The Sale Nobody Was Supposed to Make

About This Talk

The closing chapters of Hilchot Mechirah test a completed sale three ways. Chapter 28 reads the seller's words: a parcel sold as fit to sow a kor is approximate, with a margin of one twenty-fourth, a quarter kav for every area fit to sow a se'ah, while the same parcel sold as measured with a rope must be exact to a hair; rocks ten handbreadths high and hollows ten handbreadths deep fall out of the measure and pass to the buyer unpaid for; a surplus under an area fit to sow nine kabbim is repaid in money and a larger one may be returned as land, half a kav being the line in a garden; a buyer who already knows the field is bound even where the stated measure is wildly high; and local custom overrides the entire chapter. Chapter 29 tests the seller's competence: the sales of a deaf mute, of one mentally incapable or emotionally unstable, and of a minor are void by Scriptural law, and the Sages reinstated the deaf mute and the minor for movables alone so they would not be left idle with nobody to trade with, a minor transacting from six if tested and subject to his guardian's veto, acquiring only by meshichah where a female minor acquires through her courtyard, with majority at thirteen and twelve, inherited land unsellable before twenty though a gift of it holds, no exhumation to prove minority, and a drunk responsible unless he has drunk past knowing. Chapter 30 asks whose property it was: an unknowing buyer holds the option, a servant's deals rest with his master and a wife's with her husband, her ratification of his sale of ketubah land is void because she may have acted only to satisfy him, while the option on her nichsei m'log is hers alone, a court may trade an orphan's property but never gift it since a person may not give away what is not his, and a sale made on Shabbat earns lashes and holds.