daf bit: Bava Batra 88

[cellio]

The torah commands us to have honest weights and measures. The mishna on today's daf discusses application. A wholesaler of items like oil and wine must clean his measures once in 30 days, because the residue diminishes the volume of what his customer takes away so he can't let it build up. A producer must clean his measures once in 12 months; the talmud assumes that he has fewer customers and fewer transactions than the wholesaler, so stuff doesn't build up as quickly. (R' Shimon ben Gamaliel reverses these, though, arguing that frequent use prevents some buildup and infrequent use allows more to stick.) A shopkeeper, who is presumed to have more customers than the wholesaler, must clean his measures twice a week, wipe his weights once a week, and clean his scales after every weighing. This last is because the pans in the scale are concave, so there's a place for stuff to pool. (88b)

Comments

[siderea]

Thank you for all this! Very helpful.

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]

[cellio]

Huh! I knew that this was illegal today but thought it in the general class of fraud; I didn't know that there are inspectors who enforce this! Thanks for the education.

Modernly, we think of "wholesalers" as manufacturers

Do we? I've always thought of wholesalers as the bulk distributors, not necessarily manufacturers. Their function is to broker what would otherwise be a big many-to-many mapping among original producers and end buyers. Not every farmer wants to run a store; selling your entire crop to one person who'll take care of it from there, though it brings a lower price than selling directly to buyers, can be worth it. Even today, when I was selling self-published books and musical recordings, I was quite happy to sell larger lots at a discount to stores so I didn't have to handle (as many) individual sales myself. (One always has CDs on hand at concerts, of course.)

Off to google the etymology of "retail"!

What'd you find?

P.S. On further thought, I wonder if frequent cleaning would wear the weights/measures, making them (oops!) lighter, which would be rather counterproductive.

That's a good question! The Rambam says don't make weights out of iron, lead, or other metals because they can rust (reducing their weight), though I can't tell if he's stating law or giving advice. He says to make them out of "marble, glass, diamond, and the like". I don't see anything about what liquid measures were made of; I wonder if, at least in the time of the mishna, they would have been earthenware? Does earthenware erode with washing?

Hoobah! If in your literary perambulations you come across any historical case law examples, please send them my way.

Will do! Does any of this come up in the code of Hamarabi, I wonder? I've heard that he covers many of the same topics that the torah does (not always in the same way of course), but I don't know much about it myself. I've seen the occasional "here's the torah passage, and here's the corresponding part of Hamarabi" in classes.