As we recently learned in a mishnah, when Jerusalem added territory or the Temple added new area, there was a specific procedure for doing so that began with approval from a variety of officials and even the high priest’s oracular stones, the urim v’tummim. The acquisition was celebrated and solidified with sacrifices and music.
According to the lore the rabbis inherited, their ancestors — both under the leadership of Joshua and under Kings David and Solomon — acquired and built up that most revered city, Jerusalem. The rabbis on our page of the Talmud do not seem to care that Joshua had no Israelite king and no Sanhedrin at his disposal. Nor do they worry that there was no Sanhedrin available to David and Solomon. These first acquisitions were special, and the sages longingly refer to them as kedushah rishonah (“the first sanctity”).
Half a millennium later, after the destruction of the first Temple in 586 B.C.E., the Jewish scribe Ezra led a band of Israelites exiled to Babylonia back to reclaim Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple in what the Talmud remembers as kedushah sh’niyah (“the second sanctity.”) But the Talmud is troubled that Ezra did not have all the essential ingredients mentioned in the mishnah – he had no king and no urim v’tummim. (According to Yoma 21b, the urim v’tummim disappeared after the destruction of the first Temple.)
Rav Huna, who died near the end of the 3rd century C.E., and his younger contemporary Rav Nahman disagreed on what it meant that Ezra was missing key ingredients in his rebuilding of Jerusalem:
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Rav Huna says: “We learned in the mishnah: With all these.” He maintains that the initial consecration of the Temple in the days of David and Solomon sanctified it for its time and sanctified it forever. Therefore Ezra, who reconsecrated the area, did so merely as a commemoration.
Rav Nahman says: “We learned in the mishnah: With one of these.” He maintains that the initial consecration of the Temple sanctified it for its time only, and did not sanctify it forever. Ezra consecrated the Temple and its courtyards, even though there was no king and no urim v’tummim.
The sages disagree about whether all the procedures described in the mishnah are necessary, or whether just one would have been adequate. Rav Nahman is so convinced that only one is necessary, he suggests amending the mishnah itself.
But then the Gemara brings a curious beraita in the name of Abba Shaul:
Abba Shaul says: There were two ponds on the Mount of Olives, a lower pond and an upper pond. The lower pond was consecrated during the time of the First Temple with all the procedures mentioned in the mishnah. But the upper pond was not consecrated with all these procedures …
In the view of Abba Shaul, the lowermost bodies of water in Jerusalem had come into Jewish possession appropriately, but the upper pool was, as the beraita says further on, “not completely sanctified.”
The anonymous editor of the Talmud, processing incredulously that a renewed Jerusalem had not been adequately sanctified in Ezra’s time, sought some kind of justification for this oversight. What reason could there be? The editor offered an enigmatic description of this upper part of Jerusalem:
For this (upper portion) was the filth of Jerusalem, and it was easy for it to be conquered from there.
In describing this plateau as “filth” (turefah), the Talmud applies to this small section of the holy city a medically inexact and clearly derogatory term that the rabbis frequently employed to allude to women’s reproductive organs. In the course of a single word, the Talmud’s editor has invited us to reread the majority of the page as describing a relationship between a man (the people of Israel) and a woman (Jerusalem).
Now this reads differently. When the Talmud debates whether the second sanctification of Jerusalem succeeded, the Talmud is apparently worried over whether the Jewish people were truly married to that part of Jerusalem that Ezra’s generation annexed. Around the 14th century, one scribe had grown so attracted to the marital metaphors that, where our standard printed edition asserts “there was no need for sanctification,” an earlier manuscript (erroneously) records “there was no need for marriage.”
When we reread this page of Talmud, then, kedushah rishonah and kedushah sh’niyah are transformed into the stories of Jerusalem’s marriage to the Jewish people. The first marriage, officiated during or around the lifetime of King David, was glorious and had no parallel. The marriage saw rough times when the city fell to a foreign empire, but the marriage never died. Kedushah sh’niyah, the second “wedding,” was a pale imitation — more like a renewal of vows.
The complex and beautiful history of Jerusalem cannot be divorced from the sacred relationship the city shares with the Jewish people. Even if our proverbial honeymoon ended more than two and a half millennia ago, the Jewish people remain a part of that special bond we share with the holy city. There was no wedding photographer, but our daf today paints for us memories of that beautiful day when we and the City of Peace tied our fates to one another.
Read all of Shevuot 16 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on May 17, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
