The Sanhedrin of seventy-one was not a single institution. It was the top of a ladder, and Rabbi Yossi remembered the steps.
In each city of Israel sat a provincial court of twenty-three. When an ordinary Israelite had a question — a contract dispute, a difficult halakhic puzzle, a ruling on ritual purity — he brought it to his local bench first. If the twenty-three understood the case, they settled it on the spot.
If they could not decide, they forwarded it to the court of the nearest city. Two courts of twenty-three, side by side, often saw what one had missed.
If the neighboring court also failed, all the judges rose together and carried the case up the roads of Judea to the Temple Mount itself. There, at the entrance to the Har ha-Bayit, sat a second rabbinic court of twenty-three. Inside, at the entrance to the Azarah — the inner courtyard — sat a third court, also of twenty-three.
Only if all these benches failed did the case pass through the gates and into the Lishkat ha-Gazit, the Chamber of Hewn Stone, where the seventy-one judges of the Great Sanhedrin sat. There the vote of the majority closed the question.
"Seldom," Rabbi Yossi said, "was there contention in Israel" — not because disagreement was rare, but because the structure absorbed it at every level on the way up.