A mishnah on today’s daf discusses the timing for arranging and burning the bowls of frankincense, that are set alongside the showbread, noting that incorrect timing of these actions impacts whether the showbread can be consumed. The Gemara that follows, interestingly, does not comment directly on this mishnah, but instead quotes a different mishnah from Tractate Yoma that also discusses the necessary timing for Temple rituals:
We learned in a mishnah there (Yoma 28a): The appointed priest said to the other priests: “Go out and stand on a high point in the Temple and see if it is day and the time for slaughtering the daily offering has arrived.” If the time has arrived, the observer says: “There is light.” Mattitya ben Shmuel would say: “Is the entire eastern sky illuminated, even to Hebron?” And the observer would say: “Yes.”
And why did they need to institute this? Because once, the light of the moon rose and the priests imagined that the eastern sky was illuminated with sunlight. They then slaughtered the daily offering, and they had to take it out to the place designated for burning.
The tamid (daily offering) can only be sacrificed after dawn. The mishnah from Yoma relays a procedure whereby, as morning approached, the priest in charge of the shift would send other priests to a high vantage point to determine whether the sky had begun to lighten. One priest in particular, Mattitya ben Shmuel, sets a higher standard, holding that one should wait for illumination of the entire eastern horizon. This precise process of checking ensured the tamid was not slaughtered too early, as the mishnah relays had once occurred when the priests mistook moonlight for daylight. If the offering is slaughtered too early, the sacrifice is invalidated, and it must be burned.
After quoting this mishnah, the Gemara brings a related beraita about two other ritual actions that cannot be performed during the night:
The father of Rabbi Avin teaches: Not only in this case, but even in the case of a bird burnt offering whose nape was pinched at night, and in the case of a meal offering from which a handful was removed at night, it must be taken out to the place designated for burning.
The Gemara challenges this ruling:
Granted, a bird burnt offering is disqualified if pinched at night, as it cannot be restored. But in the case of a meal offering it is possible to remedy the situation, as the priest can restore the handful to its original place and then remove a handful during the day.
Pigeons and doves slaughtered for a burnt offering were killed by pinching the neck. Doing this at night disqualified the offering. But while you can’t un-slaughter an animal that was killed at night, reasons the Gemara, you can theoretically return a handful of flour that was removed. Why not allow the priest to return the handful taken in the night and remove it again later in the daytime? Why does doing this at night permanently invalidate the offering? Rabbi Avin, whose father taught this beraita, supplies the explanation:
Service vessels sanctify their contents even when those contents are not placed in the vessel at the appointed time for that service.
Even though night is an invalid time for removing the handful, once the handful is removed and placed in a service vessel, it nonetheless assumes sanctity. Once that happens, it cannot simply be returned to the remainder of the flour and restored to its original state.
Notice that in all this discussion, the Gemara has not even mentioned the original mishnah that generated it — the one about when it is appropriate to arrange showbread and frankincense in the Temple. So why are we even reading this? The reason for placing this discussion here in the Talmud becomes apparent only later, when the Gemara uses today’s mishnah to challenge the ruling that something sanctified in vessels at the improper time is disqualified moving forward. In other words, today’s Gemara is not a straightforward analysis of the mishnah. Instead, the mishnah is an occasion for the Gemara to relate an entirely different discussion in which this particular mishnah happens to be cited.
Read all of Menachot 100 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on April 21, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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