If you have an ox that was tam (innocuous) and was worth 100 zuz (a coin), and it gored and killed an ox that was worth 200 zuz, the damage here is 200. But since it was a shor tam (innocuous ox) that caused the damage, only 50% of that has to be paid. So the owner of that shor tam owes 100 zuz in damages. In this case, the carcass—the dead body of the ox—was worth nothing, so the total loss here is 200 zuz. And, as we said, the damager has to pay 100 zuz in damages. The injured party, the owner of the ox that was killed, takes the entire damaging ox, because it happens to be worth the same amount. The damaging ox, the shor tam, was worth 100 zuz. He is owed 100 zuz, so that ox becomes the property of the victim.
The next case has a little bit of a different valuation. It says that a shor tam was worth 200 zuz and killed an animal that was worth 200 zuz. So the amount that the owner of the damaging ox now has to pay is 100 zuz. But he can't simply hand over his ox, because his ox was worth 200 zuz. And here, too, the body of the dead ox was worth nothing. This is what the Pasuk (verse) was talking about: they should split the living ox and divide the money in half, since in this situation the damager owed 100 zuz, which was half the value of the damage he caused to the other party. But the living ox was worth 200 zuz, so he couldn't simply hand over that ox, as we said, because he would be paying more. Therefore, the victim—the owner of the ox that was killed—becomes a joint partner in the living ox. They sell the living ox and split the money between them in order to take care of the 100 zuz he was owed.
Rabbi Yehuda is going to disagree with this. Rabbi Yehuda says, “You're right about the actual law here: the living ox is worth 100 zuz. The victim here would get 50% of the worth of the living ox. The problem becomes how you read the Pesukim. You explained the first part of the Pasuk perfectly, where it says they should sell the living ox and divide the money between them. But you didn't take care of the second part of the Pasuk, which said, ‘And the dead one as well you should divide in half.’”
Rabbi Yehuda asks, “Rabbi Meir, according to you, what is the situation they're talking about when dividing a dead ox? It can't be the situation you were talking about above, because the dead ox was worth nothing. So what situation are you talking about? What is the Pasuk talking about at the end, where it says that you should also split the dead carcass?” I'm talking about a situation where you have an ox that was worth 200 zuz that gored another ox that was worth 200 zuz, and the carcass of the dead animal here was worth 50 zuz.
So in this situation, the victim had an ox worth 200 zuz, but the carcass was still worth 50 zuz, so the damage to his property was 150 zuz. In this situation, the damager is obligated to pay 75 zuz to the victim. The body of the ox here belongs to the victim, but in order to make the arrangement happen in an orderly fashion, we sell both the living ox and the dead ox, and then divide the money. The damager takes half the value of the living ox. That's 100 zuz. And then he also takes half the value of the dead ox, which is another 25 zuz, for a total of 125 zuz. The victim also takes half of the living ox, which is 100 zuz. And the victim takes half of the living ox and half of the dead ox, which is another 25 zuz, so he ends up with 125 zuz. Everybody ends up with this equal amount of 125. The 125 ends up being half of the total loss, which was 150. Half of that is 75, plus the 50 that he was owed for the carcass of the dead ox, so he ends up with the 125 zuz and has been compensated for half of his loss. He pays off the debt he lost, and when that happened, there was another 10 million because of the loss. And then, when he comes and something is finally given back to him, it's more than...