1The Gemara challenges: But according to the opinion that earthenware vessels can be cleansed of their absorbed substances by the process of kindling, with regard to pots used in the Temple, why does the Merciful One state in the Torah that they should be broken? Let us simply return them to the kilns in which pots are made to be sure that the pots will be cleansed by the extreme heat of the kilns. Rabbi Zeira said: The pots cannot be returned to kilns because, as taught in a baraita (see Bava Kamma 82b), kilns are not built in Jerusalem because of the great quantity of smoke they produce.
2The Gemara presents an objection to Rabbi Zeira’s answer. Abaye said: But if, as the baraita teaches, there are no kilns in Jerusalem, are scrap heaps of earthenware assembled in the Temple courtyard? The same baraita also teaches that there are no scrap heaps in Jerusalem. What, then, is done with the shards of earthenware vessels that must be broken in the courtyard? The Gemara dismisses the question: Abaye raised that objection only because that which Shemaya taught in Kalnevo escaped him; Shemaya taught there: In the Temple, shards of earthenware vessels were miraculously absorbed in their place.
3The Gemara returns to the topic of kindling earthenware vessels and asks: But if kindling from within cleanses everything absorbed in an earthenware oven, what is the reason for that which Rav Naḥman says that Rabba bar Avuh says: The oven in the Temple was fashioned of metal? Let us fashion it of earthenware, as an oven’s kindling is from the inside, and, accordingly, it would be possible to cleanse it?
4The Gemara answers: The reason the oven must be fashioned of metal is because there are the two loaves, i.e., the public offering on Shavuot of two loaves from the new wheat, and the shewbread, i.e., the bread baked each week in a special form and displayed for the duration of one whole week on the table in the Sanctuary, whose baking is done in the oven, and also whose sanctification occurs in the oven. Because these offerings are not kneaded in a service vessel, they are sanctified only by being placed in the oven, and therefore the oven is a service vessel; and we do not make a service vessel of earthenware.