The Fine That Was Never a Price

About This Talk

Chapter 2 attaches money to something that cannot be priced and then spends its last words guarding against the pricing. The fifty silver pieces of the verse cover only the pleasure of the act, so a seducer owes three payments, the fine plus boshet for humiliation and pegam for damage, while a man who forced her owes four, adding tza'ar for pain, because the verse describing force uses a word of oppression that the seduction verse does not use; the fine is identical whether she is the daughter of the High Priest or of a convert, but the other three must be evaluated by the court, humiliation according to the standing of both parties and what her father and family would have paid to prevent this with this particular man, damage as the difference in what she would fetch, in the Rambam's own comparison, as a maidservant sold before and after, and pain by her youth and size weighed against his age and size. A seducer pays humiliation and damage immediately and owes the fine only if he does not marry her, while a rapist pays all four and marries at once and may never divorce her, and if she leaves the marriage or is widowed she receives nothing further. Ten categories of girls carry no fine, among them a bogeret, one who dissolved a childhood marriage by refusal, a divorcee, an aylonit, a girl who is not competent, one who cannot hear or speak, a convert, a captive, a freed slave and one of tarnished reputation; ordinarily no fine means no humiliation or damage either, but rape of a bogeret or of a girl who used mi'un still owes humiliation, damage and pain, rape of a girl who is not competent or cannot hear or speak still owes pain, and seduction of any of them owes nothing at all. Where two men were involved the order of events decides who bears the damage and who bears humiliation alone. No fine is ever levied on a man's own admission, and an admission exempts him even if witnesses arrive afterward, though his admission still obligates humiliation and damage, and a flat denial of her claim costs him a rabbinic oath; where she claims force and he claims seduction he has admitted part of the claim, so he swears a Scriptural oath over the pain and pays the damage and the humiliation. The payments go to her father, since all monetary benefit of her youth is his, and the chapter tracks the shifting claim with care: she collects if she waits until bagrut, marriage or her father's death before suing, her father collects if she sued while he was alive even if she later matures or marries, and her brothers inherit the claim if he dies after she filed, while a girl consecrated and then divorced takes the fine alone. The Rambam then rules in his own voice on the verse forbidding a father to defile his daughter, holding that a father who makes his daughter available in advance for payment has turned a penalty meant for the uncommon and the unplanned into a market, in which case no fine is owed at all and both parties are liable to lashes.