[Avodah] amah size

[Yitzhak Grossman]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:35:30 -0800
Saul.Z.Newman at kp.org wrote:

> http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Parasha/eng/teruma/gra.html  mishkan's gold 
> quantity related to dimention of the amah 

The argument against the large Amah hinges on this point:

"The only way of resolving this contradiction with respect to the
“large cubit” is to assume that the ark cover was hollow, or that the
weight of the ark cover is not related to its external measurements.
However, there is no support for such as assumption in the literature
on the Torah."

But this is incorrect; the author missed a couple of important sources:

Ralbag [0] deals with essentially the same point as the author, that
the total gold collected would not have sufficed for the construction
of the Aron if we accept Hazal's declarations of its dimensions
literally (the author is discussing the Kapores, while Ralbag is
discussing the Aronos themselves).  Ralbag therefore concludes that
Hazal were exaggerating:

"It is impossible that the thickness of the gold Aronos was a Tefah,
as Hazal have said, since it would be impossible to complete even one
of these Aronos with this thickness with all the gold mentioned in
Pekudei that was used for the work, and this will be clear to anyone
who has studied a little geometry

But Hazal have said this to teach that these Aronos had a perceptible
thickness"

Tashbaz [1] also discusses this and other problems with the sufficiency
of the collected quantity of gold, and he proposes the *exact solution*
that the author claims has "no support ... in the literature on the
Torah":

"And with regard to the Kapores being a Tefah [thick], we can resolve
this [by proposing] that only the walls [of the Kapores] were so, but
the rest of it was thin ... in order to answer the great question of
how so little gold could have sufficed for this thickness of the
Kapores"

The notes to the Machon Yerushalayim edition of Tashbaz mention that
the work "Midos U'Mishkalos Shel Torah" [2] discusses the weight and
shape of the Kapores at length.

[0] beginning of Terumah:
http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=19168&pgnum=200
http://hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=19168&pgnum=201

[1] Resp. III:70, found in the notes to the Ma'aleh Adumim edition
of Ralbag

[2] R. G. Y. Weiss, Yerushalayim 5745, Ch. 147 n. 3

Yitzhak
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