We’ve talked a lot about what happens to the blood and meat of sacrificed animals. Today’s daf discusses what happens to the hides. The mishnah teaches:
The hides of offerings of lesser sanctity are returned to the owners. The hides of offerings of the most sacred order are given to the priests.
Peace offerings, thanksgiving offerings and seasonal offerings (like the offering of a firstborn animal, tithe offerings and paschal lambs) are considered offerings of lesser sanctity. Those who bring these animals keep their hides and usually get to eat at least some of the meat. Burnt offerings, sin offerings and guilt offerings have the status of higher sanctity, so their hides go to the priests (and laypeople do not get to eat their meat).
That’s fairly straightforward. Let’s consider a more complicated situation. What happens if an animal meant for a most sacred sacrifice is slaughtered and something happens to disqualify it from the altar? What becomes of its hide?
If any (higher sanctity) offerings were disqualified prior to their flaying, their hides do not go to the priests. After their flaying, their hides go to the priests.
An animal that is disqualified after slaughter is burned outside the Temple. According to this opinion in the mishnah, if the animal is disqualified while it still has its skin, its skin is burned with it. But if it was skinned prior to disqualification, the priests get to keep the hide. And then something really interesting, and surprisingly rare, happens in the mishnah. We get testimony from someone who has actually seen this happen.
Rabbi Hanina, the deputy high priest, said: In all my days, I never saw a hide going out to the place of burning.
Rabbi Hanina shares his own recollection that hides were never burned together with disqualified animals. This functions as a challenge to the first opinion in the mishnah, suggesting that all hides of disqualified animals go to the priests, regardless of when the disqualification happens. And who would be more qualified than the deputy high priest to remember how things used to work?
And the rabbis say: “We did not see” is no proof. Rather, it goes out to the place of burning.
The rabbis reject the testimony of Rabbi Hanina, the deputy high priest, and insist that the correct Temple ritual involves burning the hides of animals disqualified before they are flayed.
The Talmud is going to unpack Rabbi Hanina’s position more fully tomorrow. But for now, let’s stop and think about what just happened. Throughout the tractate, the rabbis have continually turned to the Hebrew Bible to articulate and justify the various details of the sacrificial service. Some of us have found that odd — after all, the earliest Tannaim (the first generations of the rabbinic movement), were alive while the Temple still stood and would have seen this process for themselves. Why not bring in eyewitness testimony wherever possible? Not only is this rarely done in the rabbinic texts, in this case we see the rabbis reject eyewitness testimony. What’s going on?
There are (at least) two ways to read this rejection.
First, this rejection might be evidence of the rabbis’ intentional shift of expertise away from priests and towards rabbis and rabbinic logic. If priests had authority to determine the details of Temple ritual, what else might priests have authority over? And what would that mean for the post-Temple Judaism that the rabbis were in the middle of creating? Crafting a fully rabbinic Judaism that functioned without a Temple might have required rejecting priestly authority in all spheres, even if the priest in question was both a subject area expert and a rabbi himself.
Alternatively, we might read the rejection more narrowly. Perhaps it was less about leadership and expertise than it is about the practical difference between saying: “I never saw something” and “it never happened.” Lots of things happen in the world that I’ve personally never seen, so perhaps the rabbis recognize that Rabbi Hanina’s statement leaves some room for uncertainty.
Either way, today’s daf reminds us that among the earliest generations of rabbis, there were many who witnessed and could recall how the Temple functioned. What they did with that information is a whole other story.
Read all of Zevachim 103 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on December 26, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
