Fact-Checking the Torah -- partial answer

So here is a partial answer to my challenge last time. I said find Mishnayot that use nun-final verbs and see if Talmud changes them to mem-final, for things that take place only in the temple or during the temple period which ended in 70 CE.  The experts among you may have jumped directly to Tractate Yoma. (We who follow the Daf Yomi cycle just finished reading it.)

Mishnah Yoma 1:3 tells how the elders would take aside the kohen involved in the Yom Kippur service and read the service to him in case he was uneducated. The Gemara is daf 18a in Bavli. And in both places it uses qorin. And some of you said to yourselves, but the kohen didn’t do a Yom Kippur sacrifice after the temple was destroyed.

Having read that, others of you are saying, but we have a kohen duchan on Yom Kippur. He gives that hand sign before the ark. (The one that Leonard Nimoy used for his Vulcan sign of greeting.)

The verb in Talmud shows that priests were still involved in the Yom Kippur service. While the Mishnah admits that even when the temple stood, there could be uneducated priests, the Talmud endorses that. It’s a qal va-chomer or a fortiori argument: if when the full culture was up and running some priests might be uneducated, how much more so would this be true after the Hadrianic persecutions?

Mishnah Yoma 1:7 also has people reading to the priest from works that will keep him awake. This prevents him from becoming a baal qeri and having to go to the mikveh. This is on Yoma 18b in Talmud and once again, the nun-final form is preserved. Taharut applied even after the destruction of the temple; every Jewish community has a mikveh somewhere. I can’t tell you if anybody takes it on themselves to keep the kohen awake after Kol Nidre. What I can tell you is that some synagogues are miles from the closest mikveh and as Shabbat Shabbaton, Yom Kippur has the same driving restriction as Shabbat.

So there is another example of how ignoring the cultural and historical context could have led you down the garden path to a mistaken conclusion while you tried to prove I was wrong. Now I’ll get better results from you.

Oh yeah. Jerusalem Talmud has the same spellings on Yoma 6b and 7b.