György Spiró - Captivity

On some law-days they might have nothing to do; they would sit in the shade, snacking on the challah baked by the master’s wife, sipping wine and scratching, the master dispensing pearls of wisdom. But there would be other occasions they were called on to make decisions on two or three matters, in which case they would have to deliberate hard, with their brows furrowed in deep thought. The master’s wife served the challah and wine but otherwise was not to be seen; she had no right to participate. The closing of the day’s affairs was dinner, the master’s wife serving it with a surly look, slapping it down and departing. Master Jehuda, Esdras, Johanen, and Uri would consume the food and drink, then the two magistrates would leave and Master Jehuda would ask Uri what he thought — whether they had done well in sorting out that day’s business, and whether they had served the law in a manner that was pleasing to the Lord — and would sit smugly as Uri told him that they had.

It was around this time, toward the end of the day, that the assistants would come to the house and give an account of what they had done that day, whether they had finished this or that chair or couch or table, whether they had managed to sell it, and to whom, which adze or knife had become blunted and whether they had been able to whet it anew. It was never news of major matters that they reported, but it was always embellished and made to sound important, and Master Jehuda took pleasure in the details.

The people who requested advice or were in litigation were also interested in the tiny details. Uri never ceased to be amazed at the questions. To whom does fruit hanging over a fence from a tree on the other side belong? To whom does water situated on the boundary line between two properties belong? Whose duty was it to repair the cistern? Who should pay the cost of a broken vase, a slave’s owner or the slave himself? Was it permissible to slaughter a neighbor’s stray chicken? What punishment was due to a slave boy who fell asleep while watching a flock and let a sheep go missing? What was the owner’s liability? But then there were also some more serious issues with which the judges might wrestle for weeks.

The three of them were charged with determining whether a firstborn animal brought before them was ritually pure and flawless and therefore fit to be handed over to the priests as a sacrificial offering.

Three of them were needed because none of them was a kosher butcher. A firstborn lamb, calf, chick, or any other clean animal species would be carefully examined: the ears to check they were not damaged, likewise the mouth and nose; the legs to check whether they were broken, and the tail too; the eyes to ensure they were not dropsical or inflamed and the white had not infiltrated the black of the pupil, which was an imperfection (though not the other way around because any color was allowed to infiltrate white, white being clean). Uri’s presence inspired them to conduct even more thorough investigations than usual.

There was one religious matter that they pondered on for a long time.

A man by the name of Ezekiel had died unexpectedly, but his widowed wife, Martha, mother of three sons and many daughters, did not wish to marry her deceased husband’s elder brother, Thomas, which she would normally be obliged to do by the rules of levirate marriage unless she underwent the ceremony of halizah .

“Such a thing still exists?” Uri asked.

Yes and no, he was told. It still existed under the law, but was not common by tradition. Still, custom had to defer to the law, seeing as the Lord had commanded that two people who did not desire each other’s bodies should not be united. Out of that there would be no proliferation. The Creator had commanded that people should multiply, and that command took priority over the levirate, which was compulsory of course, but except for when a woman was infertile, since then she had no value to the Lord.

In such a case, Master Jehuda explained, the usual practice was for the wife to take the brother-in-law’s left sandal and publicly spit in front of him as a sign that she did not wish to enter a levirate marriage. Because her dead husband’s family could not tolerate such humiliation, by this coarse act she would extricate herself from their ownership and return to her father’s family. Even if her father had long since died, her male relatives were obliged to accept her under their ownership, a woman being a man’s property through the wish of the Lord, who also subordinated the beasts to man. The same would happen if a dead man’s brother did not wish to marry the widow, Master Jehuda explained, except in that case the brother would take off the dead man’s sandal and spit in front of the widow and the halizah would be in force.

However, in this case, Thomas, the elder brother, was unwilling to validate the halizah, saying that his younger brother had wished to dissolve his marriage bond and had gone as far as having a bill, a get, written out and signed by two witnesses. The widow had hidden it but he had somehow found it. The woman ought to be regarded as divorced, he argued, and the removal of the sandal and the spitting should be regarded as invalid.

Jehuda said that they would give some thought to the matter, and Thomas left. He was a swarthy, vigorous man with dark eyes and a menacing gait.

All four of them carefully studied the divorce instrument. It was scrawled in Aramaic, but still legible.

It was the first time Uri had seen a divorce bill.

“What do you make of it?” Jehuda inquired.

Uri shrugged his shoulders.

“A divorce bill has to contain the signatures of the husband and two witnesses and to state what it is, for what purpose, and when it was written,” said Jehuda.

“Those things are all present,” said Uri.

“It’s a forgery,” Johanen declared roundly.

“I believe so too,” Master Jehuda said. “But then what proof do we have?”

“Thomas is always lying,” said Johanen, “even when he is not speaking.”

Esdras confirmed this.

The two magistrates had no great liking for Thomas, Uri had to conclude, and he waited with some curiosity to see if they would dismiss the dubious evidence on that account.

They established, however, that the ketubah did figure in the text.

The ketubah was the marriage document recording the husband’s obligations to his wife and what she is entitled to so as not to be left destitute in the case of a divorce. It was a form of contract also made in Rome which often gave the people who dwelt on Far Side reason to gossip for weeks on end about which women had received how much money upon being divorced. Reading that in this case the ketubah concerned land, Uri asked what the custom was in Judaea.

Master Jehuda gave a mischievous laugh.

“Among us, a ketubah can only ever be about land,” he said. “There’s the issue! So?”

Esdras and Johanen scanned the letter of divorce once more but could find nothing odd about it.

“You’re all blind,” Master Jehuda declared with a superior air. “It says here that the woman is to receive a land area equal to seventeen qabs of grain and a stretch of orchard equal to four qabs. What do you make of that, then?”

They still saw nothing wrong with that.

“Right, then,” said the master, taking a deep breath, his face shining and eyes glinting as slyly as any Roman lawyer’s, before launching into his explanation. “They had three sons. The eldest inherits twice as much as the other two, which makes four parts, two of which go to the firstborn son. It says here the deceased man owned fields equal to sixty-five qabs plus five qabs of orchard. As far as the field area is concerned, you have to subtract the seventeen qabs that are owed to the woman from the sixty-five qabs, leaving forty-eight qabs. The eldest son will get twenty-four, and the other two, twelve each. That’s all in order, because then everyone gets more than nine qabs, the minimum required. However, if the mother gets four qabs of the orchard, that will leave the three sons altogether one qab. The obligatory minimum portion of an inheritance is half a qab of orchard; one is not allowed to bequeath any less than that! Ezekiel must have been fully aware of the size of his property. He could not have bequeathed to Martha a stretch of orchard equal to four qabs, because in so doing that would have left only one qab over, and splitting that into four half-qab portions just cannot be done! Under the law Martha could only have been due three qabs; then at least the sons would have been left two qabs, of which one qab was due to the firstborn and a half a qab each to the other two. But that’s not what is written here, so it’s invalid!”