Study Gittin folio 82A with parallel Hebrew-English text, traditional commentary, and modern study tools. Free access to Babylonian Talmud online.
as it teaches by skipping one by one. The examples given relate to one witness missing, e.g., 7 ties and 6 witnesses, and so on. They do not include a case in which two witnesses are missing, e.g., 7 ties and 5 witnesses. This indicates that the dispute between R' Akiva and Ben Azzai is only with r
Abaye said: Learn from it that this relative, who is allowed to sign a folded and tied bill of divorce, can sign if he wants to sign, either at the beginning, as the first signature, in the middle, or at the end.
From where does Abaye infer this? From the fact that it did not designate a place for him to sign. And learn from it, as well, that from any 3 of the witnesses who signed on a folded and tied bill of divorce, we can ratify the bill of divorce, i.e., it can be ratified based on their signatures. And
As if it enters your mind that we need consecutive witnesses, then they should designate a place for this relative to sign, in the beginning, or in the middle, or at the end, and they should then validate the use of many disqualified witnesses. It could have been instituted that every third witness
With regard to the halakha concerning the dispute in the Mishnah, it is related that when they came before R' Ami with a question pertaining to a bare bill of divorce that needed more witnesses, he said to the person overseeing: Go out and complete it even with a slave from the general public, in a