Ketubot 11: Those of lesser value; determining credibility; complacency

Our first Mishna tells us that the ketubot of a number of women should specify that they are entitled to 200 dinars (like all adult women who are virgins) should the marriage end.  These women are not obvious choices: converts, ransomed captives, and freed maidservants who went through these changes in status before the age of three years and one day.  The rabbis use much of today's daf to argue about the implications of this notion.

To begin, the Gemara notes that one can act in someone's interest in their absence but one cannot act against someone's interest in their absence.  Those who have converted to Judaism as minors would be asked to confirm their conversion upon reaching maturity.  But would they choose to do this?  What difference might it make if their parents were Jewish, if only one parent was Jewish, etc.?  The rabbis believe that it would be in a minor's interest to convert to Judaism or to actively choose to stay Jewish.  However, a grown person would be more interested in holding on to her life of licentiousness.  Disturbingly, the rape of one of these young women would lower her value in the ketubot from 200 to 100 dinars.  Just like all Jewish women.

The rabbis are clear: they wanted men to continue to find their wives desirable.  They knew that their rulings could either encourage or discourage men to this end.  

Our second Mishna is more disturbing.  First, it teaches that girls under the age of three years and one day who have intercourse with an adult man, boys under the age of nine years who have intercourse with an adult woman and women whose hymens have been damaged due to 'wood' (foreign objects) are all given ketubot worth 200 dinars.  Second, it teaches that chalutzim, divorced women, and widows have ketubot worth 100 dinars.   This second set of women are not subject to claims regarding their virginity.

The rabbis wonder whether there is a difference between losing one's virginity because of an accidental fall and losing one's virginity due to an act of intimacy.

It is very disturbing to note that a man who has intercourse with a girl younger than three has done... nothing; it is as if one poked an eye.  One tear will be replaced by the next and then the next.  This toddler's hymen will grow right back.  And thus he has done nothing.  Nothing.

Similarly, a boy who has intercourse with a woman renders her to be as if she was injured by a foreign object.  Nothing has changed for him nor for his status.  The action of his penis is what affects change in a grown woman's status.  And the sexual abuse of a boy is not mentioned at all.

The Gemara focuses on what action might have been done to a woman.  The rabbis want to know whether or not the chatan was aware of his kallah's condition before he betrothed her?  If there is a dispute, she may be deemed credible.  But amount of her ketubah might be changed.  

This valuing of human life - of women's lives - is uncomfortable, frightening, even disgusting to read.  As this is the second time that I am learning Ketubot, it is somehow easier to stomach the rabbi's casual conversations about the rape of children and the undervaluing of traumatized women.  Is this how our ancestors have understood women?  Through an increasingly desensitized lens; with complacency and acceptance?