When witnesses wanted to testify about a case—for example, that they knew a certain person owed money to another person—this is what the judges would do to confirm that the witnesses were legitimate. The Mishnah says that first, the judges would bring the witnesses into the courtroom and scare them. They would make them very afraid of giving false testimony. They would tell them all sorts of stories about people who gave false testimony and say that everyone dislikes those types of people. They would have everyone else leave the courtroom and leave the senior witness there. The judges would say to him, “How do you know that this person, the defendant, owes money to this other person, the person who has a claim against him?” If the witness said, “How do I know? Because the defendant told me, ‘I owe money to the person who has the claim,’” or, “Somebody else told me that the defendant owes money to the person with the claim,” the witness has said nothing. The testimony is worthless.
The fact is, many times people don’t want to appear wealthy. They don’t want to appear rich. So they’ll make it seem like they have debts. They’ll lie about a certain debt that they have. They’ll say, “Oh, you should know that I owe so much money out there to other people,” in order to make themselves look less wealthy than they are. So that type of testimony can’t be believed. The second type of testimony—that somebody else told me there’s a claim and this guy owes that guy money—is also not believed because it’s coming from a third party. So what type of testimony is believed? The only testimony that’s accepted is when the witness, or testifier, says, “The defendant admitted to the person with the claim, in front of me, that he owes him 200 zuz (silver coins).” That’s an obvious situation where it’s real. If the defendant says it in front of the person who has the claim against him, he’s not going to say that unless it’s real.
Afterward, they would bring in the second witness. The first witness we just mentioned, or the first person giving testimony, is alone in the room. So now they have him leave the room and bring in the second witness, and they examine him as they did the first witness. If the statements of the two witnesses were in line with each other, if they were consistent, then the judge would discuss the case. If two judges say that the defendant is innocent and one judge says that he is guilty, we say he is innocent. If two judges say that the defendant is guilty and one says that he is innocent, he is guilty in this case; we go by the majority. Here we’re talking about cases of monetary issues. The majority is enough. We’re not talking about capital punishment, like we mentioned earlier, where you would need more than a simple majority. If one judge says that he is innocent and one says that he is guilty, or let’s say two judges say he is not guilty and two find him guilty, and then one of them says, “I don’t know,” what they would do in this case is add judges to the court. If the third judge is unable to make a decision right now, we say that we don’t count him in the judgment right now, and you have to bring more judges. Since it’s a monetary case, we bring one more judge, and then we go by the majority of what these three decide: the two who were there previously, one we sidelined, and then one more judge to help us make the decision.