his failure to dispel the possibility of a lapse and other possibilities where these are more apparent, and his departure from wording that would unequivocally exclude a lapse in every case, in favour of wording that more clearly indicates a restriction than merely excludes a lapse in certain cases, are conclusive evidence that this was not what he intended.

A parallel would be a man saying to his slave: “Honour Zayd. If he is righteous, honour him.” Zayd is not righteous, so the servant does not honour him. His master then says to him: “You have disobeyed my command. Did I not order you to honour him?”

The servant replies: “You told me: ‘If he is righteous, honour him.’”

The master says: “I only said this so that you would not imagine that I hate righteous people and therefore refrain from honouring him despite his righteousness. I was excluding the possibility of an exception in this particular case.”

Would such an explanation be accepted from a rational person? Would the servant be accused of negligence? Or would he say to his master: “This wording indicates a restriction. Had you intended the command to apply generally, you should have said: ‘Honour him even if he is not righteous,’ since honouring a righteous person would then follow all the more clearly; or: ‘Honour him even if he is righteous,’ if he is truly dear to you.”

Likewise, here the disputant says: “The founder transferred the share to the members of the tier, whether or not the deceased had a child.”

When asked, “Why, then, did he qualify the transfer by saying: ‘Provided that, if any of them dies leaving no child, his share shall pass to the members of the tier’?” he replies: “To exclude the possibility of a lapse in this case, but not in the case in which there is even greater reason to exclude it.”

He may then be told: “The wording would have been