549 | Making Sure that the Departed is really Dead this formulation would seem to suggest that there is no explicit commandment of burial, but that the rabbis enacted it as general practice, linking their ruling to this verse – an asmachta – though the verse only deals with hanged men . Hence, there are a number of authorities who regard the duty of burial as of rabbinic authority 1 this also seems to be the conclusion of r . Baruch ha - Levi Epstein, in his Torah Temimah to Deut . ibid . sect . 163 - 164, pp . 293 - 294 . However, r . Yehiel Michel tycocinski, in his ( authoritative ) Gesher ha - Hayyim, Vol . 2, second ed . Jerusalem 1960, pp . 110 - 111, suggests an interpretation of that passage in Sanhedrin as meaning that there is a hint in the Bible that the body itself should be buried directly in the ground ( cf . Zohar Exod . Terumah 151 b ) , as opposed to being buried in a closed coffin . And it is this, he suggests, that the Rabbis learned from the intensive double - word ...
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