Zevachim 54: Bird Offerings, Made for Poured Blood, Building the Corners of the Altar, Guilt Offering Details

We open today's daf with a description, in gruesome detail, of the bird offering's sacrifice and how its blood is poured on the curtains of the altar.  After a short description of the southern side of the altar and what it means to have no base, the Gemara turns to descriptions of building the altar.

The rabbis go to some length to interpret the altar as being a place that is sanctified for blood.  Words like "consume" must mean that blood will be consumed in that place.   Wooden structures are built to the sizes dictated and then they are filled with mixtures of damp stones of different sizes, plaster, molten lead and tar.  Each corner of the altar is constructed in this manner.  

In some places, Zacharia teaches that the corners of the altar should be hollow.  This might be achieved by placing twigs, etc., that can be removed after the cement mixture has been set.  In this way one might achieve a hollowed out corner.  The Gemara then discusses where the altar should be built if it is higher than any other point in Jerusalem and Jerusalem is the highest point in Israel.

A new Mishna teaches us about communal peace offerings and guilt offerings.  Guilt offerings include punishments for:

• robbery, which are brought by a person who owes payment of a debt but denied it and swore a false oath;
• accidental misuse of consecrated property;
• the person who had intercourse with a Canaanite maidservant betrothed to a Hebrew slave;
• a nazarite who became impure through contact with a corpse;
• a leper who brought a guilt offering for his purification;
• a provisional guilt offering brought because of uncertainty whether one committed a sin that requires a sin offering

In all of these guilt offerings, slaughter happens in the north of the Temple courtyard.  Their blood is collected in a service vessel in the north.  Their blood requires two placements that are four.  The meat offerings are eaten within the curtains in the Temple courtyard as facilitated by male priests.  Offerings can be prepared in any way and must be consumed on the day that the offering was sacrificed up until midnight.