Shabbat 6: Four Domains on Shabbat

The rabbis discuss the public and private domains, the karmelit and the exempt domains.  For the purposes of Shabbat, they define the private domain as an area of at least four by four handbreaadths that is separated by a partition that is ten handbreadths high - this could be a fence or a ditch.    A public domain has streets, marketplaces and other places where multitudes gather.  It is at least sixteen cubits wide, not roofed, and without a wall.  If there is a wall, it can still be a public domain but only if the streets run from gate to gate and the gates remain unlocked at night.  Further, Tosafot and others agree that there must be at least 600,000 people that pass through it each day.  However, rabbis have been lenient with that interpretation.  

A karmelit is a place not used by many people with an area greater than four by four handbreadths, three to ten handbreadths high, with no partitions.  The corner beside the public domain and a covered public domain has the legal status of a karmelit as well.  It is forbidden to carry from a karmelit to a private domain or to a public domain - or vice versa - on Shabbat.  We are also prohibited from carrying more than four cubits within the karmelit.

We know that carrying from the private to the public domain or vice versa on Shabbat makes one liable to bring a sin-offering.  If this is done intentionally, one is liable to receive karet*,  and if there were witnesses and one was forewarned, one is liable to stoning.

The fourth domain is the exempt domain.  It is the threshold between one domain and another.  From that place one is permitted to take and give objects from/to a homeowner in the private domain.  One may also take and give items from/to poor people standing in the public domain.  One must not transfer an object from the homeowner to the poor person or vice versa.  However, we are told that if one transfers something, it is not actually a breach of Torah law and so all three are exempt from liability.

The rabbis discuss related issues, like posts and beams, which might be used to mark domains.  They also consider where eiruvin, boundaries joining different areas, might be set up between adjoining domains.  

At the end of our daf, the rabbis discuss how a sea, a valley, the colonnade and the karmelit might all be in the general category of karmelit where they are not like the public domain nor like the private domain.  

* taken to represent the punishment of an early death, a spiritual death, excommunication of some sort, or the death of one's child