CHAPTER TWO

TITHES AND RITUAL PURITY

A.

I. INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

The halakhah, as derived from talmudic sources, prescribed that a Jew who wished to make his produce fit for eating as secular food had to separate [n,~i,n], or priestly dues, and tithes [n,,tv1m] in the following manner. First, he separated for the priests. From the remainder he gave a tenth, which was the first [Jitvic, ,tv1m], to the , who for their part gave to the priests a tenth of the , called the terumah of the tithe [,tv11~ n~i,n] or the tithe of the tithe [,tvl7~i1 1~ ,tv11~]. Having separated the terumah and the first tithe, the owner of the produce separated from the remainder yet an­ other tenth, this being the [•ltv ,tv11~] in the first, second, fourth, and fifth years and the poor man's tithe ['ll7 ,tvl7~] in the third and sixth years of the Sabbatical cycle. The second tithe had to be taken to and consumed there, or redeemed and the money, with the addition of 25 % [,::i'm tv~in], taken to Jerusalem where the owner bought whatever he wished. The poor man's tithe, given, as its name implies, to the poor, consisted of secular food. On the last day of in the fourth and seventh years a confession, contained in the Bible (Deut. 26: 13-15) and relating to the tithe, was made. The confession referred, according to the Sages, to all the tithes.

2. THE RELATION BETWEEN THE BIBLICAL LAW AND THE HALAKHAH

The halakhot mentioned in the previous section are based on the Bible, which contains several laws dealing with the tithes. There are two such laws in the . Of these two, a detailed one occurs in the , as follows. "To the Levites I have given every tithe in for an inheritance, in return for their service which they serve, their service in the tent of meeting ... And the Lord said to , 'Moreover you shall say to the Levites, "When you 24 TITHES AND RITUAL PURITY take from the people of Israel the tithe which I have given you from them for your inheritance, then you shall present an offering from it to the Lord, a tithe of the tithe. And your offering shall be reckoned to you as though it were the grain of the threshing floor, and as the ful­ ness of the wine press ... and you may eat it in any place, you and your households; for it is your reward in return for your service in the tent of meeting ... "'" (Num. 18:21-32). That the tithe was given to the Levites both in return for their ser­ vice in the Tabernacle and because no inheritance of land would be allotted to them is evident from this law, which imposed on them the obligation to separate, from the first tithe given to them, the tithe of the tithe as the priestly terumah. The halakhah sees in this law the basis of the first tithe which was given to the Levites. About its date and significance biblical scholars disagree. Thus Well­ hausen and others, 1 who assign source P to as late as the time of the Babylonian exile, hold that the law deals with the tithe given to the Levites as an annual obligation. They point to the identity between the regulations relating to the tithe as stated in the halakhah and those in the law under discussion, an identity which, they contend, is due to the proximity of time between the biblical law composed during the Babylonian exile and the halakhah which had its beginnings at the commencement of the period. Kaufmann,2 seeking to prove the antiquity of the Priestly Code, main­ tains that the law of the tithe in the Book of Numbers refers to a tithe given either as a votive or as a freewill offering at no fixed date and with no time limit set for it. Since basically a votive or a freewill offering was dedicated to the Temple, the Levites had to separate the terumah of the tithe from the tithe in order to release the latter from its sanctity and so permit them to eat it as secular food anywhere without pro­ faning "the holy things of the people of Israel" (Num. 18 :32). We shall not enter here into the question either of the date of the Priestly Code in particular or of the separation of terumot and tithes and the status of the priests and the Levites in the biblical period in general, all this being irrelevant to our present discussion. What is

I J. Wellhausen, Prolegomena z1,r Geschichre Israels, Berlin, 19056, pp. 150-152. 2 Y. Kaufmann, Toledor ha-Em11nah ha-Yisra'elit, Jerusalem & Tel Aviv, 1936- 1956, I, pp. 143-184. The same view is expressed by M. Haran, Entzi/j.lopedyah Mi/j.ra'it, V, pp. 204-212, s.v. -,tvl7~.