Nothing You Leave Is Ownerless

About This Talk

The last three chapters of Nizkei Mamon leave the ox behind and take up the harms that need your absence to work. Chapter 12 builds the law of the pit on four words of Exodus, that the owner of the cistern must pay: dig in the public domain and you answer for it although the ground was never yours, since you dug without permission, and dig on your own land with the opening facing out, or renounce the land while keeping the pit, and you answer too, while renouncing land and pit together leaves the verse without an owner and you exempt; it makes no difference whether you dug it, water carved it, an animal did, or you bought or inherited the field, and opening a covered pit counts as digging one. The Torah says cistern to fix the depth at which a fall kills, ten handbreadths, below which an injury is paid in full and a death is not, and nine handbreadths with one handbreadth of standing water is liable because a handbreadth of water counts as two, while a pit as wide as it is deep has no foul air and a pit stuffed with wool still kills by air alone; a cover fit for oxen but not camels obligates wherever camels pass even rarely, one that rotted from within exempts, the first of two partners bears it until he hands over the buckets, a pit entrusted to a deaf mute, an incompetent or a minor stays the owner's, and an ox that pushes another animal in splits the damages half and half when mu'ad, or a quarter from the ox's body and three quarters from the pit owner's best property when tam. An ox and not a man, a donkey and not utensils: a human who falls in and dies is not paid for even if blind or at night, nor is a competent animal that fell by day, while the small, the blind and the night-time fall are, and a mere injury is always paid in full. Chapter 13 extends the pit to every obstruction left in the path of living beings, warned from the outset, liable for a person or animal whether or not it was renounced and never liable for utensils, including an ox's load broken in the fall; the passerby who breaks your jug in the road owes nothing, for it is not the practice of people to look out on the way as they walk, though in front of the wine vats he pays unless it was dark or the path was filled with jugs; a potter who fell and could have risen becomes a pit himself and pays for the next man's body but not his vessels, while the man hurt by a second man's load is answered with the words I did not dig this cistern; water poured out obligates even once absorbed if the ground stays slippery, sewage is barred in the dry months and permitted in the rains with liability either way, straw taken out to be trodden is penalized by being declared ownerless and still charged to the man who brought it, an unsound wall or tree gets thirty days, balconies must clear a camel and its rider, nothing may be dug beneath a public road, a public path is never under sixteen cubits, and the pious men of earlier generations buried their thorns and broken glass three handbreadths below the plow, burned them, or threw them in the river. Chapter 14 turns to fire: full liability for kindling in another man's field, and on your own land a distance measured against the height of the flame, with a stream eight cubits wide or a wall measured against the fuel clearing you, while a flame that rears up and bends over is charged at a thousand cubits with no estimate made; a coal given to a child leaves a moral obligation and a flame leaves liability, a competent agent or watchman bears it himself, of wood and flame whoever came second pays, an uncommon wind exempts everyone and the man who fanned it alongside the wind does not; a thresher burnt in a grain heap is paid for and hidden clothing is not, a fire begun on his own land pays for hidden goods only as though the space had held wheat, burning a house pays for all it contained on the owner's oath taken holding a sacred article, the camel overloaded with flax pays for the burnt stall unless the shopkeeper's lamp sat outside, even a Chanukah lamp; and because fire is reckoned as damage done with his arrows it obligates all five payments for an injured person where a pit obligates the bare damages, so that the treatise closes on the derivatives of fire, a stone or knife or load left on a roof and brought down by an ordinary wind.