Rava is concerned that the accused should not be killed - so why is he increasing the time discrepancies between the edim and thereby davka sustain testimonies that according to Abaye would not be accepted, so according to Abaye there is less a chance that the accused would be killed.
And if you will answer me that so that edim will be able to come and mezim them, then I will ask you, the Gemoro says that the edim mezimim have to cover the entire time span to mezim the edim. So fine. But still why did Rava need to increase the times more than Abaye, what did he gain thereby?
Avrohom Tenenbaum, Brooklyn, NY
1. First, it should be stressed that the dispute between Abaye and Rava concerns how to explain the reason of the opinions of Rebbi Meir and Rebbi Yehudah, but there is not necessarily a dispute between Abaye and Rava about which testimonies one accepts and which one does not. So they both agree that if one witness says 3 and the other says 5 we do not accept them according to Rebbi Meir, and according to Rebbi Yehudah we do accept them, but the dispute concerns why we do or do not accept their testimony.
2. The underlying reason that led Rava to disagree with Abaye is that according to Abaye one mustsay that the witnesses are extremely accurate in their knowledge of time. According to Rebbi Meir, either a person makes absolutely no mistake at all, or only a minicscule mistake. Rava had a very strong question on this explanation: How is it possible for the witnesses to know so accurately the exact time at which the crime was committed, especially taking into consideration that in those days no one possessed watches? (See also Bechoros 17b, that there is a opinion that "Iy Efshar l'Tzamtzem" -- it is impossible to be so accurate.)
3. This is stated by Chidushei Rabeinu David (written by one of the Rishonim, a Talmid of the Ramban), who states that Rava maintains that most people would make a mistake of up to 2 hours even according to Rebbi Meir. It therefore follows that there is another reason to believe the witnesses, because there is a rule that we do not assume a person is a liar unless we have strong evidence to assume so. Accordingly, since there is less than 2 hours between what the 2 witnesses said, we assume they are telling the truth since most people may make a mistake up to 2 hours.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom
Sholom Aleichem,
thank you for the answer. The quoted gemoro in Bechoros is totally irrelevant since there the question is if two heads can exit contemporaneously but here the subject in hand is the accuracy of the contemporary technology available at the time of time measuring. Do you think that Abaye was a child and was anaware of the maximum accuracy of time measuring capabilities of his time? After all he was the Rosh Yeshiva. Perhaps one could say that the edim would not want sbsolutely to ruin their ? reputation and that it is possible to be precise (as Abaye) but in some specifc cases lake in murder, many people would be totally shocked and confused after seeing a murder ( I would) ( my brother once saw a murder and he was in real real shock so I can tell you this from experience) and specifically in this case one could be confused and since we do not want the murderer to get away with it (? ? ?) maybe just in this case Rava extends the time gap. In such a case, only la
ter or much later the edim realize that actually they could serve as edim and only later they would start to investigate the exact time of the occurrence which is difficult.This occurred to me now after I read your email. Yeyasher koach.
Avrohom Tenenbaum
Avrohom, thank you very much for your interesting comments.
What I was trying to understand in my previous reply was how can Abaye say, according to Rabbi Meir, that a person does not make any mistake at all?
I found that the Pnei Yehoshua is also concerned with this problem. He asks, how is it possible to say that everyone is like Avraham Avinu who was able, through the stars, to know at exactly what time everything takes place? Even Moshe Rabeinu said only, "at around midnight," because he was not capable of knowing precisely exactly when the firstborn of Egypt would be struck!
The Pnei Yehoshua answers that since the witness was interrogated about when the murder happened and did not chose to say that he did not know, this suggests that he believes he has an accurate idea of the time.
However, as you say, we expect him to know only according to the contemporary available technology.
Kol Tuv,
Dovid Bloom