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Erev Shabbat Shalom chevra,
The fourth perek really underscores just how challenging it was to prevent Yom Tov from devolving into something that looked and felt much like a workday. This was true in terms of transporting foodstuffs to the home, (when people didn't have refrigerators, freezers, and preservatives), and in terms of the need to fire up the oven and stove. Though we never think about this when we are cooking on Yom Tov in the modern day, for most of human history cooking involved gathering and chopping wood, and rubbing objects together to create sparks.
The four "tools" that the Mishna enlists in order to limit "work work" while making sure that's there's still plenty of room for cooking fresh and tasty Yom Tov food are:
(1) requiring that the methods of foodstuff transport are not the same as the ones used when one has just completed a significant market transaction (Mishna 1)
(2) limiting the collection of firewood to that which was "ready and implicitly designated" for Yom Tov use, rather than literally leaving the entire field open (Mishnayot 2, 3, and 6)
(3) limiting what tools can be used in the chopping of the wood (Mishna 3), and
(4) requiring that a fire be lit before Yom Tov, from which subsequent
flames are lit. (Mishna 7)
An interesting note about the latter: Unlike on Shabbat, this prohibition to produce a flame from scratch on Yom Tov is rabbinic in origin, as is implicit in the above presentation. This distinction actually became relevant to two Halachik questions I was asked in recent months, one having to do with the permissibility of eating food that somebody else had cooked on Yom Tov over a flame that they had ignited on Yom Tov, and the other had to do with the permissibility of using a tankless water heater on Yom Tov (which "ignites" on Yom Tov in response (at least to some degree) to the tap being turned on, but which is obviously not being ignited by the user directly. (Always happy to share more :)
Shabbat Shalom!
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