Unexpected Insights: Ovens Then and Now and Their Talmudic Significance

Our ovens today are straightforward: an electric heating element, racks, a removable tray, and we just turn the knob. But back in the day? The oven had an open flame inside. No turbo or grill here. So, how did they bake in such ovens?

In truth, there were various types of baking and cooking contraptions, like the kupach and kirah, but we're talking about the oven. That was where baking happened.

The Talmud describes "sticking bread to the oven." What does that mean?

The oven looked like a small clay tent, with a large opening on the side where wood was fed in to light a fire, but the wood lay at the bottom. On the inside walls, they could "stick" a lump of dough, which would bake and turn into bread.

Such an oven couldn't be set up inside the house, both because the house was small and because it produced a lot of smoke. The ovens stood in the courtyard. Hence, when Choni the circle-maker promised rain, he instructed the people of Jerusalem: "Go and bring in the Passover ovens"—there was a special oven for roasting the Passover offering, one that wasn't used for leaven throughout the year. But in the winter, it had to be pushed inside, as the clay was damaged by rain.

One of the famous incidents in the Talmud is the Oven of Achnai. The sages were meticulous about eating non-sacrificial food in purity, and certainly, if one wants to eat terumah, it must be done in purity. But in the courtyard, there were creeping creatures, or people not mindful of purity, and the oven could easily become impure. Since it's a clay vessel, it can't be purified. What's the solution?

Achnai was clever, he cut his oven into sections, much like a jigsaw puzzle, and placed sand between each section. He essentially nullified it from the status of a vessel by placing sand between the layers. Does that make the oven pure?

There was a disagreement between Rabbi Eliezer the Great and the sages of Yavneh. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus believed the oven became pure and considered it as earthen. However, the sages, led by Rabban Gamliel, who was Rabbi Eliezer's brother-in-law, believed the oven did not become pure.

"On that day Rabbi Eliezer gave all the answers in the world," the Talmud recounts, but most sages didn't accept his answers. Rabbi Eliezer even performed extraordinary wonders, but even those the sages did not accept. "It is not in heaven," declared Rabban Gamliel, and all the sages of the assembly concurred, including Rabbi Eliezer's notable disciples like Rabbi Akiva!

Rabbi Eliezer remained ostracized, and the Oven of Achnai is remembered through the ages as the subject of this significant dispute in Jewish history. From it, we learned how Rabbi Eliezer never gave up on his truth, and likewise, how the sages adhered to the necessity of following the majority and heeding the court's decision.