Sotah 5:2-3

Sotah 5:2

On the day that Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was appointed head of the Academy in Yavneh, Rabbi Akiva expounded the following verse: Leviticus 11:33 says, “Any earthenware vessel into which any of them falls, anything in them yitma.” It doesn’t say tamei (will be unclean), it says yitma (it will render unclean), meaning that it can render other things ritually impure. From this we learn that a loaf in the second degree of ritual impurity can render something a third degree of impurity. Rabbi Yehoshua exclaimed, “If only Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai were still alive! He used to say that future generations would declare a loaf in the third degree of impurity to be clean because there is no verse in the Torah to support the ruling that it is unclean. But now, his student Rabbi Akiva has derived from the Torah that it is unclean based on ‘anything in them yitma.’”

Sotah 5:3

On that day, Rabbi Akiva also expounded Numbers 35:5, “You shall measure from outside the city, the east side 2,000 cubits” and Numbers 35:4, “From the city wall outward, 1,000 cubits all around.” 1,000 cubits and 2,000 cubits are mutually exclusive so how are we to understand these verses? Rabbi Akiva explained that the 1,000 cubits refers to the empty outskirts of a city while the 2,000 cubits refers to the Shabbos boundary. Rabbi Eliezer the son of Rabbi Yosi HaGlili says that the 1,000 cubits are the empty outskirts and the 2,000 cubits are fields and vineyards.