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Perek Ten puzzles through cases in which there are multiple financial claims that are being presented against a man’s estate, including the Ketubah claims of one or more of the man's widows. And the problem is that there may not be enough funds there to satisfy all of these claims. In such cases the Mishna wonders, who among the claimants receives priority? (The Mishna makes the puzzles more interesting through positing multiple wives, among other things.)
Here are the important ideas in play:
(1) One of the baked-in financial terms of marriage (remember Mishna 4:10) is that if a wife pre-deceases her husband, when the husband himself later dies and his assets fall to his sons (who may include sons from different mothers!), the sons of the wife who pre-deceased the man may claim the value of their mother’s ketubah outright , i.e. as a sum set aside for them before the man’s assets get divided up among all of his heirs. What we will see in our Mishnayot is that the sons’ claim to their mother's ketubah amount takes second place to the claim of a surviving widow who is now seeking her Ketubah. This is because the entirety of the estate is mortgaged to a (living) wife’s Ketubah, and the sons from the long-ago marriage have the same status as any other creditor, i.e. they wait in line after the surviving wife (or wives) receive their Ketubah payment.
(2) In a case in which multiple widows are seeking their ketubah payment from the estate (and again, we are positing a case of limited resources), the wife whose ketubah has the earliest date takes precedence, and then chronologically on from there. Mishna 5 makes reference to Ketubot that may have had the same date, but in which the time-of-day was recorded, again allowing us to determine which claim precedes which.
(3) Mishna 4 takes up the case of multiple widows who happened to have had different amounts of money specified in their respective ketubot. There, the effort is made to first ensure that each receives a fair share of “minimum Ketubah”, and then we go forom there in figuring our the fairest distribution of the amounts that went beyond “minimum Ketubah”.
(4) Mishna 6 is actually funny, constructing a case that yields an inescapable legal loop that just keeps looping around. Puzzle through the Mishna and smile!
Thank you to everyone who joined us for Sunday's Zoom shiur with Rabbi Broyde! It was really terrific.
And please save the date for our next Zoom shiur, with Rabbi Shlomo Weissman the administrator of the Beth Din of America, on March 17th. Save the date!
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