daf bit: Bava Kama 93

[cellio]

We have already determined that in the case of robbery the thief owes damages based on the value of the stolen goods. (He pays a multiple of this value.) What if the value changed after the robbery? The mishna on today's daf addresses this. If one stole pieces of wood and made utensils from them, or stole pieces of wool and made garments from them, he owes damages for the value of the pieces of wood or wool. Similarly, if he stole a pregnant cow and it then gave birth to a calf, or he stole a sheep ready for shearing and he then sheared it, he owes the value of a pregnant cow or a sheep ready for shearing. However, if he stole a cow and it then got pregnant and gave birth, or he stole a sheep and it then grew out its coat and he sheared it, then he owes for a non-pregnant cow or a sheep not ready for shearing. This is the general principle, the mishna tells us: all robbers pay in accordance with the value of the stolen goods at the time of the robbery. (93b)

That the thief owes full restoration if he has diminished the value of the stolen items seems obvious to me. That the thief gets to benefit from the proceeds of his theft, for example the calf if the stolen cow later becomes pregnant, comes as more of a surprise to me. What happens if he stole a cow, it became pregnant, and he then paid damages before it gave birth -- if the thief returns the cow, would the owner owe the thief for the increase in value? I suspect that the practical answer is that you treat livestock and goods as commodities -- the thief pays the value of a cow but doesn't necessarily return that specific cow. I'm speculating, and perhaps it's addressed somewhere in the coming pages.

Comments

[isaac moses (from livejournal.com)]

No, I'm not taking the initiative to try to write up my learning. "Little learning is better than no learning," indeed, and if I would try to commit to more activity per mishna than the little I do, that might tip the balance from "little" to "no." It's easier for me to react when I see something here I can react to, on a one-off basis.

I used an HTML a-tag. I think that LJ doesn't trust me enough to let that be an actual hyperlink, or something.

Shabbat shalom (on-time for this week), and chodesh tov (belated).

[cellio]

It is much better to learn and not blog it than to not learn because blogging it is too difficult! And I appreciate your comments here when you share them.

(Weird about LJ and links -- not sure what's going on there. I know that they block links in anonymous comments, but I thought an OpenID login was enough to bypass that.)

Shabbat shalom.