daf bit: Bava Kama 23

[cellio]

We talked last week about the categories of mu'ad and tam. A mishna on today's daf describes them, saying: cattle become mu'ad (known to cause damage, so the owner has to take precautions) after the owner has been warned for three days (regarding the act of goring), but return to the state of tam (it couldn't have been reasonably foreseen) after refraining from goring for three days. These are the words of R' Yehudah. R' Meir, on the other hand, says cattle become mu'ad after the owner had been warned three times, even on the same day, and become again tam when children keep touching them and they don't get gored. (23b)

In the g'mara they discuss the other two permutations -- that we follow R' Yehudah for mu'ad and R' Meir for tam, and the reverse. Final answer? I don't know.

Comments

[siderea]

Hmmmm. The thing that strikes me as most odd about both R' Meir's and R' Yehudah's arguments isn't the general form of them, it's the specifics. I know that if I discovered that my hypothetical kids were patting an ox that had gored three people yesterday, I wouldn't be thinking, "Well, clearly, since this ox hasn't gored any of my kids today, this is not an ox we should anticipate will gore people." "Oh, but this ox hasn't gored anybody in three whole days." "Well, then, that's fine."

I find myself wondering if there's something about boviculture I do not grasp that make these parameters make sense.