Daf Yomi: Talmudic Sages on Wages
Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.
In Chapter Nine of Tractate Bava Kamma, the rabbis continue their inquiry into different kinds of injury and damage. The previous chapter examined cases of deliberate personal injury: How should someone who inflicts a bodily injury be punished? (The answer, as we saw, is not “an eye for an eye,” as the Bible recommends, but the payment of monetary compensation.) In this week’s Daf Yomi, we read about a different kind of deliberate injury: theft. Here, too, there is an explicit Biblical law, stated in the Book of Leviticus, which holds that a thief must return what he stole to its original owner, plus an additional one-fifth as a penalty.