In the last Mishnah, we spoke about how a Kohen (priest) who is getting married has to look into the female lineage of his potential wife to make sure there is no problem and that she is qualified to marry a Kohen. He also has to look into her ancestors for a certain number of generations. We’ll elaborate on that halakha (Jewish law). You don’t need to check a person’s eligibility if you see that the person was a Kohen who brought an olah (burnt offering) on the Mizbeach (altar).
In other words, in the last Mishnah, we went through different forms of a woman’s ancestors that they have to look into to make sure she’s qualified to marry a Kohen. If you look back one generation, all of a sudden, down one branch of that tree, you see that there was a man who worked on the Mizbeach. He was a Kohen. He was a high-level Kohen, and he worked in the Bet HaMikdash. You don’t need to continue looking down that branch past him because the work was sort of done for you. The Sanhedrin would not allow a Kohen who had an improper lineage to work in the Bet HaMikdash. So it must have been that the investigation had already been done for him—we can make that assumption—and therefore you don’t need to keep looking back at that kind of ancestor.
We said that there are four different branches you have to go down when a Kohen is a Kohen. The Sanhedrin marries another Kohenet (female priest), for example. So if he’s marrying a Kohenet and all of a sudden we find out that her father worked in the Bet HaMikdash, we don’t need to look beyond that father on that branch of the tree because he must have been proper in order to work in the Bet HaMikdash. And we’ll have that same idea with other jobs. Or if you find a Levi (Levite) on that family tree who sang on the duchan (platform) in the Bet HaMikdash, you don’t need to keep looking back at that kind of ancestor. You don’t need to keep going higher up on that branch of the family tree. Or if you have a judge who worked in the Sanhedrin, you don’t need to keep going higher up in that part of the family tree because it was definite that there was no disqualification for that type of person. You could marry the daughters of anybody whose ancestors were known to be public officials, judges of monetary law in Yerushalayim, and also charity collectors, without looking past that part of the family tree. There’s no need to check their ancestors because they would only allow people who were of valid lineage to do those jobs. Rabbi Yosei also says that anybody who signed in the archives of the court of the town of Yeshana, which is near Tzippori, doesn’t have to look into their ancestors past them. They must have been checked already because they only allowed people with no disqualification to serve as an ed (witness) in that Bet Din (court).
Rabbi Hanina ben Antigonos says that even somebody who is a soldier in David HaMelech’s army doesn’t need to look into their ancestry past them. If they’re checked off, you don’t need to keep going down that branch. You could continue down to the next ancestor because their lineage must already have been checked, since David HaMelech only took people of qualified lineage in order to have Hashem with them in war. So the work was done, and you don’t need to look into that person anymore.