The only one who got to drink the wine was the Mizbeyach. Wine libations were poured into a receptacle at the southwestern corner and from there the wine went through a pipe in the Mizbeyach and down into the Shissin, a large cavity under the ground. There is a dispute in the Gemara whether the Shissin went all the way down to the tehom (the subterranean depths) or whether it was a cavity of fixed size.
According to the latter opinion, every so often the Kohanim would have to go down and clear out the congealed wine to make room for more. In order to estimate just how big the Shissin was, we need to calculate how much wine was poured into it. The numbers presented above are a good start, but they are a literal drop in the bucket compared to the amount of wine libations generated by the private offerings brought on each holiday.
**Anyone who would like to find out more about nesachim and other details of the offerings should definitely look at the online Korbanos Spreadsheet prepared by R' Naftoli Willner. It is a great resource!
By Torah law, every Jewish man must offer two sacrifices (an olah and a shelamim) when he arrives at the Beis Hamikdash on each of the three Festivals (Pesach, Shavuos, and Succos). Each of these offerings is also accompanied by a wine libation of 3 lugin per sheep, 4 lugin per ram, or 6 lugin per bull. Depending on how many people arrive on a given Festival, and how many bring bulls, rams, or sheep, we could end up with hundreds of thousands of liters of wine. I'll let the Javascript walk you through the math rather than explaining it here. On the form below feel free to adjust the numbers to whatever you think is realistic (or not) and see how much wine libation you can generate!
For comparison, an olympic swimming pool (50x25 meters and 3 meters deep) holds 3.75 million liters of water.
For comparison, an olympic swimming pool (50x25 meters and 3 meters deep) holds 3.75 million liters of water.
This form only calculates one offering per person, but we should multiply the answer by two because each person actually brought two animals, as mentioned above. We should further multiply the final answer by three to figure a yearly amount of wine that went down into the Shissin after all three Festivals had passed.
Over time, the water content of the wine will evaporate and all that will be left is the wine solids. One of the more important factors in how quickly a body of liquid will evaporate is the surface area. A long, wide swimming pool has a large surface area compared to its volume and will evaporate faster than the same volume of liquid stored in a tall, skinny container like a water tower. In order to promote evaporation the Shissin was likely shaped more like a swimming pool — the longer and wider the better! In theory, space was no issue because all of this was hewn deep out of the bedrock beneath the Beis Hamikdash and it would not interfere with any of the other parts of the structure. In fact, there are currently a number of cisterns located on Har Habayis, including one called The Great Sea that is estimated to hold 2 million gallons of water.
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