A man in a certain Jewish town had produced a good harvest. His cellar filled with casks of oil pressed from his olives and wine fermented from his grapes. The harvest was private. The tithe owed on it was not. The maaser, the portion set aside for the priests, the Levites, and the poor, was already owed as soon as the produce had been processed. The man delayed. He did not refuse in words, but he did not give.
One day he was seized with a sudden frenzy. The Exempla does not specify whether it was a fit of illness, a moment of temporary madness, or a visitation from a heavenly source. Whatever struck him, it struck him in the cellar. He began to break his own casks. He smashed the vessels of oil and the vessels of wine. The good liquid of an entire harvest poured out onto the packed earth floor. By the time the frenzy left him, he had destroyed what he had refused to share.
The text of the Exempla is brief. It is offered as an exemplum, a short illustrative case, not as a full narrative. The implication is that what the man had refused to give up by choice was taken from him by force. The tithe he would not hand to a Levite went instead to the dirt floor of his own storage room. Nothing was saved. Everyone lost.
The sages of the Talmud returned again and again to the same principle. What you withhold from the needy does not remain in your house. In one way or another, it leaves. The question is only whether you can give it away with a blessing or whether you will watch it break beside your feet. The Exempla's one-sentence story is a quiet warning. Pay the tithe. The other outcomes are worse.