Daily Talk
A man miscounts his sheep, calls the eleventh animal the tenth, and that animal becomes holy. Another man commits a transgression punishable by excision without ever knowing it carried that penalty, and he owes an offering for it. Why does the law let a mistake create holiness in one place and demand repair for it in another?
The Error That Consecrates
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About This Talk
Bechorot 8 works through what happens when the count for the animal tithe goes wrong, which errors consecrate and which do not, why silence at the tenth animal leaves the eleventh ordinary, and why an agent's mistake consecrates nothing at all. Shegagot 1 then opens the laws of inadvertent transgression with a census of its own, the forty three sins that bring a fixed sin offering and the three excision transgressions that bring none. Shegagot 2 draws the line through the mind, ruling exactly what a person had to know, and had to not know, for an act to count as inadvertent.