Yevamos 112a : The Real Case of a Divorced Woman Who Wanted to Marry a Kohen

Yevamos 112a discusses one of the most private claims a woman can make: לא נבעלתי. “We never had relations.” But what happens when that claim comes up years after the marriage is already over? A fascinating case came before the Be’er Sheva Beis Din in 2018. A woman had been widowed from her first husband. She then remarried, eventually divorced her second husband with a get, and later wanted to marry a Kohen. There was one obvious problem: A Kohen cannot marry a גרושה. So she made an extraordinary argument. She claimed that her second husband had no גבורת אנשים and that they had never had relations. Had she known about his condition before the wedding, she said, she never would have married him. Maybe the marriage was therefore a מקח טעות. And if the kiddushin were never valid, perhaps she wasn't really a גרושה and could marry the Kohen. There was a major precedent she could point to. Rav Moshe Feinstein, in Igros Moshe Even HaEzer 1:79, dealt with a woman who discovered immediately after her wedding that her husband was completely incapable of consummating the marriage. The condition existed before the kiddushin, she hadn't known about it, doctors considered it incurable, and eventually the husband disappeared and she could not obtain a get. Rav Moshe ruled that she should not remain an agunah and permitted her based on קידושי טעות. So could the Be’er Sheva woman make the same argument? Beis Din investigated. They even obtained her former husband's medical records. The records showed that there had been a problem, but they did not prove the kind of complete, incurable condition that existed in Rav Moshe's case. And then Beis Din discovered something even more damaging. They looked back at her original divorce case. At the time, she had complained about other serious problems in the marriage. But she had never claimed that her husband had no גבורת אנשים. In fact, she remained with him for several months and even opened a שלום בית case. That makes it very difficult to come back years later and say: “Had I known about this, I never would have agreed to the marriage.” So Beis Din rejected the מקח טעות argument. But there was one final problem. She had already received a get. Even if the original kiddushin could somehow be invalidated, there is a concept called ריח הגט: Even a get that wasn't truly necessary can sometimes disqualify a woman from marrying a Kohen. So this woman wasn't trying to get out of a marriage. She was trying to go backward and prove: “I never needed my get because I was never really married.” And Beis Din said she couldn't. It is an incredible modern extension of לא נבעלתי: Can the claim “We never had relations” merely end a marriage — or can it sometimes prove that the marriage never existed at all?