Mishnah Dalet (four) will now talk about the students who sat in front of the judges. The Mishnah says: There were three rows of Torah scholar students who would sit in front of them. There were 23 of these students in each row—23 students in each row. They were there on reserves in case more judges were needed. As we said earlier, when dealing with certain types of cases, if they didn’t come to a real majority, they would keep adding judges to the Bet Din (court) in order to come to a majority or a super majority.
Every one of these students would recognize his place in a specific order. That means the three rows weren’t just random seating; every one of them had a designated spot. The students in the first row were the highest level, those in the second row were the second level, and those in the third row were the third level. Even within the rows, those toward the end of the row were wiser. So it all went in order. The rankings of one to all the way to 69 of how wise these students were. The top student was at the head of the row, and the lowest-ranking student of that row was at the end of the row.
If they needed to make one of the students a judge and add him to the court—for example, if one of the judges died and they needed to add somebody—they would make the student from the first row a judge. He was the one closest to them and the wisest of the students. They would have him join the semicircle. Then each of the 22 students remaining in the first row would move up one place, to the next seat in the row. The man who was in the second seat would now move up to the first seat, and so on and so forth.
The same thing would happen with the second row. One of the students in the second row, the top student of that row, would move up to the first row and become the last student in the first row. Then everyone would also take one seat forward, and the last seat in the second row would now be empty. One of the wisest students from the third row would move up to that empty spot in the second row, the last spot of the second row. Each of the 22 remaining students in the third row would move up one seat, and then the last seat, the 69th seat, would be empty.
The judges would then choose one student from the crowd or the community, and they would seat him in that empty spot in the third row. The new student would not sit in the place of the first student of the third row, who had just moved to the second row. Rather, because the new student was not as wise as the rest of the students in the third row, he would sit in the place that fit him, which was at the end of the third row. He was all the way toward the end; he was considered to be the lowest-level student. So they would seat him in that last seat. Everybody would move up one slot, and he would take that last seat. This would keep happening as they added judges to the Bet Din.