On today’s daf, the Mishnah finally lays out the official order of inheritance:
“If a man dies and has no son, then you shall pass his inheritance to his daughter” (Numbers 27:8). A son precedes a daughter. All descendants of a son precede a daughter. A daughter precedes the brothers of the deceased. Descendants of a daughter precede the brothers. Brothers precede the uncles. The descendants of the brothers precede the uncles.
A son, and his entire descendent line, take priority over a daughter for inheritance. Similarly, when there are no sons, a daughter and her entire descendent line take priority over the deceased’s brothers and uncles.
The Talmud then explores where the Mishnah gets this principle. The Bible never explicitly says anything about an inheritor’s descendent line. The Torah, after all, states that, “If a man dies and has no son, then you shall pass his inheritance to his daughter.” (Numbers 27:8) According to a straightforward reading of Numbers, then, if there is no living son but there are grandchildren through a deceased son, the estate would still go to the daughter and not those grandchildren. So, the rabbis have to demonstrate this principle:
I have derived only that a son (inherits before a daughter); from where do I derive that a son of a son, or a daughter of a son, or a son of a daughter of a son (inherits before a daughter)? The verse states: “If a man dies, and he has no (ein lo) son, then you shall pass his inheritance to his daughter”: Investigate the matter (ayyein alav).
The rabbis are playing with homophones. Though ein (has) and ayyein (investigate) are not spelled the same, their pronunciations are relatively similar. And so the rabbis read, “he has no son,” as really meaning: “investigate for him his descendent line.” So we now have evidence that a predeceased son’s inheritance passes through his descendent line and not to his sister. How do we derive that the same is true for a daughter? Through a similar argument:
From where a daughter’s daughter, or a son of a daughter, or a daughter of a son of a daughter? The verse states: “And if he has no (ein lo) daughter, then you shall give his inheritance to his brothers” (Numbers 27:9): Investigate the matter (ayyein alav).
When, God forbid, a child predeceases their parent, extensive investigation should be done in order to determine that they didn’t have children. For many people, especially those living locally, that would have been easy to determine. But we can imagine that if one’s son was a traveling salesman, or a merchant who traveled with caravans, they might have had a family in a distant place that the rest of their family didn’t know about. Investigation, in these cases, would involve work, but was required to settle the inheritance according to rabbinic law.
This interpretation depends on a play on words between ein lo and ayyein alav. This use of homophones reminds us that rabbinic culture was largely an oral culture. Though today we are awash in written language and mostly encounter biblical and rabbinic texts through the written word, the ancient rabbis would have been hearing them and passing them on through speech. That meant that sometimes linguistic creativity came through what was said and heard, and not what was written.
What I find meaningful about this particular play on words is that it takes what could be seen as a loss or an absence — the lack of a child— and turns it into a charge to investigate. The Talmud will eventually conclude that “inheritance is successively examined up to Reuben” — meaning to the original 12 sons of Jacob who are seen as the founders of the twelve tribes. When a community sees absence, they are required to search for presence, even if it is distant or hidden. Today’s daf insists that if we search hard enough, we will find the hidden connections between us all, because, as John Donne reminded us a thousand years later, “no man is an island.”
Read all of Bava Batra 115 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on October 18, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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