Avodah Zarah 9b (ט:) — the Talmud in English

The verse [Numbers 35:

“forty-eight cities.”

And if the scribe errs,

a scribe who writes bills of divorce and other documents and errs, not knowing which year he is in,

let him ask the tanna how many years he counts

let him ask the tanna which year it is according to his reckoning of the years since the destruction,

and subtract from them

and subtract from the reckoning

forty

and eight, and he will find its remainder.

And your mnemonic is:

so that the tanna will not subtract and the scribe will not add, retain this sign,

the scribe subtracts

the scribe reduces

the tanna adds

the tanna increases, as explained.

The following calculation applies to one who knows which year he is in after the destruction of the Temple, but wishes to calculate when the shemita year will occur. For it is established for us that shemita is observed nowadays, whether by Torah law or by rabbinic enactment.

The Second Temple was destroyed at the conclusion of a shemita year, that is, in the first year of the count of a cycle of seven shemita years. And the year preceding the destruction was a shemita year.

The tanna who counts according to the destruction of the Temple does not count the year of the destruction as the first year in the count of the years since the destruction, because for most of that year the Temple was still standing. Rather, he begins his count with the year following it [the Temple was destroyed in the year 3828 from the creation of the world, and the tanna’s count of the years since the destruction of the Temple begins with the year 3829 from the creation of the world].

The Sages and Rabbi Yehuda disagreed concerning the count of the shemita years.

The Sages maintain that after forty-nine years, during which there are seven shemita years, the fiftieth year arrives and is the Jubilee year, and in the following year they begin counting the first year of the next shemita cycle.

But Rabbi Yehuda maintains that the fiftieth year “counts for both,” meaning that the Jubilee year is the first year in the count of the subsequent shemita cycle.

Now, once the tanna knows the number of years after the destruction of the Temple, he can calculate when the shemita year will occur.

For example, if he is now in the three-hundred-twentieth year after the destruction of the Temple, he adds one year—the year of the destruction—to his reckoning [as explained, that year was the beginning of a new count of the shemita years], and he has three hundred and twenty-one years.

According to Rabbi Yehuda, in every hundred years there are fourteen shemita years [14 multiplied by 7 equals 98], leaving two additional years.

And in three hundred years there are six additional years.

Add these six years to the twenty-one, and the result is twenty-seven—

Divide twenty-seven by seven, and you obtain three, with a remainder of six.

Thus, he knows that six years before the year in which he is now, there was a shemita year, and the same will be true one year from now.

Rav Huna, son of Rav Yehoshua, said: As for one who

knows the number of his years according to the count of the years since the destruction, but

does not know in which year of the cycle he is,

which year of the shemita cycle he is in,

he should calculate as follows:

Let him add one year,

he should add one year to his reckoning, namely the year of the destruction, which is not included in his count. That year—the year of the destruction—was the first year in the count of the next shemita cycle.

And let him count the hundreds as Jubilees and the remainder as cycles of seven.

That is, in every hundred years there are two Jubilees and fourteen shemita years,

and remove two from each hundred,

and from every hundred years he should remove two years, as explained,

and cast them

he should add all these additional years [two for each hundred] to his reckoning—that is, to the number he has beyond the hundreds,

and count them as individual years,

and reckon the additional years he has together with the “remainders” of the hundreds—

and he will know

then he will know

how many years of the cycle,

which year of the seven-year shemita cycle he is in.

And your mnemonic is,

this sign will be in his possession, in the language of the verse (Genesis 45:

“For these two years the famine has been.”

That is, from every hundred he should remove an excess of two years.

Rabbi Ḥanina said: After four hundred years from the destruction of the Temple, if a person says to you: Buy

purchase

a field

that is

worth one thousand dinars for one dinar!—

do not buy it!

Because this year is the end of the redemption, and you will gather to the Holy Mountain, to the inheritance of your forefathers; why should you lose the dinar?

In the baraita

in the beraita

the tanna

teaches in a somewhat different version:

After four thousand two hundred and thirty-one years from the creation of the world

5 , if a person says to you: “Buy for yourself a field worth one thousand dinars for one dinar” -

Do not buy it!

What is the difference between them?

What is the difference between the beraita and Rabbi Ḥanina’s statement?

There are three years between them,

there are three years between them,

as the baraita adds

the beraita adds

three years

three years.

After we learned that scribes of documents write their dates according to the reckoning of the Greek kingdom, the Gemara relates an incident from which it is learned that the date in documents is written according to the general regnal year of the Greek kingdom, which began six years after the beginning of the Greek kingdom and its conquest of Elam, which belonged to Persia.

There was a certain document in which it was written

that the date [the “date”] written in it was,