If the owner of the third says, “I do not want it,” what do we say to the owner of the sixth? We say: Take the share of the owner of the half, and you will then have four out of six. If he says, “I cannot afford it,” we say: then there is no right of pre-emption. This is why he said: “If one of them waives it, the other must either take the whole of it or leave it.”

The scholars call this shared entitlement a case of competing claims: if each of them demands his right, he competes with the others; but if he relinquishes his right, it falls to the others. This is because it is a case of competing claims: when each of them demands his right, they contend over it, whereas if one waives it, it reverts to the others.

His statement, “If two people purchase the share of one person, or the reverse, or if one person purchases two portions from two plots of land in a single transaction, the pre-emptor may take one of them”: an example of the first scenario is a piece of land jointly owned by two men, one of whom sells his share in the land to two men. We say that the pre-emptor may take the share of one of the two men but not the other, because in this case neither of them is harmed: one has had his share taken through pre-emption—which is the right of the partner—while the other retains his share in full. Ownership is then between two persons, since we have removed the third by taking his share through pre-emption.

If the one whose share was not taken says, “This harms me,” we say: It does not harm you. Originally, you owned a quarter, and that quarter remains; no new partner has been introduced to you, for the original partner who did not sell is still present.