Preventing forgeries has been a concern as long as there have been legal documents. On today’s daf, we learn two new stipulations for a kosher document that are designed to prevent fraud:
Rav Yitzhak bar Yosef says that Rabbi Yohanan says: For any erasures, the scribe must write at the end of the document: “And this is their verification.”
And the scribe must review some of the details of the document in the final line. What is the reason for this? Rav Amram says: It is because one may not learn any new details from the final line of a document.
The first anti-forgery requirement is straightforward: When a document has erasures and corrections, the scribe is required to list and verify them. Otherwise, there is a concern that someone might tamper with a completed document.
But the purpose of the second requirement — summarizing the document’s details in its final line — is less self-evident. Rav Amram explains that we summarize the document’s contents at the end because we’re not allowed to learn anything new from the last line of a document. But this doesn’t really explain how it prevents forgery.
Though Rav Amram has stated this confidently as a halakhah without citation, his fellow amoraim inquire after its source:
Rav Nahman said to Rav Amram: From where do you know this? Rav Amram said to him: As it is taught: If one writing a document distanced the witnesses’ signatures two lines from the text, the document is not valid; one line from the text, the document is valid.
Why do two blank lines make the document not valid (while with one blank line it is valid)? If you say that perhaps the holder of the document will forge information and write it in those lines, then in the case of one line left blank as well, he can forge information and write it in that line. Rather, conclude from the beraita that one may not learn any new details from the final line of a document.
A supporting beraita states that if there’s too much space (two lines or more) between the end of a document’s text and the witnesses’ signatures, the document is not kosher because there is a concern that someone will opportunistically cram additional conditions into that space after the document is signed. However, a single blank line between condition and signatures is acceptable. Why is this single space allowed? Because there is a law that the last line of a document cannot add new information. Therefore, that space can’t be used to forge a condition that wasn’t part of the original document, because even were one to write something there, we wouldn’t rule based upon it. In other words, the rabbis infer from the rule that we may not have two blank lines above the signatures of a document but that we can in fact have one that there was another rule, i.e. not acting upon any information in the final line of a document. Otherwise, this single blank line would not have been permitted.
Returning to Rabbi Yohanan, we see the rabbis develop the custom of summarizing the content of a document in its final line, i.e. “so and so lent ___ amount of money to so and so,” because if there isn’t a forgery and the final line contained any new and necessary information, we’d be unable to legislate it. Therefore, kosher documents should conclude with a summary of the content that came before.
Read all of Bava Batra 162 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on December 4, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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