Arachin, Chapter 9, Mishnah 6. Throughout this chapter we have been learning the special laws that govern a house sold inside a walled city: the seller has a full year to redeem it, and once that year passes the sale becomes permanent and the house does not return in the Yovel. All of that depends on one question that the Mishnah now comes to answer: which cities actually carry the status of arei choma, walled cities?
A Wall That Is Not a Wall
The Mishnah begins with two cases that do not qualify. "Ir sheg'goteha chomatah," a city whose roofs are its wall. Picture a town with no wall built around it at all, but with a ring of attached houses standing shoulder to shoulder, forming a closed circle. From the outside it may look sealed, yet there is no wall there, only homes doing the work of a wall.
Then comes a second disqualification: "veshe'einah mukefet choma miymot Yehoshua bin Nun." Here the town does have a real wall encircling it in our own day, but no such wall stood there in the generation of Yehoshua bin Nun, the period when our ancestors came into Eretz Yisrael and took possession of the land.
Of both of these the Mishnah rules, "einah kevatei arei choma." The houses in such cities are not treated as houses of a walled city, and the laws of redemption we have been studying do not apply to them. Two conditions must be met together: the city needs a genuine wall, not homes that happen to function as one, and that wall must trace back to the era of Yehoshua bin Nun.
A Wall That Once Was
A Wall That Once Was
Now flip the picture. Take a town that stood behind a wall in the generation of Yehoshua bin Nun, yet today has no wall left standing anywhere around it. The Mishnah says of such a place, "nidon kevatei arei choma": its houses are judged by the rules of a walled city, and every halachah of redemption we have been learning governs them, even though not a stone of a wall remains. The status was locked in at the time of the conquest, and the collapse of the wall does not undo it.
The Working Definition
The Working Definition
Having set the two conditions, the Mishnah supplies the measure: "Ve'elu hen batei arei choma," these are the houses of walled cities, "Shalosh chatzerot shel shenei shenei batim mukafot choma miymot Yehoshua bin Nun." The settlement must contain three courtyards, a pair of houses standing in each one, the whole of it ringed by a wall dating from the era of Yehoshua bin Nun. Meet that description and the place holds the full status, with all of these halachot applying to the homes within it.
The Examples
The Examples
The Mishnah now names real locations that fit the definition:
- "Kegon Katzra hayeshana shel Tzippori," the ancient Katzra, a modest settlement in the region of Tzippori
- "veHakra shel Gush Chalav," the Chakra belonging to Gush Chalav
- "veYodfat hayeshana," Yodfat in its ancient form
- "veGamla, uGdod, veChadid, ve'Ono, viYerushalayim"
Every one of these places had its three courtyards holding two homes apiece, and every one of them was already enclosed by a wall in the era of Yehoshua bin Nun.
A clarification is called for here. The Yerushalayim appearing on this list is not the capital city that housed the Beit Hamikdash. The halachot of arei choma never governed that Yerushalayim in the first place. Our Mishnah is therefore pointing to some other locale within Eretz Yisrael that happened to bear the same name.
The Mishnah closes with "vechein kayotzei vahen," and others like them. The list is not exclusive. Any city sharing these same characteristics, three courtyards of two houses each, ringed by a wall from the days of Yehoshua bin Nun, holds the status of a walled city, and the laws of redemption we have learned apply to its houses.