Concept
Ketubah כתובה
The marriage document that protects the wife: an enactment of Shimon ben Shetach more than two thousand years old.
The ketubah is the husband's obligation: to feed, to clothe, to be a husband, and on divorce or widowhood to pay the sum written in it. The sages instituted it "so that she should not be light in his eyes to send her away": divorce stops being free, and the decision is not taken in a minute of anger.
Its essentially present form was given by Shimon ben Shetach in Hasmonean times. The document is written in Aramaic, signed by witnesses and handed to the bride under the canopy; ketubot illuminated by artists became a genre of Jewish art in their own right. The laws are in tractate Ketubot.
On the timeline
3684 · 77 BCEThe Third Pair: Yehudah ben Tabbai and Shimon ben Shatach5656 · 1896 CEThe Cairo Genizah: a thousand years of paper from one storeroom
Related
Sources
Chazal: Mishnah, Talmud, midrash, Zohar
- Ketubot 82b — the enactment of Shimon ben Shetach
- Mishnah Ketubot 1:1 — the order of marriage
Basis: Talmud and midrash.