Talmud Bavli
Talmud Bavli

Halakhah for Sanhedrin 222:11

שנאמר (דברים יג, יז) ושרפת באש את העיר ואת כל שללה כליל לה' אלהיך שללה ולא שלל שמים מכאן אמרו ההקדשות שבה יפדו ותרומות ירקבו מעשר שני וכתבי הקדש יגנזו

THOU SHALT SURELY SMITE THE INHABITANTS OF THAT CITY WITH THE EDGE OF THE SWORD.<span class="x" onmousemove="('comment',' Ibid. 26. ');"><sup>20</sup></span> A COMPANY OF ASS-DRIVERS OR CAMEL-DRIVERS PASSING FROM PLACE TO PLACE SAVES IT.<span class="x" onmousemove="('comment',' If a travelling caravan made a thirty days' halt in the town, its members are regarded as inhabitants. Consequently, if they resist seduction, and their abstention turns the remainder who abstain from idolatry too, and would otherwise be in a minority, into a majority, the town is saved from the fate of a condemned city. — This is followed in the text by 'as it is said etc.' But as the deduction is from 'inhabitants', not from the verse next quoted, the Wilna Gaon deletes 'as it is said'. [Yad Ramah preserves another reading: 'they are saved', that is, if the caravan passing through the city becomes involved in the seduction, they do not share the fate of the inhabitants, but are treated as individual idolators, provided they did not halt for thirty days.] ');"><sup>21</sup></span>

Sefer HaChinukh

From the laws of the commandment is that which they, may their memory be blessed, said (Sanhedrin 111b) that the city does not become an enticed city - meaning, to judge them with the law of an enticed city, the people of which are killed with the sword and their property is burned with the city - until its enticers are two, or more than two, as it is stated (Deuteronomy 13:14), "Wanton men came out, etc."; and that its enticers are from that tribe and from that city, as it is stated, "from among you, and entice you"; and until they entice its majority, and that the enticed be from one hundred up to the majority of the tribe. But if the majority of a tribe is enticed, they are not judged by the law of the enticed city, but rather as individuals who are stoned and their property is for their heirs, as it is stated, "the residents of the city" - and not a small village and not a large [metropolis], and less than a hundred is a small village, and the majority of a tribe is a large [metropolis]. And the law that a city of refuge and so [too,] Jerusalem cannot be made an enticed city, and so [too,] a city that is on the border cannot be made an enticed city; the law of how we make it into an enticed city, and the warning that we send to it through two Torah scholars; that which they said concerning its plaza; that which they said about the properties of the righteous within it who were not enticed with it; the law of consecrated things within it; the law of the fruit of palm trees within it; the law of the properties of the people of another city that are within it or the properties of the people of the enticed city in another place; and the rest of its details are [all] in Tractate Sanhedrin (Chapter 11).
Ask RabbiBookmarkShareCopy
Previous VerseFull ChapterNext Verse