The Fire That Finishes

About This Talk

Chapter 15 rules that an earthenware vessel is not susceptible to impurity until the work of making it is complete, and that for an oven completion means firing, measured by a heat sufficient to bake doughnuts, while a range with two openings needs enough heat to bake a stirred egg in a frying pan and a range with one opening follows whichever use it was built for, with even a partly built oven qualifying at four handbreadths, or one handbreadth if it is small. It rules that an oven heated from behind, in the craftsman's shop or entirely by accident is susceptible, as a court determined when fire broke out in a village oven, yet an oven heated to whiten bundles of flax stays pure because that work does not affect the substance of the oven, that a stone oven is always pure and a metal one is outside the laws of ovens because Scripture orders an impure oven smashed and these laws reach only what can be smashed, that a cracked metal oven patched or coated with clay becomes an earthenware oven while clay merely smeared on it changes nothing, that an earthenware oven is susceptible even hanging from the neck of a camel, and it works through furnaces, trivets, chains of stones joined with clay, two ranges sharing a middle stone, and the heating counter that is a vessel rather than a range. Chapter 16 sets the remnants of a large oven at four handbreadths and of a small one at its larger portion, gives the only remedy earthenware has, a division into three portions with the coating stripped from each so that every shard stands bare on the ground, rules that a division into two leaves the larger portion impure and two equal portions both impure since it is impossible to determine which is larger, takes up rings with sand between them and the coating that is either holding the oven together or merely resting on it, rules that shards coated inside and out and heated make an oven while a barrel whose base was removed never becomes one, and states the principle that cracks can be patched only with clay, lime or gypsum, since nothing an oven is not usually made from will do. Chapter 17 rules that an accessory required in order to use a vessel is the vessel itself, so a stone protruding a handbreadth from an oven or three fingerbreadths from a range is connected, that the extra layer of earth on a homeowner's oven is pure while a baker's is susceptible because his spit rests on it, that the crown of a range is pure and the tira of an oven is connected only at four handbreadths, that the place beside a range for oil, spices or a lamp is joined only by Rabbinic decree so that terumah touching it is held in abeyance rather than burnt, and it closes the border question with trivets, protrusions and the open space in front, noting that these measurements are not held with great exactitude, being all of Rabbinic origin.