[Avodah] Association of Positive Mitzvot with Days of Year?

[Zev Sero]

The ketores was 368 manim (a measure of weight), not kabim (a measure
of volume).  I suppose it's possible that a kav of the mixture weighed
a maneh, so they were equivalent, but where do you see that?  It seems
unlikely; 3 kabim is rather a lot, far more than would be necessary for
even a kohen gadol with the largest possible hand.


> So it would seem the amount the workers take away from the running
> total is measurable.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.  Surely they didn't keep anything;
whatever they took on the 29th of Adar in lieu of wages, they sold back
on the 1st of Nissan, so this had no net effect on the accumulated size
of the mixture.  Every year they would weigh out 368 manim and add it
to whatever was carried over from last year, and every year the amount
they had to carry over was 3 manim minus a handful more than last year,
the exact amount depending on the size of that year's kohen gadol's hand.

It would seem that the average KG's handful was something like 1/3 of a
maneh, so the question I implied above still stands: why provide 3 manim
for this purpose?  My only guess is that once in a while there was a KG
with giant hands; if Moshe Rabbenu was 10 amos tall, as the gemara says
(and it seems impossible to read that allegorically), then presumably
his hands were also very big, and he may have needed 3 manim in order to
reach in and take a handful.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon