Sheviis 1:7 — Combining Saplings and Gourds
Combining Saplings and Gourds
A reading aid, not an exact translation.
This English is a clause-by-clause rendering to help you follow the Hebrew. It is not word-for-word literal, and it is not a transcript of the recorded shiur — the audio carries explanation and context the translation deliberately leaves out.
| Case | Ruling | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| Do saplings and gourds combine to make an orchard? | Yes — within a beis se'ah | — |
| What about just ten gourds? | Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: The whole beis se'ah is plowed — until Rosh Hashana | — |
A machine transcript of the recorded shiur.
This is the shiur as spoken, transcribed automatically and left unedited — the wording is Ephraim's, and occasional transcription errors remain. It follows the audio word by word.
An amalgam of commentaries, including original insights.
These insights draw on the commentaries to this Mishnah and on the recorded shiur. Those commentaries often rest on earlier sources — the Gemara, the Yerushalmi, the Rishonim, and one another — without always saying so; where they do, we generally cite the one we read. Every commentary consulted is kept, verbatim, with this page.
The delaas of the Mishnah is the bottle gourd, not the pumpkin, which came from America and was unknown in the ancient world. Mishnat Eretz Yisrael notes that it is sown at the beginning of the summer and ripens in that same summer, so hoeing and plowing the patch serve the crop growing in it now, which is why it may be worked until Rosh Hashana. Bartenura and Rambam limit the mishnah to the Greek gourd, which grows large enough to be reckoned like a tree.
מִצְטָרְפִין — they combine
The mishnah says saplings and gourds combine to make up the ten, without saying in what proportion. The Yerushalmi requires the saplings to be the majority, and Bartenura gives the arithmetic: six saplings and four gourds. The Tosefta gives a different mixture, three cucumbers, three gourds and four saplings, which leaves the saplings a minority and adds a species the mishnah does not name at all.
רַבָּן שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן גַּמְלִיאֵל אוֹמֵר — Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says
Hon Ashir reads the dispute out of the mishnah's own wording. It does not say af kol asarah, which would make Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel add to the first tanna, and it does not say amar, which would make him explain him. It says omer, a ruling of his own, so his gourds are not the first tanna's gourds and the two disagree, as the Yerushalmi also shows. On that footing Hon Ashir asks his question: why did Rambam drop Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel from Hilchos Shemittah 3 altogether?