The following (from Gittin 25a–26a) is one of the main Talmudic passages in which the berērah theme is developed.

The term berērah is Amoraic. The root meaning of brr is ‘to choose’; here the meaning is: a choice, among possibilities, which determines an act, the choice being made not when the act is performed but subsequently. The legal problem is whether the later ‘choice’ validates the original act as if the choice had been made at the time of the act. For this reason it is best to paraphrase berērah as ‘retrospective specification’, i.e. the subsequent ‘choice’ or specification operates retrospectively. In the Talmudic debate, when an authority is said to accept the berērah principle, this is formulated as: ‘he holds berērah (it lēh berērah) and when an authority is said to reject the berērah principle, this is formulated as: ‘he does not hold bererah’ (let lēh berērah).

Our sugya opens with a problem set by the third-century Babylonian Amora, R. Hoshea, and presented to his teacher, R. Judah. The rule is that a get (‘bill of divorce’) to be valid requires to be written specifically for that husband and wife. If, for instance, a man had two wives with the same name and the get has been written for the purpose of divorcing wife A, that get is invalid as a bill of divorce for wife B, even though the name is the same. R. Hoshea's problem is as follows.