Legal Bills of Divorce

m. Gittin 3:1

70–220

About This Entry

This ruling addresses the specificity and intent with which a bill of divorce must be written in order to legally effectuate divorce. One reason for requiring such specificity is that marital status must be clear in order to prevent unintentional adultery. The rabbis also wanted to prevent accidental or hasty, impulsive divorce because divorce has consequences. A divorced woman cannot marry a priest, so if a woman was already married to a priest and was accidentally divorced from him, they would not be able to remarry.

Any get which is not written [expressly] for the woman [for whom it is intended] is invalid. How is this so? If a man was passing through the street and heard the voice of a scribe dictating, “So-and-so divorces so-and-so from such and such a place,” and he says, “that is my name and that is the name of my wife,” it is not a valid [document] with which to divorce his wife. Moreover, if he wrote [a get] with which to divorce his wife and changed his mind, and a person found him and said to him, “My name is the same as yours, and my wife’s name is the same as your wife’s,” it is not a valid [document with which the second] may divorce his wife. Moreover, if he had two wives with the same name and wrote a get with which to divorce the elder, he may not use it to divorce the younger. Moreover, if he said to the scribe, “Write [a get], and I will divorce whichever I choose,” it is not a valid [document] with which to divorce his wife.

Translated by Joshua Kulp.

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Notes

Words in brackets appear in the original translation.

Credits

m. Gittin 3:1, from Mishnah Yomit, trans. Joshua Kulp, www.sefaria.org. Originally from https://learn.conservativeyeshiva.org. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) License.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 2: Emerging Judaism.