Zevachim 51

The current chapter of Tractate Zevachim is concerned with the procedural details for each major category of sacrifice — details like where in the Temple a sacrifice is slaughtered, where its blood is collected, where and how the blood must be sprinkled, where the remainder of the blood is poured, and details about how it is eaten and/or burned. The rabbis are certainly interested in the actual content of these laws, but they are even more concerned with hermeneutics — how the laws are derived from the text of the Torah. 

In this vein, today’s daf picks up toward the end of a long, meta-discussion on hermeneutic methods. In particular, the Gemara is interested in whether and how one can string together multiple hermeneutic principles, implicitly asking, what are the limits and guardrails around our methods of deriving laws from the Torah? The final question of this section asks:

A matter derived via a paradigm — can it be used to derive another matter via a juxtaposition, or via a verbal analogy, or via an a fortiori inference, or via a paradigm?

This is really four questions squeezed into one. The Gemara is asking whether it is a valid interpretive move to first learn a law or principle from the hermeneutic method known as binyan av, in which something specific is learned by logical inference from a universal model or paradigm, and then to use that newly derived law as the basis for learning a second law, either through another binyan av or another hermeneutic principle. The Gemara brings a beraita that seems to prove that we can in fact learn a second binyan av from a binyan av, but leaves open the question of whether you can do the same with a binyan av and one of three other principles: juxtaposition, verbal analogy and a fortiori.

Thus concludes our lengthy detour into the nitty gritty of rabbinic hermeneutics. While this section may have felt like a bit of a digression from our main topic, it also gets at something important at the heart of Tractate Zevachim — namely, that almost none of these laws are actually practiced. They are certainly not practiced today, but sacrifices were equally out of play for the rabbis of the Talmud. Because of this, perhaps more so than for any other area of Jewish law, the study and derivation of these laws becomes the ritual itself. These methodological questions of how we derive laws from the text of the Torah underlie the meaning and validity of the rabbis’ entire project in Tractate Zevachim. This attitude towards study as ritual is expressed cogently in a passage from Tractate Menachot, the tractate we will study after Zevachim:

Rabbi Yitzhak said: What is the meaning of that which is written: “This is the law of the sin offering” (Leviticus 6:18), and: “This is the law of the guilt offering” (Leviticus 7:1)? Anyone who engages in studying the Torah of the sin offering, it is as though he sacrificed a sin offering, and anyone who engages in studying the Torah of a guilt offering, it is as though he sacrificed a guilt offering.

The only way we can engage with this crucial area of Torah is to study it. We cannot engage through practice. The rabbis understood that the more time, love and attention we give to discussing these laws, the more praiseworthy. 

Drawing on these sentiments, all the mishnahs of the fifth chapter of Zevachim were instituted as a daily recital in our morning prayers. In the traditional liturgy, one recites this chapter followed by a quintessential beraita detailing all the hermeneutic principles used to interpret the Torah. This chapter, and the way it models and discusses these principles, is seen as an exemplary mode of Torah study. While it is still about the particular topic of sacrifices, it is also symbolic of the whole project of Torah learning we are engaged in together. 

Read all of Zevachim 51 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on November 4, 2025. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.