Gris (Bechoros 34)

Today, we're gonna talk about a unit of measurement that appears in the Daf, uh, called a gris.

A gris, when I went to Yeshiva, was understood to be approximately the diameter of a dime, that is about two centimeters, or for Americans, about three-quarters of an inch.

Uh, the derivation of this measurement comes from the fava bean, uh, which grew widely in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, and of course, today is cultivated all over the world.

Uh, here's a photograph of a fava bean plant, so in case you see one of these in the wild, it grows these pods, and when you open up the pods like this, you see that there are, uh, s- four or five fava beans inside the pod.

Now, the problem that, uh, may occur to you immediately is, well, hey, does-- wait a second.

How do you standardize these sizes so precisely? And in fact, that's a very serious problem.

Look at this photograph here that shows three different fava beans with very different sizes.

And when you go to, you know, different stages of development and different parts of the world and slightly different species and so on, it can be a huge problem.

Here, speaking of huge fava beans, have a look at this picture that shows several fava beans around a quarter, and they all dwarf the American coin here, which, you know, uh, can lead to sig-significant problems, especially when we get to Masechtah Nida later on in Shas, where the size of a gris can have huge implications.

So why did they use such a non-standardized, uh, unit of measurements in the ancient world? The reason is really implicit in the fact that in the pre-industrial world, there were no standardized measurements that were readily available in an agrarian society.

You know, people like builders and things like that that needed a standardized amah had to have a much more accurate, uh, you know, definition of these terms.

But for most farmers, you know, they had to work with the so-called rule of thumb, which is also one of these, uh, proverbial, uh, just non-standardized measurements.

Um, we know that there are many different size human thumbs, adult human thumbs, but we certainly know when one is abnormally small or abnormally large.

So too, when the ancients were speaking about measurements like a gris, they had a rough idea of what size that would be, and if they had any doubts as to the disposition of the Halakhic implication, of course, they would have to go ask a, uh, a sage for some Halakhic determination.