“If fire breaks out and catches in thorns so that the stacked grain or the standing grain or the field is consumed, he who started the fire shall make full restitution.
6. If fire break out and catch in thorns. This injury is somewhat different from the foregoing, for he who kindles the fire is commanded to make good the damage done by him, although there may have been no willful intention to do harm. For the incendiary who had maliciously destroyed either a cornfield or a vineyard was to be far more severely punished; here, however, mere carelessness is punished.
Fraud and injustice do not enrich a man but impoverish him; if you unjustly keep another's goods, they will not only waste themselves but consume what is your own. The thief who killed or sold what he stole showed his crime complete and hardened, so he pays fivefold or fourfold as his desert.
AI summary
Commenting on Exodus 22:1-6
If fire break out,.... Even though of itself, as Jarchi interprets it: and catch in thorns a thorn hedge or fence, with which cornfields might be en closed: so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; whether it be corn cut down, bound up in sheaves, and laid up in heaps or stacks, or whether it be...