The Origins of the Ketubah: Deferred Payment or Cash up Front?

THE ORIGINS OFTHE KETUBAH: DEFERRED PAYMENT OR CASH UP FRONT? Deborah Greniman The giving of the ketubah, a written contract specifying the material obligations of husband to wife, is a well-known element of the Jewish wedding ceremony. In the ketubah, the groom pledges not only to maintain his bride for the duration of the marriage "according to the custom of Jewish husbands" but also to give her a monetary marriage settlement, designated by the biblical word mohar, "brideprice," at an unspecified future date. AU of his present and future property is considered surety for the pledge, which, according to Jewish law, can be made good upon the dissolution of the marriage by way of his predecease or by way of divorce. In such a case he will also be obliged to return the bride's nedunya, dowry - the value of the property that she brought into the marriage. The ketubah, in some form, seems to have been customary at least from the period of the Tannaim, the Jewish scholars in Palestine in the early centuries of the first millenium CE, in whose time the first post-biblical compilations of Jewish law were redacted. Its validity both as a necessary element of the marriage ceremony and as a legally binding contract holds until this day. Its explicit intent is to record and safeguard the bride's right to a financial settlement in the event of divorce or widowhood, and it is also presented in the Talmud (BT Ketubot 11a, Yevamot 89a) as a rabbinic enactment aimed at hindering hasty divorce. However, many a Jewish woman may smile ruefully at the idea that she is "protected" by this arrangement. Under Jewish law, then and now, the husband is empowered in marriage both by his exclusive prerogative to initiate divorce and by his exclusive control of all the property belonging to both spouses until the moment of the dissolution of the marriage. Over time, this has meant that the husband's near-absolute power to withhold his agreement to divorce has made his prior commitment to a financial settlement negotiable or 84Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. © 2001 77ie Origins ofthe Ketubah even irrelevant. In the case of a contested divorce, the woman may well find herself having to pay off her husband as the price of her freedom. Given these painful aspects ofJewish divorce, my curiosity was piqued by the following baraita quoted in the Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 82b, which refers to the regulation of the ketubah at the very outset of the rabbinic period, in the first century BCE, while the Temple still stood: Rav Yehuda said: At first they would give1 a virgin two hundred [zuz] and a widow a maneh [i.e., 100 zuz], but men would grow old without taking wives. Until Shimon ben Shetah ordained: AU of his property is surety for her ketubah [i.e., he need not give it to her at the time of the marriage]. It has also been taught thus in a baraita: At first they would give a virgin two hundred [zuz] and a widow a maneh, but men would grow old without taking wives. They ordained that [the money] would be kept in her father's home. But then, when he became angry at her, he would say: "go to your ketubah" [i.e., go back to your father's home as a divorcée and take your ketubah]. They ordained that it would be kept in her father-in-law's home [where the young couple lived]. Rich [brides] would make it into baskets of silver and gold; poor ones would make it into a chamber pot. But then, when he became angry at her, he would say: "Take your ketubah and go." Until Shimon ben Shetah ordained that [the groom] must write for her: "AU ofmy property is surety for her ketubah."2 What interested me about this text was its remembrance of a time in which the bride had received the ketubah as an advance payment. If this were really the case, might she have been better off, I wondered, having the money up front, rather than having it left...