Get גט

"And he shall write her a bill of divorce and place it in her hand"—divorce in the Torah is not a declaration but a document passing from hand to hand. The get is written by a scribe for this couple and this couple only, with each name exact and the town named, before two witnesses, and handed to the wife.

By custom a get is written in twelve lines—the numerical value of the word itself, gimel and tet. The strictness is protection: a wrongly written get is void, and a woman who relied on it is in trouble. Hence tractate Gittin's exactness about every letter. Nothing ends a marriage but the get—not distance, not years; hence the tragedy of the agunah, the woman whose husband has not given one.