Yesterday, we learned from a mishnah that high-quality vessels bearing the image of a dragon are presumed implements of idol worship and therefore forbidden. Indeed, the prohibition is so strong that a Jew may not enjoy any benefit from them at all and should throw them into the Dead Sea in order to destroy them. Today, we’ll learn there’s a different way to tame those dragons.
Perhaps especially in a world where everything was hand made, tossing beautiful and expensive implements was probably fraught, even for rabbis. For example, consider the story about the dragon and the cursed ring. No, not that one. This one:
Rabba bar bar Hana says that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: Once, I was following Rabbi Elazar HaKappar the Distinguished on the road, and he found a ring there, and there was a figure of a dragon on it. He then encountered a minor gentile, but did not say anything to him. He then encountered an adult gentile, and said to him: “Revoke the ring’s idolatrous status.” But the gentile did not revoke it. Rabbi Elazar HaKappar then slapped him across his face, whereupon the gentile succumbed and revoked its idolatrous status.
Perhaps taken with the ring’s beauty or value, Rabbi Elazar HaKappar ignores the mishnah’s instruction to throw the dragon ring into the Dead Sea. Instead, he pockets it and then seeks to render it non-idolatrous, even assaulting a stranger to make it happen. What exactly are we supposed to take away from this strange story?
Learn from this incident the following three halakhot: (1) Learn from it that a gentile can revoke the idolatrous status of both his own object of idol worship and that of another gentile. (2) And learn that only one who is aware of the nature of idol worship and its accessories can revoke the idol’s status, but one who is not aware of the nature of idol worship and its accessories (such as a minor) cannot revoke the idol’s status. (3) And learn from it that a gentile can revoke the status of an idol even against his will.
This is, indeed, an unexpected idea — that an item used for idolatry can revert to an ordinary object. Intention, of course, matters: It must be done by an adult who is conscious of the nature of idol worship, who is in fact an idolator, but even under coercion it is effective.
If that sounds like a strange conclusion to you, you’re not alone:
Rabbi Hanina ridiculed this ruling and asked: But why was it necessary to have a gentile actively revoke the idolatrous status of the ring? Doesn’t Rabbi Elazar HaKappar the Distinguished maintain in accordance with that which we learned in a beraita: In the case of one who saves an object from a lion, or from a bear, or from a cheetah, or from a troop of soldiers, or from a river, or from the tide of the sea, or from the flooding of a river, or similarly one who finds an object in a main thoroughfare or in a large plaza, or for that matter, anywhere frequented by the public, in all these cases, the objects belong to him, because the owners despair of recovering them?
As Rabbi Hanina points out, to Rabbi Elazar HaKappar’s own thinking, once an owner has despaired of recovering a lost item and given up hope of finding it, they’ve essentially given up any claim of ownership. This, in turn, presumably negates any meaning they attached to the object and renders it no longer an object of idol worship. This suggests that Rabbi Elazar HaKappar’s attack on the non-Jew was completely unnecessary. He could have just kept the ring.
But Abaye is not convinced:
Granted, the owner despairs of recovering the object itself, but does he despair of its forbidden idolatrous status? The owner does not assume that the object will never be worshipped again; rather, he says to himself: If a gentile finds it, he will worship it. If a Jew finds it, since it is valuable, he will sell it to a gentile who will then worship it.
Rabbi Hanina is correct that despair means a surrender of ownership, but it doesn’t change the object’s status: Even though the former owner has lost the hope of recovering the item, they might still believe or even hope that someone else will worship with it. And indeed, it may well find a new owner who does just that. Thus, the found object, although ownerless, retains its idolatrous status. In other words, the dragon ring really is cursed.
Read all of Avodah Zarah 43 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on July 31, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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