daf bit: Gittin 48

[cellio]

The mishna talks about payment of various types of obligations. Compensation for damages must be paid from the best of a man's property, while creditors are paid from medium-grade property. There is a dispute about whether a woman's ketubah is paid from medium-grade or low-grade property (Rabbi Meir says the former). Orphans are paid only from the lowest grade. In any case, however, payment cannot be recovered from mortgaged property if free assets are available, even if those assets are of lower grade. (48b)

The mishna's reasoning on this last point appears to be that it is better to get something with certainty than something better but at risk, but the g'mara does not clarify this point here. There seems an obvious possibility for abuse here, but the g'mara doesn't address it.

I would have thought that the solution to "some of his stuff is better than his other stuff" would have been some sort of valuation system -- that field or those two, etc. I'm not seeing that here.

Comments

[sethg]

All these debts are denominated in money, right? So IIUC the assumption here is that the debtor has a small fertile field, a large field that's not so productive, and a medium-sized field that's in between, with all three fields having the same market value; the question is which field gets seized to cover which kind of debt. (But I haven't read the daf so I might be guessing wrong.)

[cellio]

That makes sense. Thanks.

[kayre]

Is this talking strictly about real estate? Because if it means almost anything else-- cattle, grain, handmade products-- it makes perfect sense to me.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

It refers only to land. And sethg_prime explained well. The person being paid gets x dollars worth of land, whether that is a large swamp or a little bit of good farmland (or an apartment in a fancy neighborhood).