Study Yoma folio 80A with parallel Hebrew-English text, traditional commentary, and modern study tools. Free access to Babylonian Talmud online.
All the measures in the Torah connected to eating are the volume of an olive-bulk, except for the amount of food that renders objects impure, because the verse changed its expression in this case, and the rabbis altered the measure accordingly. The proof of this, that the rabbis gave it a different
The Talmud asks: And what does the baraita mean when it says: A proof for this is from Yom Kippur? Why is the verse pertaining to ritual impurity not sufficient to show that the rabbis changed the measure based on the different words in the verse? The Talmud answers: If we learned it only from ther
§ The Talmud asks: From where do we derive that the measure for impure foods is the volume of an egg-bulk? R' Abbahu said that R' Elazar said that the verse states: “Of all food [okhel] which may be eaten [ye’akhel], on which water comes shall be ritually impure” (Leviticus 11:34). The double usage
The Talmud asks: Even if we claim that the measure for impure foods is an egg-bulk, one could say it is referring to the giant egg-bulk of the bird called bar yokhani. The Talmud answers: If you grasped many, you did not grasp anything; if you grasped few, you grasped something. This means that in
R' Abbahu himself said: The verse states: “Of all food which may be eaten.” This is referring to food that you can eat at one time. The rabbis estimated: The esophagus cannot hold more than the volume of a chicken’s egg, and therefore this is the measure used for the ritual impurity of foods.