Daily Talk
A woman receives a hundred zuz for the rest of her life whether or not anything ever happened, and the Rambam says outright that the Sages fixed the number so that nobody would have to be asked. A woman who cannot hear is given no marriage contract at all, and the reason is that otherwise no man would marry her. Then the chapter's hardest ruling turns out to rest on a claim about cooking. Why does a chapter this exposed keep deciding its cases by refusing to look?
The Feast He Would Not Spoil
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About This Talk
Chapter 11 sets the size of the marriage contract and then the narrow conditions under which anyone may dispute it, ruling that a virgin widowed, divorced or released by chalitzah out of erusin alone carries two hundred zuz while one who had been wed carries a hundred, that a freed maidservant, a convert and a redeemed captive carry two hundred only where that happened before three years and a day, and that the hundred is fixed whether or not they engaged in relations because the presumption is accepted as fact and the question will therefore not be asked. It grants two hundred to a girl who had relations below the age of three because she will heal and be a virgin like all others, and to a woman whose partner was a boy below nine, and it withholds a ketubah entirely from a woman who is a deaf mute expressly so that a man would not refrain from marrying her, while binding a husband who chooses to write such a wife ten thousand zuz. It then confines the claim denying virginity to a bride entitled to two hundred, forecloses it where the groom entered into privacy with his arusah before the wedding, believes her uncorroborated account of a fall or of rape after consecration against a husband whose objection is a guess rather than an absolute claim, and orders an investigation that looks first at her family's history of bleeding, then at illness, then at hunger, feeding her and letting her recover before the couple try again. The Rambam rejects the geonic reading for a bogeret on the strength of many manuscripts, rules that the husband is nevertheless believed where nothing is proven because a man will not labor to prepare a wedding feast and then mar it, closes the window immediately where the couple entered privacy and at thirty days where they did not, preserves the additional sum for her on her oath, and requires a husband who remains married after the forfeiture to write a new contract of a hundred zuz, since a man may not live with his wife for even one moment without a ketubah.