Made to Hold

About This Talk

Three chapters that decide what a clay vessel is, when it stops being one, and where its edges fall. Chapter eighteen rules that earthenware is susceptible to impurity only when it has a receptacle and was made to serve as one, which purifies the clay chair, bed, bench and table, the curved pipe even while it stands full of water, the swimmer's barrel and the earthenware boat, while making vessels of a perfumer's tilted funnel, a lantern with an oil well, a perforated titrus, the dish catching drops under a lamp and the base catching seepage under a jug; it adds the rule that whatever serves a container while inverted is pure, and then rules on broken shards, which alone among fragments stay susceptible, by measure, a revi'it from a mid-size vessel, half a log from a one to two se'ah barrel, a log from anything larger, requiring that the shard hold liquid resting on its base except where the vessel was built with a pointed base like a drawing jug or a goblet. Chapter nineteen measures the hole that ends a vessel against what it was for, olives for food, seepage for liquid, nuts for a barrel, oil for a cruse, and traces five graded stages in which a dying vessel keeps one function after losing another, rules that a barrel losing even one handle drops to the rank of a base, that a base broken in two is pure as a remnant of a remnant, that a cracked barrel smeared together with turds stays susceptible because its status was never interrupted while reassembled shards are pure forever, and that once earthenware has been pure for a single moment it is never susceptible again. Chapter twenty measures connection by need: coating on a sound vessel is separate and on an unsound one integral, an oven's plaster is the oven for one handbreadth and a range's for three fingerbreadths, surplus tar belongs to nothing, mortar on a samovar conveys impurity while ground shards do not, straps count when sewn and not when tied, tool handles are joined by a fixed table of measures from one handbreadth to ten, a borrowed staff is joined only while the work is being done, and a thread off a garment or a rope on earthenware is attached for a hundred cubits but only up to the knot where a second rope begins.