Bava Batra 155

We’ve learned that a child can inherit from a deceased parent, even before they reach the age of legal majority. But though they can own the property, they aren’t able to sell it because most financial transactions, including this kind, are valid only if both parties are adults.

Today’s daf asks how old someone has to be in order to sell the property they’ve inherited from their father. Rava and Rav Huna bar Hinnana share two different answers, both attributed to Rav Nahman.

Rava says that Rav Nahman says: Eighteen years old. 

Rav Huna bar Hinnana says that Rav Nahman says: Twenty years old. 

Both Rava and Rav Huna bar Hinnana agree that an actual minor cannot sell property they’ve inherited, but they remember Rava teaching slightly different ages. 

In the United States, many a 13-year-old bar mitzvah stands up on the bimah and declares, “Today, I am a man…” Bar, bat or bnai mitzvah makes someone an adult for ritual purposes, like being obligated in the commandments and being called to the Torah. But the rabbis didn’t think that a tween should be responsible for complex financial transactions.

Rabbi Zeira then raises an objection from a beraita we first saw yesterday:

There was an incident in Bnei Brak involving one who sold some of his father’s property, and he died, and the members of his family came and contested the sale, saying: “He was a minor at the time of his death.” And they came and asked Rabbi Akiva: “What is the halakhah? To examine it?” He said to them: “It is not permitted for you to disgrace him. And furthermore, signs of puberty are likely to change after death.”

Rabbi Akiva rejects the family’s suggestion to exhume their dead relative in order to determine by visual inspection if he was a minor at the time of his death. Preserving the dignity of the dead is more important than who owns a particular piece of property. And if members of the family are tempted to ignore this ruling, Rabbi Akiva adds that anything that they do see if they exhume the body will be legally inadmissible because decomposition changes human bodies. 

Rabbi Zeira uses this beraita to argue that the legal age of majority is eighteen, and not twenty:

But if you say “from twenty years old,” if they examine him, what of it? But didn’t we learn in a mishnah (Nidda 47b): “a twenty-year-old man who did not develop two pubic hairs, proof must be brought that he is twenty years old and then he is considered the saris (a eunuch or a sexually underdeveloped man).”

Rabbi Zeira reasons that we know from an earlier tradition that at age twenty one can go to court and be found to be adult, regardless of their physiology. If the age of majority was twenty, there would be no need for a visual examination. So, he concludes, this proves that the age of majority is eighteen. On tomorrow’s daf, we’re going to learn that Rav Nahman actually said that the age of majority for the purposes of conducting a property sale is twenty.

This discussion as a whole reminds us that growing up, even from a legal perspective, happens in stages. As we age, we get new secondary sex characteristics and new rights and new responsibilities — in both ritual and financial law. 

Today’s daf also reminds that the claim, in a legal arena, that someone is a child or an adult is complicated and often not unmotivated. The family members in this story want to prove that their deceased relative was a minor in order to invalidate the sale and take back the property. In other cases, claims that someone is an adult, or a child, are rarely neutral but often part of much more complicated understanding of justice, competency and adulthood. 

Read all of Bava Batra 155 on Sefaria.

This piece originally appeared in a My Jewish Learning Daf Yomi email newsletter sent on November 27, 2024. If you are interested in receiving the newsletter, sign up here.