Clear to You As the Sun

About This Talk

Chapter 7 makes the invisible theft a theft: weighing or measuring below the standard of the country violates a negative commandment and makes the seller a thief, yet he pays nothing double and receives no lashes, because he owes restitution and must simply hand over the proper measure; merely keeping a defective measure or weight in a house or store is a separate prohibition even unused, since a stranger may measure with it, which is why it may not be kept even as a chamber pot, why a blemished sela must be ground to powder or thrown into the Dead Sea rather than cast among scrap or hung on a child's neck, and why the one exception is a city where every lawful measure carries a standard seal, and the same worry forbids confusable sizes like a two-kav vessel; a coin worn by under a sixth may still be spent, since most people forgo a loss under a sixth, but never used as a weight; short measure must be returned to a gentile too, land and boundaries fall under the same verse, a fingerbreadth of a neighbor's field makes a robber by force and a thief by stealth, and the chapter closes with false measures punished more severely than forbidden intimacy, because that sin is between a person and God and this one between a person and his fellow, and with denial of this mitzvah treated as denial of the exodus. Chapter 8 turns it into an engineering code: correct scales are a positive commandment, land is measured by geometry where a fingerbreadth counts as though planted with saffron, weights may not be iron or lead because they corrode and lose weight but marble, glass or diamond, weights may not be buried in salt nor liquids warmed while measured, partners' land may not be measured in different seasons since rope contracts in heat, the leveling stick must be olive, walnut, box or sycamore and even on both sides and used neither slowly, which cheats the seller, nor in one stroke, which cheats the buyer, and every trade's balance has a published size, three handbreadths of free air and twelve of pole for scrap iron down to one and six for a storekeeper and three fingerbreadths for gold and purple, so that the scale is not merely accurate but visible; beyond accuracy the seller must tip the balance toward the buyer, one hundredth on liquid and one four-hundredth on dry at any scale and a full handbreadth where the custom is to tip, ten pounds are tipped once rather than ten times, a town may raise its measures by no more than a sixth, measures are cleaned on a schedule, a quarter-pound weight is set with the meat rather than among the weights lest it slip unseen, and every city must appoint inspectors who correct scales, set prices, beat the owner of a false weight and force a price-gouger down. Chapter 9 ends the treatise with the person as the thing stolen: kidnapping is read out of "do not steal" in the Decalogue and carries strangulation rather than lashes, attaching only when he abducts a Jew, brings him into his own domain, makes use of him, even a lean or a shield worth less than a p'rutah or done while the man sleeps, and sells him to others, so it fails where there was no removal, no sale, a sale before the use, a sale to the victim's own father or brother, or an act done entirely while he slept, and five relationships can never be kidnapping at all, a son, a minor brother, a guardian's orphans, a household member and a student, because "found in his hand" excludes those always in his hand, while liability otherwise reaches a one-day-old born at term, a convert and a freed Canaanite servant; then the housebreaker, who may be killed by the householder or any bystander, by night or day, Shabbat or weekday, on the roof or in a courtyard or enclosure, because he is presumed a pursuer who will kill if resisted, with the license withdrawn the moment it is as clear as the sun that he will not kill, so a father breaking into his son's house may not be killed though a son breaking into his father's may, nor a thief who turned his back or is leaving the tunnel, nor one surrounded by witnesses, nor one who broke into a garden, field, pen or corral; and the treatise closes on the inversion, that a thief the law forbade you to kill is liable for utensils he smashed inside the house while a thief the law permitted you to kill is not liable at all.