|
The first part of perek 9 also begins with the thread of "things that needed to be recited in Hebrew", and then proceeds into a full exposition of the somewhat unfamiliar "Egla Arufa" ritual described in D'varim 21: 1 - 9. (I'd definitely recommend looking at the text in D'varim before studying these Mishnayot.) It seems that the two main objectives of the Egla Arufa ritual are:
(1) to raise awareness about the mysterious murder in the hope that the culprit might be identified
(2) to "make some noise" about the murder, in the hope of preventing violence from becoming something banal, something simply accepted by the populace as "bad stuff that happens".
Mishna 2 features the rabbis' strong inclination to limit the frequency with which the ceremony takes place, presumably because a ceremony intended to gain public attention and to arouse passion through an act of unusual violence (against the heifer) will lose its efficacy with too much regularity and repetition. Mishna 9 makes this point in a post-facto way.
It's important to note that the debates in Mishnayot 3 and 4 are taking place a generation after the Egla Arufa ceremony stopped being performed. This contributes to the sense that these debates are also about larger questions, such as "What makes a person, a person"? or 'Where in the body is life centered?"
Mishna 6 has always left me wondering whether the elders are implicitly admitting that they ought to have known about this traveler, and ought to have taken measures to ensure his safety. What do you think?
Mishnayot 7 and 8 are about how we define the Torah's condition for the ceremony, i.e. that "it is now known [who killed him]". The Mishna probes what level of knowledge - or at least assertions of knowledge - would remove the case from the Torah's parameters.
| 
