The Door Comes, The Key Stays

About This Talk

Mechirah 25-27 is the Mishneh Torah's inventory of what travels with a thing when it changes hands. Chapter 25 rules that a sold house does not include a surrounding patio four cubits or more wide, a room behind the house even inside the drawn boundaries, a roof four cubits wide that carries a guardrail ten handbreadths high, or a cistern, while a loft opening through the ceiling is part of the house; the oven, range, mortared doorframes, door, beam, lock and a mill fixed in the ground are sold, while the key, a movable mill, the flour bin and the window frames are not; a seller who keeps a cistern must buy a right of way because a person sells generously, unless he stated the exception at the time of sale; and a courtyard carries the shops that open into it, a shop with two doors following the majority of its activity, with a bathhouse or olive press inside never included. Chapter 26 extends this to a whole town, where pens that face the town are included however distant, and to a field, where stones already stacked and reeds already laid are sold but merely prepared ones are not, while a dovecote, reservoir, grape press, named spice plot and mortarless hut are never sold; it then reverses the presumption for a gift, a division of inheritance, a convert's estate and a consecration, all of which convey everything attached, and rules that local custom and the local meaning of words override every default. Chapter 27 applies the same grammar to movables and living things, ruling that a ship carries its rigging but not its tenders, that a wagon sells the oxen while oxen do not sell the wagon, that a sold maid-servant comes with her garments but not her ornaments, that selling a life-bearing part conveys half the animal, and that the price paid is never proof of the seller's intent.