Mishnah Yoma Chapter 3 Mishnah 10 Pt. 6

As we’ve been reading about the fabulous Queen Hilni, one of the many, dare we say, wealthy benefactors of the Temple as described in our Mishnah, there have been a lot of questions around the motivations of these benefactors—is this a hiddur mitzvah / הידור מצוה / beautification of a mitzvah? Is this a demonstration of power and influence? Are the contributions truly beneficial to the well-being of the Temple (like for efficiency or ecology) or are they merely for show? All of these questions are super fascinating, as well as considering the personalities of the different benefactors—for a review of the awesome figure that is our Queen Hilni, check out Olivia Devorah’s fantastic source sheet!

Unique to our piece of the Mishnah today is that this is the first of such benefactions that deals with a text! (How rabbinic, right? I mean, rabbis are pretty obsessed with their texts.) But even more interesting is that the text that our Queen Hilni chose to gift to the Temple plated in gold is the text of Sotah! For a review of this deeply misogynistic ritual, check out Numbers 5:11-31 or this thorough article from The Jewish Women’s Archive. Which begs a fascinating question—why this text, of all texts?!?

The Gemara around our Mishnah seems very concerned with exactly what was written on these gold plates. Was it the whole text of Sotah? Was it just every other word and some abbreviated? Was it just the very first letter of every word? The context of their disagreement has to do with whether or not it is permitted to scribe only parts of a Torah scroll (for educational purposes or otherwise), but I think this yields something else—maybe they didn’t know what exactly was written on the plates, or for that matter, why! The word for “plates” here is טבלא / tablah. According to Jastrow, a tablah can be a plank, board, tablet for writing, a list, will, or even a book of accounts. I’m particularly struck by the last few of these possibilities because a tablah seems to me like something which is meant to help us be accountable. In my imagination, this wealthy queen wanted to make sure that whoever was going to perform this ritual, if they ever actually did perform it, knew that they were to be held accountable down to the very letter, especially because a woman’s life was in their hands. (By the way, check out the mishnayot of Masechet Sotah—it’s very clear from those texts that Kohanim often did not play by the strict rules of the ritual for Sotah, and had to be kept in check in order to protect the right of the woman going through the process).