Daily Talk
A woman is betrothed in the morning and goes home to her father's house. She has not moved in, nothing has been consummated, the two of them may never have been alone in a room together. She is a married woman. Another man who touches her is liable to execution by the court, and if her husband wants out he has to compose a document and hand it to her. Why should the whole weight of a marriage arrive before any of the content of it does?
Married Before Anything Has Happened
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About This Talk
Chapter 1 opens Sefer Nashim by recalling that before the Torah was given a man who met a woman in the marketplace and agreed with her to marry could simply bring her home and she was his wife, and that once the Torah was given a man must acquire her as a wife in the presence of witnesses and only then does she become his wife, an acquisition that fulfills a positive commandment and is formalized through money, through a formal document or through relations, of which relations and the document originate in the Torah itself while the effectiveness of money is Rabbinic in origin, the whole process being called erusin or kiddushin and the woman mekudeshet. It then rules that from the moment of that acquisition she is considered married although the bond has not been consummated and she has not entered her husband's home, so that anyone else who is with her is liable to execution by the court and a husband who wishes to end it must compose a get, and that the arrangement the Torah replaced, in which a man paid a woman and departed, is the definition of a harlot, so that relations for the sake of lust without kiddushin carry lashes by Torah law. The chapter then sorts the forbidden relations by weight, beginning with the arayot of Parashat Acharei Mot which carry karet, then twenty shniyot forbidden by the Oral Tradition of which four continue upward or downward without interruption, so that the wife of our Patriarch Jacob is forbidden to any one of us and any one of our wives is forbidden to him, then nine issurei lavin also called issurei kedushah, including the widow to a High Priest and the divorcee to any priest, with the equation of the chalutzah to the divorcee and of the netinim to mamzerim noted as Rabbinic decrees, and finally three prohibitions arising from a positive commandment alone, the first and second generations of Egyptian and Edomite converts and a woman who is not a virgin to a High Priest, since a prohibition derived from a positive commandment has the status of a positive commandment.