The Fifth No Court Can Collect

About This Talk

Chapter 7 builds a payment no court can reach: a person who denies a financial obligation under a false oath and later admits it pays the principal plus an additional fifth, which is a quarter of the principal so that four zuz becomes five, together with a guilt offering, and the rule covers robbery, theft, withheld wages, a loan, an entrusted article, a denied lost object and partnership money alike, because wherever admitting the obligation would have made him liable to pay, denying it under oath adds the fifth. Then the limits, each protecting the same point: an heir liable through his father owes no fifth unless the stolen object still exists, a false oath against a gentile's claim carries none because the verse says "his colleague," anything under a p'rutah carries none, and witnesses who prove the case against a continuing denial collect the principal alone, since the fifth and the sacrifice were instituted for atonement and attach only where his own admission creates the liability. A robber who merely denied may let the money sit until the owner comes, but once he swore falsely over a p'rutah he must bring it to the owner even on far removed islands, because the oath made the owner despair of asking, though delivery to the Rabbinic court of his city discharges him, and the Rambam sorts the partial waivers finely, releasing the duty to pursue where the principal is paid or waived while the fifth stands and imposing it where the principal stands, while the plural of "he shall add its fifths" yields a fifth upon a fifth and a separate fifth for every false oath over one deposit. Chapter 8 asks what happens when there is no one left to repay: pay the dead owner's heirs; a man who robbed his own father must remove the object from his possession even as sole heir, passing it to his children, a creditor, a loan or charity while telling the recipient what it is; and where the victim was a convert who died without heirs the principal and fifth go to the priests of that week's watch, which the Oral Tradition derives from "if a person does not have a redeemer," and because the verse calls the restitution itself a guilt offering it may not be handed over at night, must leave each priest of the watch a p'rutah's worth, and may not be pooled with another such restitution, while chametz so robbed and held through Pesach is paid at its value when taken, a priest who robbed acquires nothing, the guilt offering waits on the principal though not on the fifth, and money already given to the priests cannot be reclaimed by the robber's heirs. The chapter then excludes Canaanite servants, promissory notes and landed property from the fifth entirely and states the ruling the next chapter unfolds: landed property never becomes a robber's, and even sold to a thousand people in succession, even after the owner despaired, it returns to him without charge while each buyer sues the man who sold to him. Chapter 9 works out that principle: the robber answers for depreciation he caused by digging, felling, spoiling or demolishing but not for flood or lightning, and not for a confiscation that struck the whole country, though he owes a comparable field where the seizure came because of him or because he showed the king the stolen field among his own; improvements are weighed with the robber at a disadvantage, the owner reimbursing only his expense where the increase is larger and only up to the increase where the expense is larger, with produce consumed paid for; a purchaser who improved collects his capped expense from the owner and the purchase price from the robber even out of encumbered property already sold, forfeiting the surplus increase if he knew the field was stolen; and a void sale of another man's field becomes binding if the robber afterward buys it from the rightful owner, since he took the trouble to act in good faith, unless the court had already announced his property for sale, or he resold, gifted, willed or merely inherited it. The chapter closes on evidence: where robbery is established the owner who says he acknowledged payment only out of fear is believed over the witnesses, the field is taken back without payment, and he need issue no protest, whereas a man who only beat his neighbor into selling holds the sale absent a protest, because he intends to rob and has not yet robbed.