The talmud reports, and I saw but have lost track of an article saying this continued to the 19th century, that communities had inspectors who made the rounds of shops inspecting weights and measures. (Sort of like government health inspectors in restaurants today, I imagine.)
I think you just went from source to example. My thesis is that for better than 2,000 years, one of the most stablely defined crimes in Western society was giving false weight, and somehow today Americans don't even realize it's still illegal, or even wrong, or that there's a branch of law enforcement that handles it.
Yes. I haven't looked up the words in a talmudic dictionary so I could be missing some nuances, but הסיטון is a wholesaler, and מקנח is a storekeeper. The original source is translated as "producer" in the Soncino translation (from which I prepare the daf bits) but "homeowner" on Sefaria, so I looked more closely at the Hebrew: ובעל הבית, literally "master of the house".
Huh. We still call it "husbandry", in English, when it involves livestock, so I wonder if there's a parallel concept there. Modernly, we think of "wholesalers" as manufacturers, but I suppose the original "wholesaler" would be the farmer who raises cash crops.
Off to google the etymology of "retail"!
P.S. On further thought, I wonder if frequent cleaning would wear the weights/measures, making them (oops!) lighter, which would be rather counterproductive.
P.P.S. re 19th cen: Certainly by then in the US secular authorities handled that. E.g. Pittsburg, 1828. [Google Books]
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Date: 2017-04-23 04:47 am (UTC)The talmud reports, and I saw but have lost track of an article saying this continued to the 19th century, that communities had inspectors who made the rounds of shops inspecting weights and measures. (Sort of like government health inspectors in restaurants today, I imagine.)
...like government inspectors of weights and measures today.
I think you just went from source to example. My thesis is that for better than 2,000 years, one of the most stablely defined crimes in Western society was giving false weight, and somehow today Americans don't even realize it's still illegal, or even wrong, or that there's a branch of law enforcement that handles it.
Yes. I haven't looked up the words in a talmudic dictionary so I could be missing some nuances, but הסיטון is a wholesaler, and מקנח is a storekeeper. The original source is translated as "producer" in the Soncino translation (from which I prepare the daf bits) but "homeowner" on Sefaria, so I looked more closely at the Hebrew: ובעל הבית, literally "master of the house".
Huh. We still call it "husbandry", in English, when it involves livestock, so I wonder if there's a parallel concept there. Modernly, we think of "wholesalers" as manufacturers, but I suppose the original "wholesaler" would be the farmer who raises cash crops.
Off to google the etymology of "retail"!
P.S. On further thought, I wonder if frequent cleaning would wear the weights/measures, making them (oops!) lighter, which would be rather counterproductive.
P.P.S. re 19th cen: Certainly by then in the US secular authorities handled that. E.g. Pittsburg, 1828. [Google Books]