Even the Sage Says It Appears

About This Talk

Chapter 14 fixes the measure of a blemish on a house at two grisim, sunk below the surface of the wall and showing an intense green or an intense red, and then rules on which houses can be accused at all, requiring four cubits square, four walls, eight stones with two to a wall, and construction on the earth from stones, wood and earth, so that a round or triangular house, a house on a ship and a house suspended from four beams are all exempt while a house on four pillars is not, and it exempts Jerusalem because the city was never divided among the tribes, along with the Diaspora and the houses of gentiles in the land, while ruling a woman's house, a partnership house and an inhabited study hall susceptible, forbidding even a certain sage to declare the blemish rather than report that something appears to have appeared, forbidding the opening of windows to make a blemish visible, and ruling a house pure if it lacked its measure of materials when the blemish was discovered and had them brought afterwards. Chapter 15 sets the isolation at three weeks counted as nineteen days, with inspections on the seventh, thirteenth and nineteenth, and traces the whole procedure of fading, scraping, removing the stones and the mortar beneath them, carrying them outside the city, replastering and waiting again, until either the house is purified with fowl or it is torn down, and it governs the repair strictly, permitting no stones or mortar moved from one side of the house to the other, no lime in place of mortar, and two stones brought for two though two may answer three, ruling that on a wall shared between neighbors both men remove stones, scrape mortar and bring other stones while the owner alone brings the new mortar, and closing with a purification identical to a person's except that the blood is sprinkled seven times on the lintel from outside. Chapter 16 makes the blemished house and its rubble a primary source of impurity that defiles by touch, by being carried and by being brought under a roof, distinguishes an isolated house that defiles only from within from a condemned house that defiles from without as well, rules that a man who enters backwards with everything inside but his nose stays pure since the Torah addressed only ordinary entry, gives the garments a man wears the time it takes to eat three egg-sized portions of bread while a cloak carried on the shoulder is impure the instant he crosses, and then closes the whole section by explaining that none of this is natural, that it is a sign given to Israel against lashon hora which moves inward from the walls to the furnishings to the clothes to the skin with repentance available at every stage, and by recalling Miriam, who raised Moses and saved him at the river and said nothing evil of him and was punished at once.