Q&A: Tosafot on Ketubot 9
Tosafot on Ketubot 9
Question
Honorable Rabbi, greetings and blessings.
Tosafot on Ketubot 9a challenges the Gemara’s statement that in the case of a priest’s wife, where the husband says, “I found an open doorway,” we have a doubt whether she had relations while married to him or before she was with him; seemingly, we should have presumed her to retain her presumption of being permitted to a priest, and therefore permit her to him. Why does Tosafot challenge this from the presumption that she is permitted to the priesthood, and not from the simpler presumption that she is permitted to her husband, as Tosafot asks afterward?
Answer
I didn’t understand. Are you asking about the order of Tosafot’s questions? I don’t understand what is difficult here. Beyond that, if she is not permitted to the priesthood, then she is also not permitted to her husband. So that is the order of priority.
Discussion on Answer
I’m uncertain whether the first answer (“that now she had relations because of the presumption of permissibility”) resolves this as well.
As for your question, the Gemara established the case as a priest’s wife, and Tosafot’s challenge is on that. The difficulty from the presumption that she is permitted to her husband also exists regarding the wife of an Israelite, and in fact the Gemara at the initial stage is not troubled by it there (because there it permits her only by virtue of a double doubt). The question really is why.
It seems to me that the explanation is that the presumption that she is permitted to a priest includes permission to her husband, and is therefore stronger. These are not two independent presumptions here: permission to her husband is conditional on permission to the priesthood.
But in Tosafot later on, when the discussion is about a minor less than three years old who is an Israelite, there the presumption that she is permitted to her husband comes up, because permission to the priesthood is not relevant there.
I’m not asking about the order of Tosafot, but about the fact that there are two kinds of presumptions: the presumption that she is permitted to her husband, and the presumption that she is permitted to the priesthood. My question is why Tosafot doesn’t ask here the way it asks later, from the presumption that a woman is permitted to her husband. (Tosafot’s answer later would not answer it here.)
(Or perhaps the presumption that she is permitted to her husband cannot be used to say that she was unfaithful not while married to him—I have no idea why.)