And the ox goes before19 them with its horns covered in gold and an olive wreath on its head. The flute [ḥālil] plays before them until they reach near Jerusalem.
When they reached near Jerusalem, they sent out [messengers] ahead of them and wreathed their first fruits.20
(3:4) The officers, chiefs, and treasurers [of the Temple] go out to greet them, and they used to go in accordance with the status of those entering. And all the artisans in Jerusalem rise before [those entering] and greet them, “Our brothers from such-and-such place, you have come in peace.”
(3:5) The flute plays before them until they reach the Temple Mount. When they reached the Temple Mount, even King Agrippa takes the basket on his shoulder and enters. [And the pilgrim continues] until he reaches the Temple courtyard. When he reached the Temple courtyard, the Levites joined in song, “I will exalt You, Lord, for You have raised me up and not allowed my enemies to rejoice over me” (Ps. 30:1).
The pigeons that were on top of the baskets were offered as burnt offerings, and those that were in their hands were given to the priests.
(3:6) While the basket was still on his shoulder, he recites from “I proclaim today to the Lord your God …” (Deut. 26:3) until he completes the entire passage [to Deut. 26:11, or perhaps to the end of the prescribed recitation, mid-26:10].
Rabbi Yehudah [Judah] says: Until “My father was a wandering Aramean” [Deut. 26:5, or perhaps to earlier in the biblical text, until the end of the prescribed recitation in 26:3].
When he reached “My father was a wandering Aramean,” he takes the basket down from his shoulder, grasps it by its lip, and the priest places his hands beneath [the Israelite’s hands]. And he ritually waves them and recites from “My father was a wandering Aramean …” until he finishes the entire passage. And he places it down at the side of the altar, and he bowed and exited.
(3:7) Originally anyone who knew how to recite [in Hebrew] would recite, and anyone who did not know how to recite would be prompted with the words [in Hebrew]. They stopped bringing [first fruits], and they decreed that they should prompt with the words both the one who knows and the one who does not.
(3:8) The wealthy bring their first fruits in silver and gold baskets [ḳĕlātōt], and the poor bring them in wicker baskets [sallei nĕtsārim] made from peeled willow. And the baskets [sallim] and the first fruits were given to the priests.
In the way it is presented, this passage recounts in a detailed manner how, in Temple times, the people of a district would gather together, bring their fruits to Jerusalem, and offer them in the Temple.
A puzzling feature of this and similar narratives, one with which any interpreter of these passages must grapple, is the way that verbs of different tenses are used at the same time. In the opening paragraph, for instance, 3:2, there are five verbs: three are participles—which can function as the present tense and are translated as such here (bring up, gather, sleep)—and two are in a compound tense typically called the “iterative past,” which describes an action done repeatedly and regularly in the past (“used to enter,” “used to say”). Later in the narrative, the perfect tense, which seems to function as a simple past, appears as well (“reached,” “wreathed” [3:3]; “bowed,” “exited” [3:6]). As Yochanan Breuer points out in his seminal article on the tense usage in this type of mishnaic narrative, two fundamental questions are: Why are multiple tenses used? And why are they mixed together in a seemingly arbitrary fashion?21 Breuer attempts to read the passages so that the tenses are not mixed arbitrarily; yet I prefer Albeck’s earlier understanding that the tenses vary somewhat arbitrarily. I believe that this mixing was deemed acceptable and natural. In fact, the extensive mixing of the three different tenses, unique to this type of passage, blends the subtle nuances of each tense, giving the sense that these events took place in the past and that they took place regularly, adding a feeling of immanence, and implying that what took place was the law, in an abstract sense.22
The most significant nuance of the combined use of tenses is the implication of the iterative past, the tense that compounds verbs such as “was” (“to be,” perfect tense) plus “saying” (participle) and which means, in this case, “used to say,” that is, would say every year when the ritual was performed (Bikkurim 3:2). Especially when taken together with the perfect verbs, this usage implies that all the actions described in the narrative took place in the past and that they took place repeatedly and regularly. The participles, too, though they do not have any inherent implication of the past, may take on the meaning of the iterative past. According to the mishnaic grammarian Mordechay Mishor, the participle, particularly when used in a passage together with the iterative past, may be equivalent to it, implying that the events took place regularly in the past.23 Thus, the opening paragraph of the first-fruits narrative, Bikkurim 3:2, could be translated: “How did they used to bring up the first fruits? All the towns in the district used to gather in the main town of the district and used to sleep in the town square. And they did not used to enter the houses. And to those who arose early, the appointed one used to say, ‘Arise, and let us go up to the Lord our God’” (Jer. 31:6).
Alternatively, the participle, as historical present tense, may be used to give a sense of immanence to the narrative, to make it easier to imagine the events happening, or to give a sense that these events are timeless.24 The participle is used most often in the Mishnah as modal, saying what ought to be done; so these verbs could be intended to convey the law. In context, these are not simply hypothetical laws; so, as I and others have suggested, the ambiguity of the participle adds that these events that happened in the past are also what the law is, what ought to be done in the Temple.25 Overall, the shifting between tenses seems to give multiple shadings to the narrative as a whole: that the ritual occurred regularly and repeatedly in the past; that it is timeless; and that it should or must be performed in a certain way. It may even make the telling more engaging.
Regardless of the precise way that one interprets the mixing of tenses, it is undeniable that the passage refers to events of the past. The rabbinic authors, living long after the destruction, are consciously looking back and saying what used to occur in the Temple in the past. In addition to looking back at the past through the combined use of verbs, four more elements tend to mark Temple ritual narratives as distinct from the rest of the Mishnah and link them to one another into a unique body of mishnaic material.26 These are: 1) their content—rituals done in the past in the Temple or near the Temple, or in the Court; 2) their form—narratives (according to some definitions of the term) describing a series of interconnected actions that together form a whole; 3) recurring conventional phrases or plot elements; and 4) in many cases, the use of an introductory formula that introduces the narrative and contains the word כיצד (kēitsad, “how so?”). The first of these characteristics is relatively obvious. The first-fruits narrative—like the narratives about the Passover offering or the daily sacrifice in the Temple, the narrative about the Day of Atonement ritual, and the narrative about the cutting and offering of the barley grain ‘ōmer—focuses on the details of a particular ritual that once took place in the Temple.27
The second feature, the narrative nature of the passages, is less obvious and somewhat controversial. Some would hesitate to call these texts narratives because, by their very nature, they are not about specific one-time occurrences that happened to particular individuals, and so cause and effect play almost no role. The characters are relatively flat because, for the most part, they are generic roles such as Israelite, Temple officials, and priest. Yet, as Moshe Simon-Shoshan has forcefully argued, though these may differ from some types of narratives in that they lack what he calls “specificity,” they do have a second fundamental feature of narrative, what he calls “dynamism.” Having dynamism, in his view, means that they describe “transition, transformation, and change … rather than stasis.”28 Many narrative theorists break down this feature of narrative even further, to a more fundamental level. As H. Porter Abbott writes: “Simply put, narrative