One-Page Learn · The Halachos at a glance
הִלְכוֹת גְּנֵבָה
Theft · Chapters 7-9
Sefer Nezikin · False Measures • Building the Scale • Kidnapping and the Housebreaker • The treatise concludes
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Of a log: the mesurah,
smallest measure guarded
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Dry measure tipped
toward the buyer
4
Conditions before a
kidnapper is liable
5
Relationships that can
never be kidnapping
Ch 7The False Measure, and Owning One
- Theft without the doubling. Weighing or measuring below the standard of the country violates a negative commandment and makes the seller a thief, yet he pays nothing double: he hands over the proper measure of the article sold, and lashes are not given because restitution is owed. (7:1-2)
- Merely owning one is the transgression. Keeping a defective measure or weight in a house or store violates "you shall not have in your pocket two sets of weights," even unused, and it may not be kept even as a chamber pot, since a stranger may come and measure with it. No lashes, because no deed is involved. Where every lawful measure in a city carries a standard seal, an unsealed one may be kept for household purposes. (7:3-4)
- Destroy a blemished coin. A damaged sela may not serve as a weight, be cast among scrap metal, or be drilled and hung on a child's neck; grind it, cut it up, or throw it into the Dead Sea. Worn by less than a sixth it may still be spent, since most people forgo a loss under a sixth, but never used as a weight. (7:4-6)
- Land and borders are measures too. Confusable sizes are forbidden outright, so no two-kav vessel may be made. Deceiving in land measurement breaks the same verse, and taking in a fingerbreadth of a neighbor's field makes a man a robber by force and a thief by stealth, with a second prohibition on moving a boundary that binds only in Eretz Yisrael. A short measure must be returned to a gentile as well. (7:7-11)
RememberThe punishment for false measures is greater than for forbidden intimacy, since that is between a person and God and this is between a person and his fellow; and denying this mitzvah is treated as denying the exodus. (7:12)
Ch 8The Apparatus: Material, Size, Inspection
- Correct instruments are a positive commandment. "You shall have correct scales," and land is measured by geometry, where even a fingerbreadth counts as a great loss, as though planted with saffron. Weights may not be iron or lead, which corrode and lose weight; use marble, glass or diamond. Do not bury weights in salt, warm a liquid while measuring it, or measure one partner's land in summer and the other's in winter, since rope contracts in heat. (8:1-7)
- The leveling stick. Not gourd, which is too light, nor metal, which is too heavy, but olive, walnut, box or sycamore wood, with both sides the same thickness. Level the measure neither slowly, which cheats the seller, nor in one stroke, which cheats the buyer. (8:5-6)
- Every trade's scale has a published size. Scrap iron: three handbreadths of free air, three above the ground, pole and cables twelve. Wool and glass: two, two and nine. Storekeeper and householder: one, one and six. Gold and purple fabric: three fingerbreadths. The length of the balance arm is left to the weigher. (8:8-11)
- Tip the balance toward the buyer. Derived from "a perfect and just weight," read as justify your balance out of what is yours and give it to him: one hundredth on liquid measure, one four-hundredth on dry, the same ratio at any size, and a full handbreadth where the custom is to tip physically. Ten pounds are weighed and tipped once, not ten times. A town may raise its measures by no more than a sixth. (8:12-17)
RememberEvery city is obligated to appoint inspectors who walk the stores, correct the scales and set prices; they may beat and fine the owner of a false weight, and force a price-gouger back to the market rate. (8:20)
Ch 9Kidnapping, and the Man Who Breaks In
- Four conditions for the kidnapper's death penalty. He abducts a Jew, brings him into his own domain, makes use of him, and sells him to others. Use means almost nothing: a lean, a shield, worth less than a p'rutah, even while the man sleeps. The penalty is strangulation, so no lashes are given, and selling him breaks a second commandment. (9:1-2)
- Where the penalty does not attach. No removal into his own domain, no sale at all, a sale before the use, a sale to the victim's own father or brother, since the verse requires separation from his brethren, or the whole act performed while the victim slept. Nor for selling only the child of an abducted pregnant woman. (9:3-4)
- Five who cannot be kidnappers. A man who takes his own son or minor brother, a guardian who takes the orphans in his trust, a householder who takes a member of his household, a teacher who takes his student, even if he uses and sells him: "found in his hand" excludes those always found in his hand. Otherwise liability is wide, reaching a one-day-old carried to term, a convert, and a freed Canaanite servant. (9:5-6)
- License to kill the housebreaker. Granted by night or day, Shabbat or weekday, by any means, to the householder or any bystander, and it covers a thief caught on the roof, in the courtyard or in an enclosed area. The reason is a presumption: resist him and he will kill you, so he stands as a pursuer seeking a life, whether adult or minor, man or woman. (9:7-9)
RememberThe license dies the moment it is clear as the sun that he will not kill: a thief walking away or leaving the tunnel, a thief surrounded by witnesses, a father breaking into his son's house. Kill him then and the householder is a murderer. (9:10-11)