Jan. 7th, 2016

cellio: (talmud)
A 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.)

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