אם מתי... אם לא אעמוד": לשונות תנאי עתידי ופשרה של סוגייה אחת בבבלי גיטין

In Chapter VII of Tractate Gittin the Mishnah deals with the halakhic problem of conditional bills of divorce. The characteristic approach of mishnaic halakha is one of strict attention to the precise literal meaning of the conditions, even at the price of overlooking the apparent intention of the grantor of the divorce, although in certain circumstances it may be conjectured with a great degree of certainty. A baraita reflecting this approach occurs in BT Gittin 73a. According to the discussion there, the Babylonian amoraim encountered difficulties in its interpretation and argued that there was an internal contradiction between the two parts of the baraita. This perception brought them, at the end of their discussion, to the conclusion that the text of the baraita was defective. That conclusion, in turn, created a problem for the Talmud's medieval commentators, for it seemed to them that the baraita could in fact be understood without difficulty. Moreover, as the medieval commentators pointed out, the apparent contradiction between the two parts of the baraita, which had troubled the Babylonian sages, is clearly explained in two parallel ancient sources (Tosefta Gittin 5:2 and PT Gittin 7:4). Why, then, did the Babylonian amoraim find it difficult to interpret this baraita? The baraita states that if a man grants his wife a divorce, conditional upon 'if I die from this disease', and then dies for another reason, she is not a divorcée (but a widow); if, on the other hand, the condition was 'if I do not stand up from this disease', and he dies for another reason, she is indeed divorced. The present article suggests that the sages of the BT viewed the two conditions as synonymous (the latter being only a euphemistic wording of the former), because they took 'not stand up' (='die') to be a fixed phrase in which 'not' must be read along with 'stand up'. In fact, however, the author of the baraita seems to have meant 'not' to be read as negating the entire condition 'if I stand up from this disease'. Therefore, just as, if a sick man gave his wife a divorce, effective 'if I do not stand up from this disease', she would not be divorced if he died for any reason, so, too, if he gave her a divorce effective 'if I do not stand up from this disease' she would be divorced if he died for any reason. On this reading, we may fully appreciate the difference between the positive formulation ('if I die'), in which a man indicates his expectation that he will die, so that the reason for his death is of little importance, and the negative formulation, which limits the cause of death to be taken into account. But this in fact widens the gap between the grantor's intentions and the practical consequences assigned by the baraita, which considers his formulations in and of themselves.