Contract
    13 years ago
            In my religion, marriage is a sort of a sacrament, but it is also a contract. There's a standard form for a marriage contract, in which the parties are identified by their full names and patronyms. The contract is read before witnesses, who then sign it.
The contents of the contract are the interesting part. In essence, it says that the husband will put aside a certain amount of money (the minimum amount, for someone who can't afford a lot, is not that much) for his wife's benefit, in case he predeceases her or they divorce. However, it also describes the conditions of this contract. Foremost among these are the things a man must provide for his wife: food, clothing and sex. So, yes, this is a two-thousand-year-old tradition that lack of sexual satisfaction is a valid reason for divorce, and furthermore - not meaning to brag or anything, ha ha - that a man who stays married can satisfy his wife.
There was a mildly awkward bit in which my father goofed as he read the contract. As he hadn't rehearsed it, he accidentally read a part he wasn't supposed to. My full name and patronym are simple enough: it's my given name, then "son of [my father's name]". My wife's patronym, however, does not refer to her father Richard, but to one of the Biblical patriarchs. Had she simply been named in the contract "daughter of Abraham" that would have been okay, innocuous. However, the contract says "daughter of Abraham the patriarch", which identifies her as a convert. While it needs to be written, because she is in fact a convert, it is inappropriate to read it aloud; one does not mark out a convert as a convert to a public gathering, lest they become embarrassed.
                    The contents of the contract are the interesting part. In essence, it says that the husband will put aside a certain amount of money (the minimum amount, for someone who can't afford a lot, is not that much) for his wife's benefit, in case he predeceases her or they divorce. However, it also describes the conditions of this contract. Foremost among these are the things a man must provide for his wife: food, clothing and sex. So, yes, this is a two-thousand-year-old tradition that lack of sexual satisfaction is a valid reason for divorce, and furthermore - not meaning to brag or anything, ha ha - that a man who stays married can satisfy his wife.
There was a mildly awkward bit in which my father goofed as he read the contract. As he hadn't rehearsed it, he accidentally read a part he wasn't supposed to. My full name and patronym are simple enough: it's my given name, then "son of [my father's name]". My wife's patronym, however, does not refer to her father Richard, but to one of the Biblical patriarchs. Had she simply been named in the contract "daughter of Abraham" that would have been okay, innocuous. However, the contract says "daughter of Abraham the patriarch", which identifies her as a convert. While it needs to be written, because she is in fact a convert, it is inappropriate to read it aloud; one does not mark out a convert as a convert to a public gathering, lest they become embarrassed.
 
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But I can't help but respect a contract that is so well written that it involves all the really important things. :)
Judaism seems, at least in my limited study, to have a very strong focus on semantics, and the concept of The Written Word as a whole. That's kind of interesting.
May I ask if this is an intentional practice?
Compare this to classical modern Hebrew (the language of Israeli policy documents and press releases), which is much more straightforward, direct, uncomplicated. This is by design, as the language's "style book" has been rewritten a few times in the past few centuries to make it a more modern, readily usable language. It's not the same language as modern Israeli Hebrew, though; while it's not different enough that I'd call it a dialect of its own, it is somewhat different in vocabulary. The modern Israeli uses a lot more loaner words from European languages or Arabic, for example, and the grammatical rules seem a lot looser.
Hmm, ok - that was a tangent. Uh. I think the poetic style and occasional incomprehensibility of the Bible led to a tradition of semantic hair-splitting (in some ways good, in some ways not) that remains even to this day.
Take this all with a huge grain of salt - I am neither a legal historian nor a Talmud scholar nor a rabbi :)