if it’s not piggul, there’s no karet. So even though a piggul is by definition a sacrifice in which the priest intended to consume the meat at the improper time, a sacrifice doesn’t qualify as piggul (and consequently for karet) unless all the other steps of the ritual are performed.
This isn’t to say there aren’t other possible consequences for messing up when intending to offer up a sacrifice. Indeed, we’ve already seen that errors and omissions can have serious complications. However, if even one stage in the process was left out, it’s not piggul and no one is subjected to the punishment of karet.
The Gemara continues to go back and forth about the details. For example, we know sprinkling is a critical step in offering a sacrifice, so if there was malintent in sprinkling, does that render that step entirely void, which would make the ritual incomplete and therefore the sacrifice not a “sacrifice” and not piggul? Two rabbis argue against this, drawing examples from Yom Kippur sacrifices to suggest that all the permitting factors are met, but the Gemara doesn’t offer a clear resolution.
The discussion about piggul continues down the daf and in scattered places throughout the balance of Zevachim and into the next tractate of Menachot, where the term appears almost 150 times. As a result, piggul and the time-bound challenges we’re exploring here are going to continue to make regular appearances in our ongoing conversations about sacrifices.
Read all of Zevachim 42 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on October 26, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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