Believed Only While She Stands Alone

About This Talk

The chapter asks who is believed about the end of a marriage, and answers by measuring what the speaker stands to lose. A woman about whom nothing is known who says she was married and is now divorced is believed, since the only source for her being forbidden is her own mouth, but where she and a man have lived openly as husband and wife her claim of divorce will not permit her to remarry, and yet it disqualifies her from the priesthood forever and requires chalitzah rather than yibbum if he dies childless, because she made herself forbidden by her own statements; a get in her hand is accepted without verifying the signatures, the husband's protest that it fell from him and she found it fails since he admits he wrote it for her, while claims of a conditional gift, safekeeping or forgery force her to verify the signatures or produce the witnesses to the transfer, and his own announcement that he divorced her is refused even when she agrees, for fear that he means to trap her into an adulterous second marriage, that the get was void without his knowing, that she speaks brazenly because he accepts her word, or that she does not grasp the prohibition, so the court tells him to divorce her again in its presence. In his presence her claim of a lost get is accepted, because a woman would not be so brazen to his face, and the moment witnesses support her it collapses, since their support makes brazenness possible, leaving her presumed married and forcing her out of a second marriage with the child illegitimate, and the same collapse follows when her husband and the agent corroborate her; where the witnesses speak of a divorce just now the court simply demands the document, where they speak of days ago the get may truly be lost and she survives if she married one of her own witnesses and claims certainty, two who saw against two who did not see bars her if they all share a courtyard yet leaves a contracted marriage standing because people divorce in privacy, an agent holding the get is believed over a husband claiming safekeeping while a lost get leaves the divorce doubtful, and testimony each man gives about himself is no testimony at all, so the woman whom two travelers each call his wife and the other his servant may marry anyone. From the fifteenth halacha the subject turns to the husband who does not return: a woman who travelled with him in peace and returns saying he died is believed on her own word, because she will not invite that ruin on herself when the matter is certain to be revealed, and on that reasoning one witness counts here as two elsewhere while a servant, a woman, a maidservant and hearsay are all admitted by deliberate leniency of the Sages; five women presumed to hate her are refused entirely in either direction, her mother-in-law, her mother-in-law's daughter, a co-wife, her yevamah and her husband's daughter from another marriage, and the disqualification runs in reverse relationships too, while a gentile's remark made in ordinary conversation is accepted and his deliberate testimony is not, and a Jew disqualified by Scriptural law for a transgression is likewise refused as a witness yet heard when speaking casually. The chapter closes on the arithmetic of contradiction, where timing decides: a witness contradicting a permission already granted does not revoke it, two arriving together leave doubt, two against two forces her out unless she married one of her own witnesses and says she is certain, one acceptable witness is not outvoted by any number of rabbinically disqualified ones, among the disqualified the majority rules so eleven prevail over ten because two are reckoned as a hundred only for acceptable witnesses, and a rival wife can neither permit nor forbid her, while one wife saying he died and another saying he was killed frees them both.