The “Killer Wife” (Qatlanit) in Jewish Law: A Survey of Sources
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article traces the development of Jewish law regarding the qatlanit or “killer-wife,” a woman who was twice widowed. The Jewish law examines the dilemma whether she should be allowed to marry again because of the risk that she poses a mortal danger to men whom she marries. Fear of marrying a woman twice-widowed plays a role in the story of Tamar, but Genesis 38 makes it clear that it is God who is responsible for the deaths of Er and Onan, and not the innocent widow. The Talmud prohibits the marriage of a twice-widowed woman, and attributes the demise of her husbands not to any intention on her part, but rather her “source” (sexual organs) or her “mazal” (fate as determined by astrology). Later responsa generally reflect a more lenient attitude towards the remarriage of the qatlanit in response to the tumult and tragedy of medieval Jewish history, as well as the growing influence of rationalism in Jewish thought. Modern rabbis, because of their openness to scientific thought and concern for the loneliness of old age, show a marked leniency towards the remarriage of a twice-widowed woman.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".