A person who has to defend himself against a claim would only have to swear if the person making the claim says that he is definitely certain he is owed money. That is on a Torah level. But hachamim (sages), under certain circumstances, said that even when someone making a claim is unsure and cannot say with definite knowledge that he is owed money, we still make the person defending himself swear. We’ll list those cases in this Mishnah. The Mishnah says: These people swear even without a definite claim being made against them: business partners, if one of the partners is managing the money on behalf of the other partners; a sharecropper, who leases land from another farmer and pays the owner a percentage of the crop yield as rent; Apotropin, an administrator. An administrator is somebody who manages somebody else’s finances for them; a woman who buys and sells for her husband from her own home. She’s running the store for her husband and managing his money; and a member of a household. Let’s say there are a few brothers managing an estate. One of them is the father of their father who passed away. One of them is in charge. When any one of these people is called to give an accounting for their dealings with the other partner or heir, they’re obligated to swear if they’re asked to.
But we’ll qualify that statement. We say: Amar lo, if one of the partners said to the other owner of the property, “What’s your claim against me?” The one who’s managing says, “What’s your issue with me?” Then the owner tells him, “I want you to swear that when you managed my property, you didn’t take anything from me.” There’s a suspicion underlying this claim. They think that the manager took something contrary to halakha (Jewish law) that wasn’t really his. We say that the manager would be obligated to swear, even though the owner doesn’t know with definite certainty that the person managing the money took something.
People are required to swear even in response to an uncertain claim because people have a tendency to take money that isn’t theirs and rationalize it. The rationalization could be: “I’m doing the work. I’m managing everything. Aren’t I entitled to a certain fee?” So, in order to alleviate that problem, a person was required to swear, even though on a biblical level, this requirement isn’t there. And the same would be true of all the other situations we mentioned here. We’re only giving one example, but it applies. It applies everywhere.
If the partners or the sharecropper completed their dealings, they divided the property up, and the partnership ended. This applies to all the scenarios we spoke about as well. The person who was managing the property is now asked to swear. But when they ended the partnership, he was never asked to swear. At that time, there was no discussion about him swearing; the owner was silent. We say: The owner now cannot force him to swear without a definite claim. The leeway that Hachamim gave to force someone to swear, even for an uncertain claim, only exists while the partnership is still there, not after it has ended.
But if there was a scenario where the partner became obligated to swear at the owner’s request as a result of something else, some other business dealings, and he’s about to swear, then we say: The owner can make him swear on an uncertain claim, even after the partnership has ended. We throw in a different oath from a previous partnership if he’d like to, because that oath is happening no matter what.
We’ll end the perek (chapter) with a rule about Shemitah (Sabbatical year) that has nothing to do with this. Usually, when the Shemitah ends, all unpaid loans are canceled, and a person who lends money is not allowed to pressure the person who borrowed the money. Here we’ll talk about how this law affects an obligation to swear. Shemitah cancels a borrower’s obligation to swear regarding a loan, just as it cancels the loan itself. In other words, when Shemitah hits, the loan is canceled. If there was also an obligation for somebody to swear about that loan, and he hadn’t done it yet, but then the Shemitah hit, he wouldn’t have to swear either. The Shemitah year would cancel his obligation to swear as well.