Plenty of couples reach their wedding planning and realize they’ve agreed to have a ketubah without being sure what it actually is. It’s one of the oldest elements of a Jewish wedding, and it carries real meaning – so it’s worth understanding before you choose one.
A ketubah is a traditional Jewish marriage contract that sets out a husband’s obligations to his wife and protects her financially on divorce or widowhood. Written in Aramaic and signed by two witnesses before the wedding, it is one of Judaism’s oldest legal documents – the earliest surviving example dates to around 440 BCE.
What Is a Ketubah in a Jewish Marriage?
Within a Jewish marriage, the ketubah sets out what a husband owes his wife and secures her financially if the marriage ends in divorce or his death. Rather than the couple, two witnesses sign it, confirming the groom accepts the terms that let the marriage proceed.
That protection was the point from the beginning. In a time when a woman had little financial recourse if her marriage ended, the ketubah gave her a documented claim on her husband’s estate – a record she could hold in her own name.
Two misunderstandings still cling to the document. The first is that the couple sign it themselves; they don’t, and it isn’t a contract between them. The second is that it marks some kind of purchase of the bride. It never did – Jewish law recognizes no such ownership between spouses. What the ketubah records is obligation, not possession: what the groom commits to provide, witnessed and set down before the marriage can go ahead.
The History
The traditional and historical ketubah is a binding legal document, which catalogs a husband’s obligations to his wife, and makes provisions for her protection in the event of divorce or her husband’s death. It is really the religious equivalent to the contemporary pre-nuptial agreement of secular civil law.
Elements of the ketubah can be traced back to Biblical times. During that period, when a man consented to his daughter’s engagement he was thereby facing the impending departure of a contributing member of his household and was viewed as requiring compensation for this loss. Thus, the groom’s family made a financial settlement, called a mohar, to the bride’s family as part of the engagement agreement. In addition, the groom would give wedding presents – mattan – to his bride.
In the post-Biblical era, as economic conditions changed, the financial obligations to compensate a bride and her family at the time of marriage proved onerous and made it difficult for young men without means to wed. Brides’ families began offering dowries to potential spouses in response. Moreover, the mohar was modified so that it was no longer a sum of money given directly to the bride’s father, but rather took the form of a mortgage or lien on the husband’s property, which he would be committed to paying out in the event of divorce, or which his estate would owe in the event of his death. The ketubah thus emerged as a way of documenting and certifying these arrangements, and ensuring that a woman had a legal record of them for her own security. The ketubah, in short, assured women of their rights and recourses in the face of the loss of their marriage.
The earliest extant ketubah dates from circa 440 B.C.E. found in Egypt and written on papyrus. This Aramaic document recorded the amount of the settlement the groom paid to the father of the bride and also noted the amount each family contributed to the dowry. The ketubah names the wife as beneficiary in the case of the husband’s death.
The ketubah text was first formalized about three hundred years later in the 1st century B.C.E. by the Sanhedrin (the presiding Judaic legislative body at the time); its authorship is attributed mainly to Rabbi Simeon ben Shetach. Despite undergoing several modifications since then, the ketubah text that has come down to us today closely resembles the one codified two thousand years ago. It is written in Aramaic, the language of legal and technical matters at the time, and an entire tractate of the Talmud is devoted to its intricacies
What Is Written In The Ketubah?
The ketubah’s multiple sections record the particulars of the wedding (date, names of bride and groom, etc.) and enumerate the groom’s obligations – financial and conjugal – to his bride.
Traditionally, the ketubah is not, as many people assume, a contract between husband and wife – neither, in fact, are required to sign the document. The ketubah is signed, rather, by two witnesses, who verify that the requisite conditions mentioned have been met by the groom. Another common misconception about the ketubah is that it in some way indicates that a man has purchased his wife, that it is some sort of transfer of property akin to a deed on a piece of land. This is not at all accurate – according to Jewish law there is no such relation of ownership between a husband and wife. The ketubah rather outlines the financial conditions that the groom must satisfy if the couple is to be permitted to undergo the wedding ceremony and become legally married
“The earliest extant ketubah dates from circa 440 B.C.E. found in Egypt and written on papyrus.”
What The Ketubah Is Today
Couples have continued to keep the tradition of a ketubah as an essential part of their Jewish wedding ceremony. Today, many artists and companies offer Ketubahs with texts that that speak to couples on a personal level in English. With the popularity of interfaith marriages and same sex weddings, couples can find ketubahs that fit their choices. Many Interfaith couples will include multiple languages such as Spanish or Chinese to include the other family. At times couples choose to write their own text which can include vows they are making to one another and poetry they love.