Kiddushin 78: Priests Who Behave "Badly"

We are zeroing in on priests who marry or betroth or have intercourse with women who are not allowed to them.  These women might be widows, as suggested in the Torah.   They might be chalalot, or mamzerot, chalutzot, or other women who are forbidden to priests by rabbinic law.  Our daf begins, though, with a woman who is forbidden to a priest because of her relation to that priest.  What if a priest has intercourse with his sister?  The rabbis ask the next logical questions: which transgressions have been committed?  Does the first transgression cancel out the second and so there is only one consequence?  How do we determine which transgression came first?  If there are two or more consequences, what are they and how are they meted out?  

The Gemara offers us a number of different opinions.  The rabbis look to proof texts, some from Ezekiel and some from the Torah, to help them understand which transgression is punishable by which consequences.  They consider which statuses would apply to the offspring of different possible unions.  The rabbis even consider the case of a convert who is under/over the age of three years and a day.  Notable is an assertion we learned repeatedly in Ketubot: a girl's hymen will not fully develop until the age of three (and thus any previous sexual interference might not affect her status).  This erroneous understanding of anatomy continues to be upsetting to read, even when the writing is brief.

A new Mishna teaches us that when a man says that his child is a mamzer, he is not deemed credible. Even when both the father and the mother together say that the child is a mamzer, they are not deemed credible.  Rabbi Yehuda disagrees.

The Gemara questions whether or not a fetus can have an unflawed lineage.  They also wonder whether or not a person can own something that has not yet come into the world.  

Part of today's daf asks about the likelihood that a woman might become pregnant if a man does not complete the act with her.  They discuss the idea of "a drop of semen" and the power that that drop of semen might hold.  The notion of one's status being irreparably damaged by one drop of semen seems to lend itself to a larger truth.  That is, if parental status can be this difficult to determine, perhaps we are meant to interpret these worlds completely differently.  Perhaps we are meant to say that because the status of so many people is indeterminable, we are all priests and we are all levites and we are all israelites.  Perhaps the Temple was meant to be destroyed so that we would be forced to collapse these systems of hierarchy.  Alas...