[Avodah] Should Shiurim be Corrected to Archeological Data

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2019 at 05:03:06PM +0100, Arie Folger via Avodah wrote:
: RMB asked whether we should revise the size of our shiurim, and gave three
: possible answers. Implicit in his trichotomy is that all shiurim are
: connected (he mentions olive and arm and dirham in one fell swoop, even
: though the arm and the dirham actually clash).

If shiurim do depend on today's arms and olives, they wouldn't need to
remain in the ratios they were in when Chazal stated how they related
in their forearms, finger-widths and olives.

: 
: So I thought that fellow Ovedim may be interested to hear of another
: shittah, namely that we reject the dirham, that based on archaeology the
: ammah is longer than Rav Chaim Noe, while the kazayit is small....

Tangengially, I am not sure about the clause about the ammah.

R Chaim Naeh's ammah is 48cm. According to the plaque at Chizqiyahu's
Water Tunnel <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siloam_inscription> (BTW,
in kesav Ivri), they dug a canal of 1,200 amos. As the tunnel is 533 m
long, that's somewhere between 42.6 and 46.3 cm. (As 1,200 is a round
number, I figure the actual number of amos is somewhere between 1,150 and
1,250 amos. Thus the range.)

So that's one piece of archeological data that says that RCN's shitah for
the ammah is too BIG.

Of course, if shiurim are supposed to drift, either because of the "law is
law" theory or because an ammah is based on contemporary peoples' arms,
then this may simply mean that the ammah during bayis sheini was lohnger
than it was in Chizqiyahu's day.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             The mind is a wonderful organ
micha at aishdas.org        for justifying decisions
http://www.aishdas.org   the heart already reached.
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