Asked One at a Time

About This Talk

Chapter 18 sets the governing rule that however many doubts are multiplied in a public domain the person is pure and in a private domain he is impure, so that nine frogs and one creeping animal in a house leave a man impure while nine creeping animals and one frog in the street leave him pure, and it follows the doubt through time, with a carcass in an alley that reaches back past a sweeping to the last day someone checked, a vessel that turns impure once a night passes while it is lost but not while it is merely forgotten, and a man whose status is read from the morning he discovers the dead. Chapter 19 takes the two paths and rules that two men asking one after the other are each pure while two asking together, or one asking for himself and his friend, are both impure, that of ten eaters of a mixed batch the first five are impure and the last five pure because they can hold the first accountable, and that a pure man may place the burden on a companion already impure. Chapter 20 closes the treatise by defining the domains through traffic rather than walls, ruling the paths to cisterns, the royal basilica and the entire Temple Courtyard public for impurity, a tree or a hole in a street wall private, a single impure store pure to the doubtful entrant and a choice between two stores impure, and ends on a list of doubts that are all pure.