According to Leviticus 12, a woman is required to bring a sin offering seven days after giving birth to a boy, 14 days after the birth of a girl. On Zevachim 112, a mishnah includes postpartum women on a list of people who, should they try to offer their sacrifice prematurely and outside the Temple courtyard, are exempt from punishment. Why? Making a sacrifice outside the proper place only incurs liability if it is performed at the proper time. If the time of that obligation has not yet come, their actions do not incur liability.
The postpartum woman is not the only one in this category. The mishnah tells us that the same rule applies to both the zav and the zavah, men and women who have experienced an abnormal discharge, and must therefore bring a sacrifice to reverse the impurity that incurs. On today’s daf, Ze’eiri suggests one more person should be included in this mishnah:
The mishnah should teach the leper together with them.
Ze’eiri’s view is that, like the postpartum woman and the person with unusual discharge, a person who has suffered tzaraat should not be held liable for offering the sacrifice that would reunite them with the community outside the Temple, if they do it at the wrong time. This turns out to be a good point and the Gemara informs us that:
Ze’eiri’s addition to the text of the mishnah was fixed by the tannaim in the version of the mishnah that they would teach.
A quick check of the list in the mishnah suggests that this is correct — Ze’eiri’s addition is indeed included on the list.
But there is also a problem. Ze’eiri is a second generation amora (a rabbi from the period after the Mishnah was completed). Yet the Gemara tells us that the tannaim adjusted this mishnah to include Ze’eiri’s addition. A tanna is someone who precedes the completion of the Mishnah — and therefore precedes Ze’eiri by at least a generation, and likely two or more. Without a time machine, a tanna could not possibly know a teaching from Ze’eiri.
It seems likely, therefore, that Ze’eiri’s addition must have come after the close of the Mishnah and it must have been made not by tannaim but by later rabbis. That’s the best way to make sense of the Gemara. And if you’re a purist about the Mishnah, and believe it should remain unchanged after it was fixed in the early third century, this means the leper should be edited back out. This is the view of Rashi, who states that the inclusion of the word “leper” in the mishnah is erroneous and that it should be deleted from manuscripts that include it.
Taking a different approach, Rabbi Gershon Shaul Yom-Tov Lipmann Heller, a 17th century commentator on the Mishnah, argues that the word “leper” should be included in the text of this mishnah. Why? The Gemara tells us the text was amended based upon Ze’eiri’s teaching.
Many contemporary Talmud scholars focus on the differences between the existing manuscripts of the Talmud, using them to uncover the evolution of the text. We might imagine this is a contemporary endeavor, but it really is not. The discussion on today’s daf demonstrates that both the Gemara and its commentators were already weighing in on what the text of the Mishnah should read. And maybe even making some adjustments.
The traditional printed version of the Talmud includes the leper in this mishnah as Ze’eiri suggested. The inclusion may be a nod to a consensus that when an error is found, it should be corrected. On the other hand, given the Talmud’s claim that the inclusion was made during the tannaitic period, perhaps it is an expression of the anxiety of admitting that later changes sometimes came into the text.
Read all of Zevachim 114 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on January 6, 2026. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
