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Erev Tov friends,
Perek 10 opens with the awful situation in which a woman receives a report that her husband has died abroad, but she has no visual evidence of this (as one would imagine would be the case in Mishnaic times in this kind of situation). On the one hand, the Sages would like to enable her to remarry based upon the report, but on the other hand there is not much they can do about the legal situation in which she would find herself should her "late husband" unexpectedly reappear, quite alive. There are two circumstances mentioned in our Mishnayot in which she is permitted to remarry despite the absence of definitive evidence:
(1) If the testimony concerning her husband's death is provided by two qualified witnesses, in which case the woman needs no formal permission from a Bet Din. The Mishna refers to this (with the potentially misleading misnomer) as "marrying without permission".
(2)If the testimony is provided by only one witness - and not necessarily one that the halacha usually regards as a "qualified" witness - but a Bet Din regards that one witness as credible. This is referred to in the Mishna as "marrying with the permission of the Beit Din".
As you will see in the many details of the opening Mishnayot, a very unfortunate situation arises if after the woman remarries, her husband rematerializes. Now, despite having been granted permission to remarry by a Beit Din, she has much of the technical legal status as an adulteress, insofar as now being forbidden to both men, and needing to be divorced by both, without entitlement to her ketubah. The Gemara explains that this is so because the Beit Din explicitly conditions its permission upon the woman herself doing her due diligence concerning her husband's status. To be clear, she is NOT regarded as an adulteress in the sense of having committed a capital crime, but it's still a pretty rough deal unfortunately, in particular for any children she may have had with her second husband.
Mishna 3 explores the specific "yibbum" implications in a variation of the above case, one in which a woman receives a tragic report of both her husband and the only child they have together having died overseas.
Mishnayot 4 and 5 explore a mirror image sort of case, in which a man hears a report of his wife having died overseas, and he then marries her sister ("wife's sister" is an incest category only when both sisters are still alive.) The halachik implications of this report turning out to be mistaken aren't quite as thoroughly dire as in the previous Mishnayot, as the permissibility of male polygamy (until Rabbenu Gershom of the 11th century banned it) precludes the legal category of adultery from entering the consideration. (It's safe to presume that the case in Mishna 5 never actually happened, and is simply an intellectual exercise.)
The perek concludes with the peculiar status of a nine (or 10 -12) year old boy who functions as a "yavvam." While in the view of Biblical law he is regarded as not having reached sexual maturity and is therefore irrelevant to the proceedings, Rabbinic law regarded such a boy as potentially capable of sexual activity and therefore a person of legal relevance in this context. As you will see though, his activities, though recognized by Rabbinic law, will invariably be legally outweighed by the Biblically recognized activities of his older brothers.
As advertised, Yevamot is kind of a slog. So thanks for hanging in, and we're more than halfway there!
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