Imagine that you wanted to build an exact duplicate of your house, and you hired an architect to do the job. But the architect isn’t allowed to see the building she was supposed to duplicate, and you aren’t allowed to make any blueprints or drawings of it: All you can do is describe its dimensions in words. Something like this is the challenge facing the rabbis when they try to imagine the Holy Temple, which stood in Jerusalem for centuries before the Romans destroyed it in 70 C.E. The Amoraim had never seen the structure they were trying to describe. All they had were conflicting reports from a variety of rabbinic sources, which had to be reconciled with each other and with the biblical description of the Temple. It’s no wonder, then, that the accounts of the Temple in Tractate Yoma, which Daf Yomi readers have been exploring this week, are so inconsistent and hard to follow.Previous Daf Yomi columns are noted here and links.
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UPDATE (8 December): Bad link now fixed. Sorry!