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How heavy were the bowls the high priest carried in the Yom Kippur service?
I'm learning mishna Yoma, which describes the high priest's service on Yom Kippur, and I was struck by some of the logistical challenges. I am wondering, in particular, about the bowls of blood. The misha says that after the bull is slaughtered its blood is collected in a bowl, and likewise for the goat. The high priest will later carry these bowls of blood into the Holy of Holies where he sprinkles, and then carry them back out, and later the two bowls are combined.
According to the National Library of Medicine (US), during slaughter an animal loses about 40-60% of its blood. (Obviously for kosher slaughter salting and soaking will remove more, but I don't think that applies for offerings.) Some unscientific sources I found suggest that a (modern) cow has around 10 gallons of blood in it. That's about twice as much as a human, so that doesn't seem to be too high (it feels low but I have no personal experience). Blood is comparable to water when it comes to weight, about 8.5 pounds per gallon.
Did the high priest carry a bowl of blood weighing 40-50 pounds back and forth during the service? (Was the bowl more like a large bucket in shape?) Did a potential high priest have to have enough physical strength to do that? Or did they not drain everything into the bowl? Or did he take a more manageable amount from the bowl? (The mishna doesn't talk about those possibilities.) Or were bulls much smaller then? Or something else?
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