Bava Batra 168: Payments, Fairness and Parchment

Why did our last Mishna say that husbands should pay the scribe?  The person who writes the get should give the get.  But the Sages note that women now pays the scribe for the get.  This was enacted because husbands might delay paying for the divorce.  The fact that the halacha was changed suggests that husbands were in fact doing just that - another tradition that has been a humiliation of the Jewish community for thousands of years.  

Our last Mishna shared a number of guidelines regarding other documents. The Gemara walks through he reasoning behind each of these other halachot.  In each of these cases, the rabbis point out that the party who benefits from the arrangement does not need added protections.  These halachot were created to balance the power dynamic between the two parties with their documents.  The rabbis also consider whether parties can be forced to share the cost of the scribe.  In my reading, the most heartening of all of this commentary is the discussion of writing two documents so that neither party would be upset viewing the claims of the other party over and over again.

The Gemara also discusses the asmachta, the exaggerated promise, which may or may not be binding.  

A new Mishna states that if a document has faded, one finds witnesses who know what was written and brings them to the beit din.  The Beit Din then writes that the document has faded, that it was written on a particular day, and the names of its witnesses.

The Gemara discusses possible cases to illustrate this Mishna.  When is further proof required?  We learn that a torn document is invalid, and that an erased or smudged document that is still legible is valid.  The rabbis teach us that a torn document is one torn by a person and that a document "torn by itself" is torn in any other way.  When a beit din destroys a document, is it torn where the critical information is written?  Or is it torn both lengthwise and widthwise?

A story is told of people who took people's land forcefully and then asked Abaye to reflect this new ownership in official contracts.  Abaye refused.  After being pressured, Abaye instructed the scribe to create new documents but on erased parchment where the witnesses would sign on new parchment.  These documents would be invalid.  The rabbis argued that the new writing could be erased and the original writing on the old parchment could be used illegally.  Abaye responded that the scribe himself would write the aleph-beit on new parchment and then erase it to create these documents on erased parchment.