Tied Up in Knots Over a Goring Ox
In this week’s ‘Daf Yomi,’ the Talmud tries to make sense of an incoherent Biblical law about awarding damages
.. According to Exodus, an ox that kills a human being is to be stoned to death immediately; yet it is only after goring three times that the ox earns the designation “forewarned.” How, then, could any ox ever be forewarned, when it wouldn’t live long enough to kill three times? As the Gemara says in Bava Kamma 41a, “How can you find a forewarned ox?” One straightforward answer to this question would be that the Bible is incoherent on this point, that it simply did not think things through. But of course such an answer is unavailable to the rabbis, who are fairly free in elaborating and revising the Bible, but never simply criticize or repudiate it.
.. An ox, the Mishna says, can be “forewarned with regard to Shabbatot”: That is, an ox that has a habit of goring on Shabbat would not be considered forewarned for goring on a weekday. This distinction initially seems to make no sense—surely an ox doesn’t keep track of the calendar, so how could the distinction between Shabbat and weekday be meaningful to it? According to the Jerusalem Talmud, the Koren edition notes the reason is that people wear different clothes on Shabbat, which might confuse the ox, leading it to gore people it perceives as strangers.
.. This dynamic is one reason the process of interpreting and codifying Jewish law is open-ended: The Talmud is not the end of argument, but the beginning.