Q&A: Gezerah Shavah and Hekesh
Gezerah Shavah and Hekesh
Question
What is the difference between them?
Answer
Both indicate a comparison between two halakhic contexts, but the trigger for the comparison is different. In a hekesh, the instruction to compare is given by placing the two contexts together in the same verse or in adjacent verses. In a gezerah shavah, the trigger is a similar word appearing in both contexts.
Discussion on Answer
Just as in modern Hebrew, so too among the Sages, sometimes the word “hekesh” is used to express a comparison and not necessarily the formal interpretive rule of hekesh. The Torah compares Rosh Hashanah to the Jubilee by means of a gezerah shavah.
That also can’t be right. Because the Talmud itself (toward the end of the first third of 34a) brings a baraita that, after presenting this hekesh, brings another gezerah shavah, and then the Talmud asks why the gezerah shavah is needed if we already have the hekesh. So you can see that here “hekesh” is being used specifically.
Indeed, but the first one really is not a gezerah shavah. The words “in the seventh month” stated regarding the Jubilee are superfluous, and they come to create a hekesh between them by virtue of that extra wording. This is not a gezerah shavah of “seventh”-“seventh,” which is what is brought later.
That’s what I had always thought, but yesterday I saw in the Talmud in Rosh Hashanah (34a) that it derives Rosh Hashanah from the Jubilee from the words “in the seventh month,” which appear both regarding Rosh Hashanah in Numbers (29:1) and regarding the Jubilee in Leviticus (25:9), and the Talmud says that this is a hekesh (and not a gezerah shavah), even though the verses are not adjacent at all.