No Room for Two Meanings

About This Talk

A chapter on how a bill of divorce must be written, and it turns out to be a chapter about never leaving a woman in doubt. A get must be written in a substance that leaves a permanent impression, ink, sikra, kumus or kankantum, and is void in beverages or fruit juices or in gallnut juice on gallnut-treated parchment where the writing would not stand out, while lead, a stylus and charcoal pass only after the fact. The surface is almost unrestricted, paper full of erasures, unfinished parchment, a potsherd, leaves, a servant's arm, a cow's horn, provided the husband hands over the servant, the cow or the sheet itself before witnesses, and a get tattooed on a servant in her possession works even unwitnessed because a tattoo cannot be forged, though if that servant was known to be the husband's the divorce is in doubt, since possession of a living being proves nothing. Cutting the form of the letters into stone or metal is writing, proved from the iron pen of Jeremiah, and cutting from the back so the letters project forward is valid, but hewing out the inside of a letter and around it so that it stands in relief like lettering on a gold coin is void, because the letter was never formed. Any language and any script are permitted and two witnesses may sign in two languages, yet a text split between two languages is unacceptable; the wording may carry no second meaning and the hand must be clear enough for children of average intelligence to read, which is why the scribe omits the yud from three words so they cannot be read as a lawsuit, an accusation of adultery or a jest, writes three yuddin in two others so the man does not appear to address two women, and elongates the vavin of v'chadu, terukhin and shevukin so the release does not become a condition or a reversal, failure in any of which leaves the get unacceptable rather than void. The last section holds the document to one woman, for her and not for her and her companion, voiding a joint declaration even before witnesses while permitting one scroll that names each release separately, and sets out the two independent roads of verification, the signatures or witnesses to the handover, the latter carrying a get through interlineations in its essential portions and even a court-style tear, but failing in the one case where the sheet below a first column was cut so that nobody can tell whether the second column continues it.