Chullin 90b sits in the middle of the laws of גיד הנשה, the sciatic nerve that Yaakov's injury made forbidden. There is an open question whether this nerve is burned along with the rest of the קרבן עולה, or whether it is removed to the תפוח, the ash mound at the center of the מזבח. We are told in the Mishnah in Tamid that the תפוח sometimes held up to 300 kor, an unbelievably large amount of ash. So the Gemara wanders into an interesting question: does the Tanakh sometimes speak in exaggeration rather than literally? And if the Torah does it, do Chazal do it too?
continuesresolvesdepends oncontrastssupports
The structure of Chullin 90. Rav Huna's olah ruling frames the daf (sections 2 and 3 of 90b); the lashon havai discussion is section 4. Click a section for its voices; ⤳ opens its connections elsewhere. From talmud.dev: 90a · 90b.
Rava in response says גוזמא, exaggeration. The pile was simply large. Rava then addresses the next part of the same Mishnah: the priests gave the קרבן תמיד water from a כוס של זהב before it was slaughtered. Again Rava says גוזמא. The Mishnah was trying to convey the grandeur of the Beit HaMikdash, not trying to give us an accurate overview of its wealth.
Rabbi Ami then widens the claim:
דברה תורה לשון הבאי, דברו נביאים לשון הבאי, דברו חכמים לשון הבאיThe Torah spoke in exaggerated language, the Nevi'im spoke in exaggerated language, the Sages spoke in exaggerated language.
An example from the Torah:
ערים גדלת ובצורת בשמים (דברים א:כח)
Cities great and fortified up to the heavens.
No wall reaches the sky.
An example from the Nevi'im, on the crowd at Shlomo's coronation:
ותבקע הארץ בקולם (מלכים א א:מ)
And the earth split at the sound of them.
The ground did not actually split; the noise was simply loud, and the pasuk is conveying this in a way that people will understand.
Shmuel, quoted by Rabbi Yitzchak bar Nachmani, counts three places where the Sages spoke this way, all descriptions of the Beit HaMikdash: the ash mound; the golden vine at the entrance to the היכל, which donors added leaves and clusters to until 300 priests were needed to move it; and the פרוכת, woven from 82 myriads (820,000 of what is disputed: dinars, threads, or the girls who wove it) and immersed by 300 priests. There is a pattern in what Shmuel brings up: three hundred kor, three hundred priests, three hundred priests. The number is rhetoric, not measurement.
And this is a מחלוקת. Shmuel's list is pointedly three, not four: he leaves out the כוס של זהב that Rava called גוזמא. The parallel Gemara in Tamid 29a makes the reason explicit: אין עניות במקום עשירות, there is no poverty in a place of wealth. The Mikdash really did use gold for mundane things, so for Shmuel the cup is literal.
So whether any given description is exaggeration is itself argued: Rava reads the cup as גוזמא, Shmuel reads it as fact. What no one on the daf disputes is the category:
There is room within the Masora to say a pasuk or a mishnah is speaking in לשון הבאי, and Chazal said so themselves.
The same tradition that defines legal quantities down to a kezayit describes the Beit HaMikdash in impossible numbers, and there is room to debate which is which. When the Torah describes cities fortified to the heavens, it is not reporting their height. It is conveying how they looked to the people standing in front of them, and Chazal understood it that way.
Sources:חולין צ: · תמיד כט. · משנה תמיד ב:ב, ג:ד · משנה מדות ג:ח · משנה שקלים ח:ה · דברים א:כח · מלכים א א:מ