Negaim, Chapter 12, Mishnah 7. This is the final mishnah of the perek, and it takes up exactly where the previous one left off. There the Mishnah spelled out the treatment a kohen orders for a house whose nega has become actionable, whether because the discoloration grew once the first week had run its course, or because it was still sitting there unchanged after the second week had passed.
It helps to review that procedure. When the time for action comes, the stone or stones carrying the nega are extracted from the wall. Replacement is done in exact measure: a single stone is answered by a single stone, and two or more by a corresponding number. One does not insert a pair in place of one, nor one in place of a pair. Alongside this removal (chalitzah), the kohen has the perimeter of the nega scraped away (kotzeh), fresh stones are installed, and the surface is then coated with plaster. There is one substance that may not be used for that coating: sid, limestone. With the repair complete, nobody touches the house further; the matter now rests until the next examination reveals what has happened.
The Return of the Nega
That is the point at which our mishnah begins. "B'sof shavua": a further week is counted from the time of the removal, the replacement and the plastering, and when it ends the kohen presents himself once more at the house, "uva v'ra'ah," arriving to examine it. "Im chazar," should the nega have reappeared despite all of that work, then "v'nitatz es habayis": the building is torn down.
Nothing is left in place. The Mishnah spells out each element: "es avanav" takes in the stonework, "v'es eitzav" the beams and other woodwork, and "v'es kol afar habayis" includes every last bit of earth and rubble that belonged to the structure. All of it is then to be cleared away, "v'hotzi el michutz la'ir," beyond the boundaries of the town, "el makom tamei," to a spot set aside as tamei. None of this labor falls on the kohen personally; the demolition and the removal are performed by others, while his role is to issue the ruling that they must take place.
Even a City Without a Wall
The Tosfos Yom Tov draws a useful point from the phrase "el michutz la'ir": the rule holds equally in a town that has no wall around it. One could easily have reasoned differently, for two reasons. To begin with, walled cities occupy a higher rung in the gradations of holiness that apply within Eretz Yisroel than unwalled ones do, which might suggest that only there does the Torah insist on removing such material past the city line. Beyond that, a town without a wall has no defined edge, so it is not obvious where the debris would be brought. The halachah nonetheless holds that every locality, walled or open, maintained a tract outside the inhabited area where tumahdike material was discarded, and that is the destination of the stones, the timber and the dust of the dismantled house.
Three Measures for Three Situations
The mishnah closes with a set of shiurim. Recall that when the kohen first inspects the house, he takes note of the original patch of discoloration, the adamdam or yerakrak, which serves as the "eim," the mother, the baseline against which any later growth is measured.
- "Hapisyon hasamuch, kol shehu": if the spreading is adjacent to the eim, growing right out of the original patch, no minimum size is needed. Any perceptible increase, the slightest bit that the eye can register as growth, counts as pisyon. A parallel formulation appeared earlier in the masechta regarding nigei begadim.
- "V'harachok, k'gris": if the kohen returns and finds a new patch that is not touching the eim but stands at a distance from it, that distant spreading only counts if it is the size of a gris.
- "V'hachozeir babatim, kishnei grisim": a nega that comes back in a house after the whole procedure of removal, scraping, replacement and plastering must be at least the size of two grisim. This larger measure is derived from the fact that the Torah writes the word "nega" twice in this context.
With these three measures the mishnah, and with it the twelfth perek, comes to a close: a house that has been treated and yet shows the nega again is not repaired a second time, but taken apart and carried out to a tamei place beyond the city.