The Order in Which She Asks

About This Talk

Chapter 16 separates the marriage contract from everything else a woman owns, ruling that what she brings in is nedunyah rather than ketubah and is nichsei tzon barzel where the husband carries its loss and gain and nichsei m'log where it stays hers in both directions, and that the word ketubah covers only the fundamental sum and whatever the husband added. It then binds the collection with a series of restrictions the Rambam himself calls leniencies, holding that the sum falls due only on his death or her divorce, that she collects from his inferior land, that a widow swears while holding a sacred article and has even her garments appraised while a woman he chose to divorce swears nothing, that she collects from land alone and not from its later increase, and that she is paid in the coinage of lesser value, before setting against all of it a lien over every acre the husband owns that lets her expropriate from purchasers on an oath instituted so that he should not view the obligation lightly. It records the geonic ordinance extending collection to movable property and the Rambam's refusal to follow it for sons inheriting their mother's ketubah, moves the widow's oath outside the courtroom lest she not be precise with herself, rules that a widow who dies before swearing leaves her heirs nothing, distinguishes the woman who admits part of a payment and must swear from the woman who lowers her own figure and need not, makes possession of the document decisive after a hundred years and silence in her father's house fatal after twenty five unless an heir had been feeding her, believes a woman who tells her husband to his face that he divorced her, believes a husband whose account was worse for him than the lie he could have told, and closes on the widow whose petition is granted or refused according to which half of it she said first.