Digging for Din: May We Learn Halacha from Archeology?

Torah amid the ruins

The archeology world was recently excited by the
discovery of a marked beka (machatzis hashekel) weight in a dig at the
Kosel.

A small stone bearing an inscription that archeologists
identified as the word “beka”—written backwards—was
unearthed in Kosel excavations at Robinson’s Arch five years ago. Nobody got
excited at the time, because nobody noticed. A volunteer in the Ir David wet
sifting project in Emek Tzurim National Park, sorting recently through that Kosel
dirt, found the artifact.

The weight of a shekel has contemporary Halachic implications.
To determine how much silver the father of a bechor must
give a kohen for pidyon haben, can
we simply multiply the weight of the found “beka
stone by ten to reach the required (Bemidbar 18:16) five shekalim? Can this find, and others like it, resolve
Halachic debates about shiurei hamitzvos?

This question is addressed by the Gemara (Bava Basra 73b) in
the aggados of Rabba Bar Bar Chana, who
told of being led through the desert by an Arab merchant to see the maisai midbar. In order to resolve the disputes
between Bais Hillel and Bais Shamai (Menachos 41b) regarding the configuration
of tzitzis, Rabba excised the corner of the talis from one of the bodies to
bring it to the Chachamim for examination. Subsequently, Rabba’s animals were
unable to walk, which the Arab explained was due to a tradition that one who
takes anything from the maisai midbar gets
stuck. Rabba returned the tzitzis and the animals walked. When he told the
story to the Chachamim,
they rebuked him, saying that it had been unnecessary to take a sample when a
verbal report would have sufficed.

While the mefarshim
debate whether Rabba Bar Bar Chana meant that these stories actually occurred
(see, for example, Ritva ad loc.), it would seem to be instructive nonetheless
with regard to the fundamental question of whether Halachic conclusions can be
derived from ancient finds.

R’ Chaim Kanievsky (Ta’ama Dikra, Parashas Shelach, p. 130 in
the 4th ed.), however, sees in the fact that Rabba Bar Bar Chana was
prevented min hashamayim from
taking the tzitzis, and in the fact that it apparently didn’t occur to him to take
the obvious step of counting the strings, that it is not the will of Hashem
that we determine Halacha by means outside of Torah like rummaging through antiquities.

In discussing the machlokes
between Rashi and Rabbainu Tam about the sequence of the parashios in tefillin, the Smag (Mitzvas Asei 22) adduces evidence for Rashi from tefillin
that were found buried near the kever of Yechezkel Hanavi—a clear
support for the Halachic admissibility of archeological evidence. The Drisha (O.C.
34) rejects the proof on technical grounds: Perhaps the tefillin were buried
because the Halacha follows Rabbainu Tam so they were pasul. The Bach rejects this argument because the
tefillin could easily have been fixed rather than interred.

The Ramban writes that he changed his mind about the weight
of a shekel—to side with Rashi over the Rif—after being shown an ancient shekel
coin in Akko with an inscription that local Samaritans could read.

In discussing this issue, many poskim have pointed to problems with the evidenciary value
of many finds: the paucity of the archeological record and the lack of proof
that whatever was exhumed is a valid representative of its kind.

The Chazon Ish (Hilchos Shevi’is 3:18)
rejects the presumption that a town known today by a particular name shares the
location of its historical counterpart, so the Gemara’s statement (Chulin 6b) that
Bais Sh’an is not subject to shemita cannot
be applied to the Bais Sh’an of today.

A similar uncertainty surrounds the city of Lod, which the
Gemara (Megilla 4a) says was walled in Yehoshua’s time and therefore celebrates
Purim on the 15th of Adar. What about the Lod of today? Though
others disagreed, Dayan Weiss (Minchas Yitzchak 8:61) felt that excavations in
the 1980s that appeared to confirm that the new Lod is the old Lod helped to
create a safek, and that residents should hear the Megilla
again on the 15th without a bracha.

It is important to distinguish between the actual evidence
from a dig and the pronouncements of archeologists, some of whom are given to presenting
assumptions and guesses as fact. Dead men tell no tales, so an imaginative
archeologist is free to exploit the absence of evidence to improvise a story
about his find. (Note that Dayan Weiss in Lod pointed not to the claims of the
archeologists but to the knowledge of experts from the Asra Kadisha
organization, who examined graves that were uncovered.)

While demonstrating this trend is beyond the scope of this
article, consider the license taken in our own beka case by archeologist Eli Shukron, who directed
the excavations on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority. To the question
of why something intended to serve as a weight would be inscribed backwards,
Shukron had an answer at the ready: This inscription was obviously made by an
artisan who also inscribed seals—which are engraved in mirror script—so he
mixed up the two.

“Apparently, the seal craftsman got confused when he engraved
the inscription on the weight and mistakenly used mirror script as he was used
to doing,” said Shukron in a press release. It gets worse: “From this mistake
we can learn about the general rule: The artists who engraved weights during
the First Temple period were the same artists who specialized in creating seals.”

Obvious, isn’t it?