Introduction
The mishnah which opens this week’s daf discusses various issues of a woman’s collecting her ketubah.
If she comes to the court and brings evidence that she has been divorced, she can collect her ketubah. The Talmud will discuss how to prevent this woman from subsequently presenting her ketubah and requesting to be paid again.
If however, she brings a ketubah without a get, and the husband claims that he paid the ketubah but lost his receipt, the husband is believed and she cannot recover her ketubah payment. Similarly, if a creditor comes to court with a debt document but has no prosbul, which is a document that allows debts to be collected even after the sabbatical year, and the creditor claims that he had a prosbul and lost it, he is not paid back. The reason is that we suspect that he never wrote a prosbul in the first place.
Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel discusses “the time of danger” usually understood as referring to the Bar-Kochva revolt, which was crushed by the Romans in 135 C.E. From that time and onward it was dangerous for Jews to travel while in possession of a get or a prosbul because the Roman authorities had decreed against the observance of the Jewish religion. Therefore during that time period a woman could collect her ketubah without a get and a creditor could collect his debt without a prosbul.
Introduction
Today’s mishnah explains how we prevent the woman from collecting twice, the first time without a ketubah, the second time with.
According to the mishnah, the woman may collect her ketubah by producing a get. The problem is that she could bring her ketubah out after her husband’s death and then collect the ketubah a second time. The fact that we are not concerned about this means we must write a receipt that could be preserved by the heirs.
Rav answers that receipts are not generally written. A woman can collect with a get only if this is a place where ketubot are not generally written.
Shmuel says that she may collect the ketubah by producing the get even in a place where a ketubah is generally written. Nevertheless, he too agrees that we do not write a receipt. So how do we prevent her from claiming the ketubah twice? When she collects with the get she will have to prove that he did not write for her a ketubah, if it is in a place where they generally write a ketubah. If she comes to collect her payment without a ketubah and there is no custom to write one, then she can collect without the ketubah unless her husband proves that he did write one for her.
Rav also says that our mishnah applies even to a place where they do write ketubot. With the get she can collect the base amount of 200/100 owed to every woman. To collect the additional amount she would need to produce the ketubah itself. If after collecting the base amount with a get, she later on produces her ketubah, she will only receive the additional amount.
The Talmud raises a difficulty on Rav from the mishnah. This mishnah makes sense according to Shmuel. The woman comes with a ketubah but no get. The husband claims he paid back the ketubah earlier when he divorced her. The woman claims he did not. Why is the husband believed? Shmuel would say that this is in a place where a ketubah was not written and the husband claims that he did write her a ketubah, and that he paid it back when he divorced her. He lost this receipt. The important point here is that since this is a place where the ketubah was not written, we can understand why he would have had a receipt that he could have lost.
However, according to Rav she would be able to collect the extra because at the time of divorce she could only collect the base.
Joseph explains that the husband is believed because he has a type of legal claim called a “migo.” This means that he is believed because he could have made a better claim. He is believed to say that he paid the ketubah, because he could claim that he never divorced her in the first place.