If you build a new house, you are to construct a railing around your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if someone falls from it.
This precept also has reference to the preservation of human life. We know that the roofs of the Jewish houses were fiat, so that they might freely walk upon them. If there were no railings round them, a fall would have been fatal; and every house would have often been a house of mourning.
Here are several laws in these verses which seem to stoop very low, and to take cognizance of things mean and minute. Men's laws commonly do not so: De minimis non curat lex - The law takes no cognizance of little things; but because God's providence extends itself to the smallest affairs, his precepts do so, that even in them we may be in the...
Commenting on Deuteronomy 22:5-12
When thou buildest a new house,.... Which is to be understood of a house to dwell in, not of a granary, barn, or stable, or such like, and every house that is not four cubits square, as Maimonides observes (f): then thou shalt make a battlement for thy roof; in the Talmud (g) it is asked, what is the meaning of, or why is it...