Gamliel says — "and the owner of the ox is absolved"—from

Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael Mekhilta Tractate Nezikin 10:16

Curated by The Jewish Mythology Team · Published January 24, 2025

Rabban Gamliel offered a different interpretation of "the owner of the ox is absolved." He argued the tam's owner is absolved from paying the monetary value of a bondservant who is killed by the ox.

His reasoning: both the mued and the tam are stoned when they kill a person. If the mued's owner must pay for the value of a killed bondservant (as established in (Exodus 21:32), which requires thirty shekels for a bondservant), then the tam's owner should logically face the same obligation. The shared punishment of stoning would generate a shared obligation of payment.

The Torah preempts this inference. "The owner of the ox is absolved" — specifically, absolved from the bondservant-value payment that the mued owner must make. The tam's lighter legal status means its owner escapes this particular financial burden.

Rabban Gamliel, Ben Azzai, and Rabbi Akiva each identified a different specific obligation from which the tam's owner is absolved. Their disagreement is not about whether the owner is absolved — the verse clearly says so — but about which obligation the absolution targets. Each rabbi traced a different logical chain that would have created a different financial requirement, and each identified the Torah's absolution clause as blocking that specific chain. The word "absolved" appears once in the text, but the Mekhilta shows it doing triple duty.

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