We’ll record two different testimonies in this Mishnah. The Mishnah says that Rebbe Akiva testified in the name of Rebbe Nechemiah, who was the leader of a place called Beit Deli, that if a woman’s husband went overseas and died there, and we have only one witness telling us that her husband died, we allow the woman to remarry, even though generally we need two witnesses. Anytime we have a davar she'be'ervah (a matter of sexual status), we need two witnesses to tell us what happened. But here, in order to ensure that this woman could remarry, the rabbi said that one witness is enough, and she won’t be trapped for the rest of her life.
The second testimony is about possible corpse tum'ah (ritual impurity) in the Beit HaMikdash. Rebbe Yehoshua gave testimony about bones—human bones—that were found in the wood storage area of the Beit HaMikdash. The rabbi said that all you have to do is collect the bones found there. You don’t need to do a very intensive, thorough search of the entire Yerushalayim (Jerusalem). There were rabbis who wanted to declare that the entire city of Jerusalem should be tum'ah, that maybe there were other corpses, other bodies underneath Yerushalayim. Rebbe Yehoshua stood up, got very upset, and said, “How can we do this? Isn’t it an embarrassment for us to make a decree about the entire city of Yerushalayim and say that it’s all impure, that there are bodies under there? It’s an embarrassment.” We have to assume that when the rabbis came and prepared Jerusalem and prepared the Beit HaMikdash, they took care of all the bodies that were there previously, and that the entire city of Yerushalayim is considered to be pure. Also, the Mishnah continues: Anything that was found in the woodshed before the bones were removed, we assume was pure, because we have a doubt. We don’t know when these bones arrived. These tamei (impure) bones arrived. So whenever we have a doubt about tum'ah in the Reshut HaRabim (public domain), which includes the wood area—the wood storage area in the Beit HaMikdash—we treat it leniently and say, “You know what? Until we found the bones, maybe they weren’t there until that day.” So anything that came before then is considered to be pure. Anything afterwards is when you get into a problematic situation. But this helped out because, for all the previous wood that was used, we make the assumption that it was pure.