For the source text click/tap here: Bava Batra 172
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When collecting a debt based on producing a promissory note, how clear and transparent must the names in the document be?
The Mishna on our daf teaches that if there are two people in a city who share the same name – the example suggested is “Yosef ben Shimon” – they cannot produce a promissory note on each other, nor can anyone else demand payment from one of them based on a note in which his name appears.
In a case where there are two brothers, one poor and one rich, and their father left them a bathhouse or an olive press as an inheritance, if the father had built these facilities for profit, i.e., to charge others for using them, the profit that accrues after the father’s death is shared equally by the two brothers.
We explore the Grimm Fairy Tale of the two brothers and a folklore analysis of the same tale in antiquity.