[MUSIC] Years of police procedural television and Law and Order have given everyone in our society a sense of trials, testimony and the rules of evidence in American courts. In order to think about testimony and false testimony in the Talmud though, we need to reorient ourselves to the ancient world. The chapter of Talmud we'll be exploring in this course deals with the laws of false testimony. Before we take a look at what Rabbinic literature has to say about this topic though, we're first going to look at how this topic was presented in some of the literature that preceded the Talmud. This is important both because it provides some cultural context about testimony for the Rabbis and because the Rabbis treat the literature that preceded their own as the foundation for their own ideas. We'll start with the earliest treatment of false testimony in the Jewish legal corpus, the text about false testimony found in biblical law. Because much of Rabbinic law is aimed at filling gaps and explaining ambiguities in biblical texts, we'll spend time pointing out what's not entirely clear about the biblical laws of false testimony. Deuteronomy, Chapter 19 provides a set of laws regarding court testimony. The Hebrew word for the giving of testimony is eduth which is how I'll be referring to it for the rest of this video. The first rule about eduth is that at least two witnesses are required for valid testimony. Deuteronomy 19 verse 15, a single witness may not validate against a person any guilt or blame for any offense that may be committed. A case can be valid only on the testimony of two witnesses or more. This is important background for the Eabbinic laws we will be studying later. Deuteronomy then proceeds to explain the consequences of a case in which a witness is found to be lying, which is the central topic of this course. Deuteronomy 19:16, if a man appears against another to testify maliciously and gives false testimony against him. The initial statement of the law is already problematic. The law imagines one witness who testifies falsely against another person. The Hebrew text unambiguously uses singular nouns and one singular verb, but didn't Deuteronomy just say that at least two people are required for valid testimony? Are there two witnesses here or just one? Deuteronomy 19 verses 17 through 18, the two parties to the dispute shall appear before the Lord, before the priests or magistrates in authority at the time, and the magistrates shall make a thorough investigation. In this part of the law, Deuteronomy tells the reader how to find out if a person is a false witness. How clear is the law about this issue? Let's imagine how this would play out. Let's say, for example, that Jill accused Kate of stealing her neighbor's sheep and eating it. What would happen next? The two of them go before the priests or judges who are in charge, which the verse seems to say are somehow invested with divine authority. Presumably, this is the start of a normal legal procedure for the Bible. If Jill's accusation was determined to be true, the judges would punish Kate accordingly. But what if Jill is lying? The Torah says that the judges are supposed to make a thorough investigation in order to find out if this is the case. What does this investigation look like? Who performs it? At what point in the legal process does it happen? Deuteronomy doesn't say. Deuteronomy is very clear though about what happens if the witness is, in fact, found to be lying. Deuteronomy 19:18-19, if the man who testified is a false witness, if he has testified falsely against his fellow, you shall do to him as he schemed to do to his fellow. According to biblical law, the punishment given to a false witness is the appropriate punishment for whatever it was he or she accused the defendant of doing. Remember that Jill had accused Kate of stealing a sheep and eating it? The punishment the bible mandates for stealing a sheep and eating it is a four fold restitution, paying back four sheep. If Jill's testimony had been accepted, Kate would have had to pay four sheep, but instead the court discovers that Jill is actually lying, because she has it in for Kate and wants to see her lose some livestock. According to the final statement of the law in Deuteronomy, you shall do to him as he schemed to do to his fellow, Jill's punishment is that now she has to pay four sheep. The biblical Hebrew word for schemed, as in as he schemed to do to his fellow Is zamam. The Rabbis use a form of this word to refer to witnesses that have been proven false. They call them Edim Zomemim. We will be using this phrase throughout the course to refer to the Rabbinic legal category of false witnesses. Although we will be teaching the text in translation, we will be using some Hebrew words and phrases, both so that you can learn them for future reference and because sometimes a direct translation can lose out on important cultural context. There is something strange about the Torah's use of the word schemed in this verse though. You shall do to him as he schemed to do to his fellow. It makes it sound like the witnesses only schemed to do something but they haven't actually accomplished it yet. Does that mean that the laws of Eidim Zomemim apply only when the witnesses attempted to get their victim punished but didn't actually succeed? As we'll see later on, this is how the Rabbis sometimes understood it. The passage in Deuteronomy closes with the following statement: Deuteronomy 19:19-21, thus you will sweep out evil from your midst. Others will hear and be afraid, and such evil things will not again be done in your midst. Nor must you show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. From a stylistic perspective, these lines make perfect sense. Thus you'll sweep out evil from your midst is a statement that appears very frequently in Deuteronomy. And the well known statement life for life, eye for eye, is a phrase that also appears in Exodus and Leviticus. Since Deuteronomy frequently recapitulates material from earlier in the Torah, this too makes sense. But on a conceptual level, these statements raise questions. First, let's go back to that line, thus you will sweep out evil from your midst. The rhetoric of sweeping out evil suggests a punishment that obliterates the problem. If the punishment for an Edim Zomemim is whatever punishment she tried to get for the accused, then this statement could imply that the law only deals with cases when there was an attempt to get someone convicted for a capital case. Fining someone a lot of sheep does not quite correspond to sweeping out evil from your midst. That's the first conceptual challenge prompted by the verses. The second challenge comes from the other part of the closing verse, the part that read life for life, eye for eye. Deuteronomy makes it sound as though the punishment for Edim Zomemim is measure for measure. But actually, it's a pretty harsh punishment for someone who only intended to do a crime but hasn't successfully carried it out. This potentially troublesome feature of the biblical law is one that we'll return to in the Rabbinic treatment of this material. We've now seen the biblical laws about false testimony, which are very clear about the punishment for the false witness. She should receive whatever punishment the person she falsely accused would've received for her alleged crime. We have also noted though that the biblical scenario also leaves some gaps. Can one person be tried as a false witness? Or are two corroborating witnesses necessary? How do you find out if someone is a false witness? Who exactly is responsible for making that investigation? Does the law really punish someone for a crime he tried or seemed to commit but never successfully carried out? Other readers of the Bible, including the Rabbis of the Talmud, shared many of these questions. As we progress through the course, we'll discover some of their attempts to answer them. [MUSIC]
