daf bit: Gittin 24
Jan. 7th, 2016 08:51 amA bill of divorce (get) must be written carefully and precisely,
so a husband hired (and I believe still hires) a scribe to prepare the
document. (This is similar to how, today, many hire a lawyer to prepare
a will.) The mishna teaches: any bill of divorce that was not written
specifically for the woman being divorced is invalid. If a scribe is
practicing and writes a get for Ploni to divorce Sarah, and a man
says "I'm Ploni and my wife is Sarah and I want to divorce her", he
can't use that document. Similarly, if a man wrote (or hired a scribe
to write) a get to divorce his wife and then changed his mind,
he can't pass it along for somebody else with the same name to use -- so
even though it was written with the intention of divorcing (rather than
practicing, as in the first case), it still doesn't count. And further, if
a man has two wives with the same name, he can't tell the scribe to write
the name and he'll decide later which one to divorce; it has to be written
about a specific wife. (24a-b)
On 26a, the next mishna is going to talk about forms -- even in rabbinic times, apparently scribes wrote out documents with blanks to fill in the names and dates later. There is a dispute about whether you can do this with a get.
(Today's daf is 25.)