Menachot 73

The opening mishnah of chapter seven in Tractate Menachot provided us with a list of meal offerings which follow the norm, namely that a handful of grain is removed to be burned on the altar and what remains becomes food for the priests. Rabbi Shimon notes that the meal offering of a sinner, when brought by a priest, is an exception to this rule, as the handful is removed and burned and the remaining grain is also consumed on the altar. 

But as the Gemara notes, Leviticus 5:12–13, which deals specifically with the meal offering of a priest, suggests otherwise: “And he shall bring it to the priest, and the priest shall take his handful of it as the memorial of it, and burn it on the altar … it is a sin offering. And the priest shall make atonement for him, for his sin that he has sinned in any of these matters, and he shall be forgiven; and the remainder shall be the priest’s, as the meal offering.” This is a sin offering (specifically one brought by a priest). And yet, the final phrase makes clear that the priest is entitled to consume the remainder — contra Rabbi Shimon’s assertion. In other words:

It is permitted to eat of the remainder of the meal offering of a sinner brought by one of the priests.

And yet, one of the other biblical sources is Leviticus 6:16: “And every meal offering of the priest shall be offered in its entirety; it shall not be eaten.”  This apparently directly contradicts Leviticus 5:12–13, which states that the priests do eat the meal portion of their own sin offerings.

So how can we resolve this tension? The Talmud notices that the final phrase in Leviticus 5:13 — “… as the meal offering” — is superfluous. The Torah has no need to tell us again that this offering is a meal offering because the context makes that abundantly clear. Since the rabbis assume every word in Torah is not only sacred but necessary to extract meaning, this extra phrase creates an opportunity to derive meaning that will resolve the tension between the sources.

The Talmud considers a number of resolutions, and eventually lands on this:

The verse states: “And the remainder shall be the priest’s, as the meal offering,” which is interpreted to mean that with regard to the rite performed by the priest, his meal offering is like the meal offering of the Israelite, but it is not like the meal offering of the Israelite.

In other words, this offering is like an offering of a priest in some ways and like an offering of an ordinary person in others. The priest’s handful is sacrificed by itself, like that of the ordinary person, and the remainder is sacrificed by itself, unlike those of the ordinary person, which are eaten. 

Much of the time, legal positions cited in a mishnah are not supported by biblical citations. They’re simply asserted. As we have seen, it is common for the Gemara to connect the Mishnah’s teachings to appropriate biblical support. Sometimes this process is straightforward because there is a clear path that connects the rabbinic tradition to its biblical roots. On today’s daf, however, we find an example that is far from straightforward — partly because the biblical text itself is internally inconsistent. In the mishnah, Rabbi Shimon let us know where things ended up, but not how we got there. The Gemara’s role is to connect the dots that get us there — even when the path is challenging to follow.

Read all of Menachot 73 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on March 25, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.