daf bit: Avodah Zarah 69

[cellio]

The rabbis are concerned that Jews not drink wine from which a heathen has poured a libation. The mishna discusses some of the conditions under which we do or don't trust non-Jews with wine. If a heathen and a Jew are conveying the latter's wine together, it is presumed that the wine is under supervision and the wine is permitted. If the Jew leaves his wine in a wagon for a time, takes a shortcut to a nearby town, bathes, and returns, it is permitted; however, if he told the heathen that he was going to do so, and there was enough time for the heathen to bore a hole, take wine, seal it, and have the clay dry, the wine is forbidden. (69a)

It's not discussed here, but it appears that if he left but there was not enough time for the heathen to do anything to the wine, the wine is still permitted. Sometime between mishnaic times and now the rabbis got a lot more cautious, to the point of forbidding wine that has been so much as touched by gentiles unless precautions are taken. I am mildly curious about when and how that happened. (Note to my non-Jewish friends: I hold more liberally than that, though I'm cautious in SCA or fannish settings because there are actually pagans in some numbers in those communities.)

(Today's daf is actually 68 but doesn't distill well.)

Edit 2011-11-21: This entry seems to have become a spammer favorite, so I'm disabling further comments. Those of you who are real people know where to find similar posts and how to get in touch with me.

Comments

[cellio]

Your idea of spiritual backlash resonates with me. I don't know if that's how the rabbis viewed it, but certainly they believed that offering any part of the (bottle, cask, whatever) in idol worship invalidates the lot, so it could be something like that. And I don't have any problem with that.

In the case of a (modern) gentile who doesn't offer libations to anybody, and may well be an atheist or totally-non-practicing something-else, I have more trouble with saying that because he touched it the wine has become forbidden, particularly if everything happened in my sight (we opened the bottle and passed it around the table). There must be more to this that I do not understand.

By the way, there is a work-around of sorts that can keep this from being a social embarrassment: according to the rabbis, wine that has been boiled is unfit for idolatry and therefore these concerns don't arise. (It's not sterilization that removes idolatry effects; it prevents them from occurring.) Most kosher wine, at least of the sort that you see in grocery stores in the US, is in this category. I understand that this process can lower the quality in ways that people more educated about wine than I would notice, which is why not all kosher wine has been treated in this way.

Really, there should be a web site somewhere dedicated to Talmudic Physics, where phenomena likewise this, and like the FTL communication technique using the two rabbis, the pork chop and the really, really, long piece of spaghetti, can be fully elucidated.

Ooh, yeah.

Out of morbid curiosity

[dragonazure.livejournal.com]

Forbidding the wine in the immediate vessel from which the libation was poured seems straightforward enough, but how many decantings back does it affect?

The serving pitcher from which the goblet/glass was filled?
The bottle from which the pitcher was filled?
The cask from which the bottle was filled?
The barrel in which the wine was aged in prior to decanting to casks?

I would expect there is some sort of threshold at which the prohibition becomes impractical or unnecessary.

What happens if the libation occurs *after* you took a drink? I assume that anything consumed prior to that point would be considered spiritually "safe", but anything afterward is not.