Study Gittin folio 20A with parallel Hebrew-English text, traditional commentary, and modern study tools. Free access to Babylonian Talmud online.
If there is a concern that the Torah scroll can effect a divorce due to the verses concerning severance of marriage that there are in it, as it is written: “And he writes her a scroll of severance” (Deuteronomy 24:1), this is also not problematic, since it is required, as it states: “And he writes
And if you would say that there is reason to be concerned that perhaps he first gave a dinar to the scribe at the outset, when he wrote the Torah scroll, and told him to write the verses discussing divorce for his wife’s sake, isn’t there a need for other things to be written in a bill of divorce a
The Talmud asks: But if so, what is Rav Yosef teaching us with his statement? It seems obvious that there is no reason why a Torah scroll could be used as a bill of divorce. The Talmud says: He is teaching us that gall water is not permanent when applied on top of gall water. The novel idea is that
§ Rav Ḥisda says: If a bill of divorce was written not for her sake, and the scribe passed over it with a reed pen, meaning that he wrote on top of what was already written, for her sake, then here we have arrived at the dispute between R' Yehuda and the Rabbis.
As it is taught in a baraita: If a scribe writing a Torah scroll was at a point in the text that he needed to write the name of God, spelled yod, heh, vav, heh; and he erred and intended to write Yehuda, spelled yod, heh, vav, dalet, heh, but he made a mistake when writing Yehuda and did not place