Most of the mincha, the meal offering, is given to the priests as food. But before they can eat any of it, a handful of the meal offering must be burned on the altar. On today’s daf, the rabbis ask: At what precise moment of the offering is the rest of the mincha allowed to be eaten? If you’re a really hungry priest and you love pancakes, how long do you actually have to wait?
Rabbi Hanina says: From when the fire takes hold of it.
Rabbi Yohanan says: From when the fire consumes most of it.
Rabbi Hanina, leniently, allows the hungry priest to eat as soon as the handful has caught fire. Rabbi Yohanan, more stringently, requires most of the handful to be burned up before the priest can eat his pancake.
Two later rabbis then discuss these opinions.
Rav Yehuda said to Rabba bar Rav Yitzhak: I will explain to you the reasoning of Rabbi Yohanan. The verse states: “And behold, the smoke of the land went up as the smoke of a furnace” (Genesis 19:28), and a furnace does not release smoke until the fire takes hold of the majority of the fuel.
Genesis 19 tells the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. After he sent the angels on their way, the Torah describes Abraham standing by the terebinths of Mamrei, and looking down onto the cities of the plains where he witnessed the smoking ruins of the cities. The language of “smoke” (kitor) in Genesis 19 parallels the language of “smoke” (hiktir) in Leviticus 2, which describes the laws of meal offerings. In Genesis 19, by the time Abraham could see smoke rising across the plains, the majority of the cities had been consumed by fire. Rabbi Yohanan (as explained by Rabbi Yehuda) infers that the majority of the handful must similarly be consumed by the fire before the priest can eat the rest of the sacrifice.
The Talmud is going to continue to interrogate Rabbi Yohanan’s position, without being particularly interested in Rabbi Hanina’s more lenient view that consumption can begin as soon as the flames lick the offering. (Indeed, Maimonides rules according to Rabbi Yohanan.) Apparently, the collective rabbis believed that priests should have the patience to wait until most of the handful was burned up before chowing down.
But even if our collective rabbinic authorities all agreed with Rabbi Yohanan’s position, one piece of this puzzle that still remains, well, puzzling, is the interpretive move that Rav Yehuda ascribes to Rabbi Yohanan. According to Rav Yehuda, Rabbi Yohanan is drawing a linguistic parallel between the biblical laws of meal offerings and the divine destruction of multiple cities for their unmitigated evil. This is hardly an obvious parallel.
As we’ve discussed elsewhere, Daniel Boyarin has argued that midrash is intertextual, meaning that when it draws a connection between one biblical text and another seemingly unrelated one — in this case based on a single word — it is often accomplishing a two-directional act of interpretation. Each piece of the parallel offers new and at times surprising insights into the other. This suggests we should look for a way the Genesis text is being interpreted. Are we supposed to understand the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as itself some kind of offering? Does the handful of the mincha offered on the altar symbolize the destruction of social and moral evils? That is one possible and powerful interpretation of the mincha offering, even if there is scant evidence elsewhere to support it.
But putting these two texts in conversation with each other also reminds us that fire is both dangerous and life-sustaining. As the indigenous people of the Americas knew long before Europeans came to this continent, when used wisely, fire can promote ecological diversity, manage the land for both flora and fauna, and reduce the risk of wildfires. Fire destroys, but it also releases the potential for new life, new ways of being in the world, and, for our hungry priest, new food items that can be eaten.
Read all of Menachot 26 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on February 6, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
