[Avodah] The Tube of an Egg

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Mar 01, 2011 at 10:24:13PM -0500, Poppers, Michael wrote:
: I wonder if MaHaRYL was forced into such a p'shat because a yud was
: missing from his /btzh/ -- in TaNaCH, a "bitzah" (a m'qom botz) never
: has a yud (and always has a dageish in the tzadi), while "beitzah" always
: has a yud -- and I'm not sure how one would understand the reisha of the
: mishna (e.g. "v'yit'nenah al pi haneir") if the object in question was
: a reed (re "v'yit'nena," it seems rather difficult to place a reed on,
: or even suspend it over, a lamp).

I thought the reverse... That the Maharil was diverting from common
pronunciation and spelling based on logic in contradiction to the
accepted wording.

Picture an oil lamp like one of these
<http://www.museumsurplus.com/Pictures/9685.JPG>. The hole used to fill
it is a couple of inches from the wick. Into that hole, and angling
away from the wick, is a reed being used as a thin pipe to feed in oil
from a resevoir. A lot more plausible than oil dripping from a hole
empty eggshell, and more likely to parallel something a yotzeir would
manufacture from cheres.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "I hear, then I forget; I see, then I remember;
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