The Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael preserves a legal teaching from Rabbi Nathan that resolves an apparent contradiction in the Torah's laws about monetary obligations. On the one hand, the Torah says "Give money." On the other hand, it says "Do not give money." How can both be true? Rabbi Nathan's answer turns on timing and the appearance of miraculous signs.
The principle works like this: the instruction to "give money" applies before the advent of signs, meaning before any supernatural evidence has confirmed a particular claim or status. The instruction to "not give money" applies after signs have appeared. The two rules are not contradictory. They govern different stages of the same process.
This kind of reasoning is characteristic of the Mekhilta's legal methodology. Rather than dismissing apparent contradictions in Scripture, the rabbis assumed that every word of the Torah was deliberately placed and that seeming conflicts must reflect different circumstances or conditions. The task of the interpreter was to identify which conditions applied to which rule.
Rabbi Nathan's teaching demonstrates a broader principle that runs throughout rabbinic jurisprudence: that context determines obligation. A rule that applies in one situation may be reversed in another, and the Torah itself provides the keys to distinguishing between them. The appearance of signs, miraculous confirmation of a claim, changes the legal landscape entirely. Before signs appear, one set of rules governs. After signs appear, the situation has changed, and a different set of obligations takes effect. This approach allowed the rabbis to maintain that the Torah never contradicts itself, even when its surface-level instructions appear to point in opposite directions.