He May Never Send Her Away

About This Talk

The chapter sets out the law of the man who issues a slanderous report, pinning it to an exact speech act: he comes to court claiming he found his bride not to be a virgin, that he investigated and determined she was unfaithful after he consecrated her, and that these are the witnesses, and only that second half carries weight, since a bare claim of non-virginity without an allegation of adultery after betrothal, or witnesses who come forward on their own rather than being brought by him, leaves him free of these penalties. Because the charge is capital, the case is heard only in Temple times before a court of twenty three judges, where rape and seduction are heard at all times before three. If the charge stands she is stoned; if the father's witnesses nullify the husband's by placing them elsewhere, those witnesses are stoned, the husband is flogged, and he pays one hundred sela'im of pure silver to her father, or to her directly if she is an orphan rather than to her father's heirs; and if a third pair nullify the father's, the maiden and the father's witnesses are stoned. The window is narrow: only a na'arah is covered, derived from the full spelling of the word, so slandering a girl below majority or a bogeret carries nothing, and a man who delays until she becomes a bogeret escapes both lashes and fine even where his witnesses place the act in her na'arah months, although she would still be stoned as a bogeret because her liability runs from the act. No penalty attaches where a na'arah would get no fine for rape or seduction, nor where she was converted or freed below the age of three since the verse requires an Israelite maiden conceived and born within Israel, nor where he divorced and reconsecrated her and slanders the first betrothal, nor where he slanders his yevamah about her betrothal to his brother. When the penalties do land it is a positive commandment that she remain his wife forever, even if she is blind or a leper, and divorcing her transgresses the prohibition that he may never send her away, so the court compels remarriage and flogs him only where remarriage has become impossible; yet real immodesty or a prohibition between them ends the marriage with a get, because she may not wish to remain and then both commandments are kept, and wherever he is not liable he may divorce her if he wishes. The Rambam closes by reading the Torah's spreading of the garment as a euphemism for debating the private aspects of the matter, and the father's evidence of his daughter's virginity as the nullifying witnesses themselves, and notes that before consecration the Torah holds her not liable at all, the man owing only a financial penalty whether he seduced or violated her.