On today’s daf, the Gemara relates another incident of a man verbally bequeathing his inheritance:
There was a certain man who said to his wife: “My property is given to you and to your sons.” Rav Yosef says: The wife acquires half of the property. And Rav Yosef said: From where do I say this? As it is taught in a beraita: Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi says: The verse states with regard to the showbread: “And it shall be for Aaron and his sons.” (Leviticus 24:9) This means half for Aaron and half for his sons.
Rav Yosef holds that when property is bequeathed to two parties, in the absence of precise information about apportionment, we assume a 50/50 split. We see the same assumption at play in a beraita where Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi states, regarding a similar constellation of recipients, that the division of the showbread between “Aaron and his sons” means each party received half.
Abaye challenges this comparison:
Abaye said to Rav Yosef: Granted, there, Aaron is eligible to receive a share; it is for this reason that the Merciful One specified him separately, so that he should take more than other priests. But with regard to a woman, who is not eligible to inherit her husband’s property, it is sufficient for her to receive a portion of the inheritance as one of the sons.
Since all priests have a right to the showbread, the Torah could have just said that. The Torah’s specific mention of Aaron along with his sons — in other words, its superfluous use of Aaron’s name — suggests that Aaron gets the same size share as all of his sons combined. But in the case with this man and his wife, there is no similar superfluity: Had he not mentioned her, she’d have received no inheritance. Therefore, suggests Abaye, he simply meant to give her a share equal to any one of his inheritors — not all of them combined.
The Gemara summons additional cases to contest Abaye’s suggestion that this is limited to Aaron:
Is that so? … but when Rav Yitzhak bar Yosef came from the land of Israel, he said: There was a certain coronation tax that was placed by the royal house on the city councilman and on the prominent citizens. Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi said: Let the city councilmen give half and the prominent citizens half.
The case of this irregular tax is another one where there’s a proposed split between two respective parties. The assumption is that the individual councilman, who comprises one of the parties, bears half the cost and the other group (prominent citizens) bears the other half. This seems to support Rav Yosef’s assertion that, in general, we assume divisions between two mentioned parties to be 50/50. But the Gemara dismisses its own proof:
How can the case of the tax be compared to the other cases? There, initially, when they would write the writ of assessment, they would write that it was placed on the city councilman alone. And the prominent citizens would assist them in raising the sum, and the king knew that they were assisting them. Therefore, now, the meaning of what they wrote: It is placed on the city councilman and on the prominent citizens, is to say that these should give half of the tax, and those should give half.
Apparently, under normal circumstances, prominent citizens would contribute to the sum of the coronation tax, but the only party explicitly responsible was the councilman. If that’s true, then this becomes similar to the case of Aaron, his sons and the showbread, where the explicit mention of prominent citizens as contributors is understood as upping their contribution from one of support to an equal portion.
The Gemara concludes by stating that this is one of three areas of halakhah where we rule like Rav Yosef, who generally does not have the winning position in talmudic disputes: When two parties are mentioned in the course of dividing property or money owed, even if one party is a single person and the other a group of individuals, our default assumption is that this means a 50/50 split between the parties.
Read all of Bava Batra 143 on Sefaria.
This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on November 15, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.
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