SOTAH (WAYWARD WIFE) IS A TRACTATE at war with itself. Based on a chapter of Bible, it describes in grim and sometimes lurid detail how a woman who is only suspected by her husband of infidelity may be subjected by him to the ordeal of the bitter waters. In between the laws, the redactors insert lengthy harangues against the woman in question, deriding her behavior in extreme terms and seeking to use her public humiliation to deter other women from promiscuous behavior. But the careful reader will find this tractate somewhat schizophrenic: At the same time that it regards the suspected adulteress with such contempt, it sets up legal procedures that virtually guarantee that the ordeal of the bitter waters will never be implemented, or if implemented, that its results will be ambiguous and hence useless. As prominent as are the numerous passages that lay out the details of the ritual, surrounding and throttling them are many others that place unrealistic restrictions on their implementation.
How are we to understand this phenomenon? The rabbis’ aversion to capital punishment stems, apparently, from a reasonable fear of putting an innocent person to death. However, since the sotah’s punishment is determined by the waters, not the judges, and only the guilty will be punished, the rabbis had no reason to fear judicial error and its consequences. It therefore seems that at least part of what animated the rabbinic revolt against this ordeal was a desire to treat women fairly, to eliminate a practice that confounded their notions of justice and morality.
Biblical Basis for Sotah and Problems
Numbers 5:11–31 is one of the more perplexing sections of the Bible. It describes the case of a woman straying from the right path and engaging in sexual relations with a man other than her husband. If a fit of jealousy sweeps over a man and he suspects his wife of errant behavior, even though there are no witnesses to her act, he may take her to the Temple and make her undergo the ordeal of the bitter waters. As part of the ritual, she has to drink a potion made of water, earth from the Temple floor, and ink dissolved into the water from a parchment on which were written the curses of this very chapter. If she is innocent, the waters will not hurt her; if guilty, they will cause her serious physical harm.
This chapter of Torah gives the reader pause for several reasons: First, the Torah is sanctioning trial by ordeal, albeit only here and only for this suspected transgression. Elsewhere, the Torah sets a protocol for justice: It is to be dispensed in the courtroom, by judges, and based on the testimony of witnesses. Here, since there are no witnesses, there is, theoretically, no basis for a trial. Nevertheless, the Torah requires the woman to undergo this trial by ordeal. We should recognize that the ordeal described here, where there must be divine intervention in order for the benign potion to do damage, is an improvement over others of the Ancient Near East, where the accused was thrown into a river and if innocent was assumed to be able to find his way out. Still, the Torah deviates from its own protocol to order for the sotah a trial by ordeal, not by judges.
Second, a man suspected by his wife of exactly the same kind of behavior cannot be taken to the Temple and subjected to the ordeal of the bitter waters. This asymmetry points to the underlying extreme patriarchy: She is his property, intended for his exclusive use, and must therefore conform to the behavioral standards he sets for her; he is not her property and so she can make no demands of him.
In a patriarchal society, a sexual act between a man and a woman is viewed as adulterous only if the woman is married to another man; if the man is married to another woman, that is of no consequence. Therefore, a married woman is allowed to have sex with her husband only, but a married man is permitted to have sex with his wife and other women as well, provided they are not married. His wife has no sexual monopoly on him. Thus a woman who commits adultery seems to be perceived as a greater disruption of the social order than a man who does the same. Society frowned upon her misconduct more than his because she betrayed not only God but also her husband, whereas a man’s extramarital sex is not considered a betrayal of his wife.1Cf. The JPS Torah Commentary, Deuteronomy, 206–207. Tigay writes that in the Ancient Near East, adultery by a woman was viewed as an offense solely against the woman’s husband. In the Bible, it is viewed as a sin against God, as well as the husband, since God has forbidden adultery.
Third, if the woman under suspicion was, in fact, unfaithful to her husband, she would be punished by the waters; but the man with whom she committed this act would go free. It does not seem right to us today that if the two of them committed exactly the same sin, together, that only one gets punished and the other does not.
Not only do we today find these to be serious inequities, but the rabbis of the Talmud did as well. If we examine closely their interpretation of the verses, as found in Tractate Sotah, we will see that they struggled with every one of these issues. Sometimes, what appear to be expansions and clarifications of Torah and nothing more are, in reality, rabbinic responses to complicated and troubling problems.
Of the nine chapters of Tractate Sotah, only the first six address the topic of the sotah. Beyond that there is one key comment in chapter 9. I have selected five topics for close reading.
The Warning and the Seclusion
Tractate Sotah opens with several statements about warning and seclusion, topics that have no obvious biblical referent.
If a man issues a warning to his wife [המקנא לאשתו]:
R. Eliezer says: He must do so in the presence of two witnesses. [Should she violate the terms of the warning and seclude herself with the forbidden man], her husband can subject her to the ordeal of the bitter waters on the basis of the testimony of one witness or even his own testimony.
R. Joshua says: He must warn her in the presence of two and can subject her to the ordeal only on the basis of two [witnesses to the seclusion]. (M Sotah 1:1)
How does he warn her? If he says to her, in the presence of two [witnesses], do not speak with that man, and she spoke with him, she is still permitted to her husband [lit., her house] …
If she secluded herself with him [נכנסה עמו לבית הסתר] and remained there long enough to have defiled herself, she is forbidden to her husband.… (1:2)
This passage allows a husband to subject his wife to the ordeal of the bitter waters only if he had issued a warning to her not to talk to a particular man and she then went and secluded herself with him long enough to have had sexual relations with him. Both the warning and the seclusion have to have been witnessed for them to have legal ramifications.
These opening paragraphs, although they appear matter-of-fact, are in many ways astonishing. First, the rabbis interpret the Hebrew root K-N-A to mean “warn,” even though in the Torah in general and in this chapter in particular this verb means to “suffer a fit of jealousy, to be wrought up over.” Second, the rabbis interpret S-T-R2M 1:2, bet haSeTeR; also, M 6:1, v’niSTaRah. to mean “closeting” herself with the specified man, not “hidden,” which is what the root means in the Bible—in the sense that her sexual improprieties did not become known.3New Jewish Publication Society (hereafter, NJPS) translation: “she keeps secret the fact that” (Num. 5:13). Ibn Ezra, a medieval exegete, comments, “She did not reveal the matter.” Albeck, 227.
Why did the rabbis retain these biblical roots, yet stray so radically from their accepted definitions? I think they are deliberately and consciously preserving the sacred text but, at the same time, infusing it with new meaning. Upset that this section deviates from the standard procedures of justice, they attempt to make it conform: They say that the only circumstance in which a husband has the right to force his wife to submit to the ordeal is if he had warned her in advance—in the presence of two witnesses—not to have any contact with a particular man and then two witnesses, or only one witness, or only the husband himself saw her closet herself with that very man long enough to have had sexual relations with him. Delimiting this time span gives rise to much dispute (Tosefta Sotah 1:2; BT Sotah 4a), but even the most lenient opinion allows for no more than a few minutes. As the Talmud notes, each rabbi defined the duration of intercourse according to his own experience (4b).
Since witnessing the seclusion is not tantamount to witnessing the sexual act itself (in which case one must testify that he saw “the painting stick inserted into the tube” [Makkot 7a]), such testimony could not normally stand up in a court of law, but here it does raise serious doubts about the behavior of the woman in question. According to these rabbinic rules, only those women who aroused their husband’s suspicion, were publicly warned by him, and then deliberately violated his word in the presence of others could be dragged by him to the Temple for the ordeal. This series of events is a far cry from the Torah’s mere “fit of jealousy.” The intention of the rabbis was to sanction administering the bitter waters only to women who were highly likely to be guilty of what their husbands suspected them of. Most fits of jealousy could not lead to further action on the part of the husband, however, for they involved neither prior warning nor seclusion in the presence of witnesses.
The rabbis sharply reduced the number of instances in which a man could subject his wife to the ordeal of the bitter waters because they recognized that, by their standards, this section of the Torah treats women unfairly. Those who agree that the rabbis reinterpreted the Torah may disagree, however, that their motivation was a concern for women. Some may argue, for instance, that the rabbis’ concern was for justice, a cause they pursued with a passion. I would answer that these concerns are essentially the same. If, as I will show, in case after case in which biblical law treats women inequitably in comparison to men, the rabbis rework it so that women are treated fairly, then differentiating between one motivation and another loses its importance.
One might also argue that the rabbis suppressed this ritual out of their embarrassment over what they perceived as a primitive, barbaric rite within the Jewish legal system. However, were this so, I do not think that they would have made reference, as we will see later, to the paramour’s punishment and to the husband’s possibly spotty past vitiating the results of the test, both of which address the specifically moral problems created by the ritual. When this tractate is read as a whole, we can discern how bothered the rabbis are by the immorality and discriminatory nature of the ordeal, not its barbarism. That latter aspect they almost seem to relish.
Despite the Talmud’s reinterpretation of Torah to make it fairer to women, we cannot fail to notice the considerable residual patriarchy in the way that the Talmud presents the husband-wife relationship. That a husband could warn his wife not to talk with a specific man implies that he had extensive control over her ordinary, day-to-day activities. Although the contextual reading of these paragraphs explains why the rabbis proposed this warning—for her good, not his—even so, we must consider what the passage says about social relationships. A key statement on this topic is found in Tosefta Sotah (5:9), the companion volume to the Mishnah dating from the same period of time. I will cite the passage and then spell out its implications.
R. Meir says that just as men differ in their taste for food, so they differ in their taste for women.
1. There are some men who, if a fly alights on the rim of the cup, cannot drink what is inside. This is a bad lot for a woman because a husband like this will decide to divorce her [if she has any contact at all with another man].
2. There are men who, if a fly enters the cup, will discard the fly but still not drink what is inside. Such a man is like Pappas b. Judah, who would lock the door on his wife [so that she could not converse with a man] and go out.
3. And then there are men who, if a fly falls into the cup, will discard the fly and drink what is inside. This is the way most men are: He sees his wife talking to her [male] neighbors and relatives and leaves her alone.
4. Finally, there are men who, if a fly falls into the tureen, will take it, suck out [the liquid], and throw it [the fly] away. So an evil man behaves: He sees his wife going out with her head uncovered, scantily clad, … spinning in the marketplace, and bathing and sporting with any and all men [and does nothing about it]. This kind of woman one should divorce.
First, note that this passage is about problems with men’s behavior, not women’s. Its main point is that a man should be neither too accepting nor too suspicious of his wife’s behavior: He who is finicky is derided (1, 2), as is he whose sexual pleasure is enhanced by his wife’s promiscuity (4). The proper way for a man to behave is to tolerate reasonable social contact between his wife and other men (3).
That this passage originates in Sotah suggests that the husband can also be at fault, unlike the title of the tractate, which implies that the wife is always at fault. The husband’s fit of jealousy can be triggered from within, not just without. Here the rabbis critique themselves, namely men, and implicitly, given the context of this passage, the entire ordeal.
Second, what can we learn from this passage about social relations between men and women in the Talmudic period? In a sex-segregated society, as indicated in Pirkei [= Mishnah] Avot, just conversing with the opposite sex seems to have been an erotic activity. The warning “Do not talk excessively with women … lest it take time away from Torah … and lead you to Gehenna” (M Avot 1:5) does not imply that women are considered intellectually inferior but that men who have casual social relations with women are easily aroused, as the parallel statement in BT Nedarim 20a adds, “lest talking with women lead a man to adulterous behavior.” It is for this reason that a husband would suspect his wife of inappropriate behavior if she engaged in conversation with a man who was neither a neighbor nor a relative, for he knew that the man would have been aroused by the encounter. This passage also creates the impression that the force at greatest odds with the desire to study Torah was the desire for sex. We will return to this subject later.
As for marital relationships, this passage suggests that a husband can legally limit his wife’s social contacts and can even force her to stay at home. Such potential control is clear evidence of the patriarchal construction of Jewish marriage, as is his right to divorce her for any reason. But note that the very source that acknowledges the possibility of despotic control over a wife also denounces it.
The Ordeal in Detail
After reading the first several paragraphs of Mishnah Sotah and noting their essentially enlightened implications, we are rather disturbed to read what follows—a detailed description of a gruesome ordeal.
The first mention of the ordeal itself appears in 1:4–7. After a number of homilies intervene, the description of the ordeal continues at the beginning of the second chapter, and again, after a break, at the beginning of the third. The Mishnah adds many details to the core ritual presented in the Torah.
They would bring her to the Great Court in Jerusalem and attempt to intimidate her, saying: My child, wine brings one to sin; so too do frivolity, immaturity, and evil neighbors. [Confess] for His great name’s sake, that is written in holiness, so that it will not be dissolved in the water. (M Sotah 1:4)
… they would bring her to the Eastern Gate … and a kohen would grab hold of her garments and rip them until he uncovered her heart (bosom) and then he would let down her hair … (1:5)
He would clothe her in black … and remove her jewelry in order to disfigure her. And then he would bring a rope and tie it above her breasts [to keep her garments from slipping down]. And all those who wanted to see could come and see … (1:6)
One pays back a person measure for measure: Since she dressed herself up for sin, God will undress her; since she exposed herself to sin, God will expose her to all … (1:7)
Her husband would bring her minhah sacrifice in an Egyptian basket and rest it on her hands in order to tire her …. Rabban Gamliel says: Just as she behaved like an animal, so her offering will be [brought from] the food of an animal [barley flour]. (2:1)
If the words of the scroll had already been dissolved in the water and she then said, “I will not drink,” they would pour the liquid down her throat… (3:3)
Immediately upon drinking her face would turn yellow … (3:4)
The harshness of these statements is appalling. They unquestionably reflect deep rabbinic contempt for a suspected adulteress. At the same time, the details of the ritual seem to have sexual overtones. Ripping off her clothes to partially expose her body is both strange and suggestive. It feeds the sexual fantasies of the bystanders, in particular the young priests (Tosefta Sotah 1:7). It is also reminiscent of the treatment of adulterous women by other cultures, who would strip them naked in public, a custom already documented in Hosea 2:5. The mishnah notes the logic of this practice: Since she broke the rules by showing her body to her paramour, she will now be forced to reveal herself to all, a kind of perverted measure for measure. The problem, of course, is that at this stage she is only accused, not yet proven guilty.
How does this description mesh with the sympathetic treatment of women in the opening mishnahs of the tractate? It seems to me that the ordeal represents an older strand of material, very callous and offensive to women, which was later framed by more reasonable statements that reflected a growing dissatisfaction with the ordeal. A fairly standard editorial principle in tannaitic literature is to bracket the earlier layer with a later one, rather than simply to present the sources in chronological order. The strategic advantage of this alternate scheme is that it forces one to read the older sources, which appear second, in light of the newer ones, which appear first. In this tractate, we read about the ordeal only after being informed that the circumstances for carrying it out could almost never arise.
Merit and Its Protection
Immediately upon drinking the water, her face would turn yellow, her eyes would bulge, and her veins would swell.… If she had merit, it would protect her [from the effects of the water]. Some merit protects for one year, some for two, and some for three.
From here Ben Azzai learned: A man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah so that if she should drink these waters, she would know that merit will protect her [שאם תשתה תדע שהזכות תולה לה].
R. Eliezer says: Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her lewdness.
R. Joshua says: A woman prefers one measure of lewdness to nine measures of separation.… (M Sotah 3:4)
R. Simon says: Merit does not protect [from the effects of] the bitter waters.…
Rebbe [R. Judah the Prince] says: Merit protects [from the effects of] the bitter waters. (3:5)
After describing the immediate yellowing of the sotah’s face and bulging of her eyes upon drinking the potion, the mishnah (3:4) goes on to limit the cases in which these changes occur: Accumulated merit could protect her and defer the physical devastation for one, two, or even three years. Before assessing the considerable implications of this statement, I will examine the one that follows, surely one of the most memorable in the entire Talmud.
Ben Azzai presents the reason a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah (and this has to mean Torah in the broad sense, with tannaitic commentary): Should she be warned by her husband not to talk to a particular man, then go and closet herself with him, and be dragged to the Temple and forced to drink the bitter waters, and should she be guilty as suspected, she should know that if she had amassed a record of good deeds, they would delay the harmful effects of the water. Stated succinctly: If she studies Torah, she will know that if she commits adultery, her punishment will be postponed because of the good deeds she has done in the past. It is hard to imagine a more absurd rationale for teaching women Torah!4An alternative explanation is that if she is guilty as suspected and finds that the waters do not harm her, she will know that it is her good deeds that have postponed the waters’ taking effect, not their inherent inefficacy. But that, too, is a strange reason to teach women Torah.
I find it remarkable that Ben Azzai is concerned with the mental state of even those women who commit adultery, who, one might argue, deserve to fear for their future. But why is his attitude to them so different from the contemptuous one demonstrated by his colleagues? It is doubtful that he is more forgiving of adultery. More likely, his statement indicates his repudiation of the entire Sotah ritual. Not only does merit protect, as already stated, but a woman should be entrusted with this knowledge in advance in order to alleviate her fear of what Ben Azzai considers to be an excessively harsh ritual.
Interpreted in this way, Ben Azzai’s statement is yet another example of the rabbis’ ability to reflect and comment upon women’s unfair lot in life. He seems to say that this ritual is such a travesty of justice that the only way to rectify matters is to teach women Torah, so that they know that nothing will happen to them for a long time if they drink the water, even if guilty. He thus not only denies the potency of the water to punish sinners, as mentioned without attribution earlier in this passage, but also claims that women, for this immoral and profoundly demeaning way of treating them, must be compensated with Torah study, an activity at the other end of the continuum, one that evinces great respect for the student. That is not surprising coming from a man whose desire is only for the study of Torah, not for women (Tosefta Yevamot 8:4).
The mishnaic passage continues with R. Eliezer’s dissenting opinion: One who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her tiflut, lewdness. This is an almost equally absurd statement. One possible interpretation is that knowledge is dangerous: If a woman knows that the accumulation of good deeds can defer the punishment, she will be tempted to engage in forbidden sexual acts (as if ignorance of this fact were the only deterrent!). Another possible interpretation is that a woman’s inferior intellect will only allow her a limited understanding of Torah, which may then innocently, or even otherwise, lead her astray. Since this same rabbi is reported in the Yerushalmi (ad locum) to have said that it is better to burn the words of Torah than to hand them over to women—a deeply misogynistic sentiment—it is likely that his statement in the Mishnah is to be best understood as a condemnation of women’s intellectual capacities. R. Eliezer would thus be in direct conflict with Ben Azzai, who views women as competent. But why an inferior mind would misunderstand Torah in a way that leads to sexual impropriety is still not clear. R. Joshua, the next speaker in the Mishnah, provides an answer: Were a woman confronted with the choice of more frequent (marital) sex and a lower income or less frequent sex and a higher income, she would choose the former.5Or, according to the version of the text quoted above, a woman likes sex a lot more than abstinence. The context shows that R. Joshua means to say that women are incapable of applying themselves to the serious endeavor of Torah study because of their preoccupation with sex and their great sexual appetite.6See Chapter 7 for further comments on this mishnah. See also Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 174–180.
It is quite astonishing that the only place in the Mishnah where the issue of educating women is raised directly is in this context of women’s inappropriate sexual behavior. I, therefore, think it possible that the Mishnah here hints, below the surface, that the reason a man should not teach a woman Torah, or that men and women may not study Torah together (and it is well known that the disciple circles were composed of men only), is not a woman’s intellectual insufficiency but rather a man’s sexual proclivities: When with women, he will find himself unable to observe the boundaries of acceptable social intercourse. What we see here, it seems, is the displacement of great and uncontrollable interest in sexual activity from men to women. It is not she who will be led astray by learning Torah, but he: In the course of teaching it to her he will find himself sexually distracted.
As we will see in Chapter 2, “Relations Between the Sexes,” the Mishnah assumes that men who spend time with women are likely to be aroused by them and may not be able to stop themselves from initiating some kind of sexual involvement (M Kiddushin 4:12). This would be even more likely were the setting deep intellectual exchange. As stated in BT Berakhot 24a, men are aroused by the sight of a woman, any exposed part of her body, and even the sound of a woman’s voice. This assessment supports what was stated above—that talking with women was considered an erotic activity. Note that the same kinds of statements are not made about women. They are portrayed as easily seduced, what the Talmud calls “light-minded” (BT Kiddushin 80b), but not as seducers. Therefore, men’s ideal conditions for Torah study are apart from women. Given all this, it is not surprising that men need to deny that women are intellectually capable.
Mishnah 5, an apparent continuation of the discussion of the ability of merit to protect, cites two more views. R. Simon (b. Yohai) proposes that merit does not protect—if it did, aspersions would be cast on all the innocent women who already submitted to the ordeal and suffered no adverse consequences. Rebbe (R. Judah the Prince) responds that merit does protect—a guilty woman can be distinguished from an innocent one by how she dies, even though she will have continued to live a long time unharmed. The guilty, ultimately, will die a sotah’s death, characterized by slow physical deterioration.
When the redactor of the Mishnah surveyed the views of these rabbis and others found in parallel passages in the Midrash Halakhah,7Sifrei Bemidbar, 8 (p. 15, Horovitz ed.). he took a stand on several disputed matters: (1) merit does protect; (2) it protects for a long time, even three years, not just for three months, nine months, or one year, as suggested by the others. In this way the redactor rendered the ordeal of no use at all. What would a husband gain from having his wife drink the waters if they would not immediately prove her guilt or innocence? The point of the ritual, according to the Torah, was to calm his jealousy if she were innocent and punish her if she were guilty. The minute the notion of deferred punishment is introduced, the ordeal neither punishes her nor yields the information sought to pacify him.
In terms of the Mishnah’s structure, this section in its redacted form, upholds the outlook of the opening paragraphs of the tractate and goes one step further. Even in the unlikely event that all the conditions for administering the ordeal, set forth at the beginning of the tractate, were fulfilled, this section would destroy all reason to implement a test from which nothing would be learned.
The Paramour
Just as the waters test her, so too they test him, as it says (vv. 24, 27), “and they shall enter,” “and they shall enter.”
Just as she is forbidden to her husband, so too she is forbidden to the paramour, as it says (vv. 27, 29), “she was defiled,” “and she was defiled.” (M Sotah 5:1)
Chapter 5 of Sotah opens with a statement about the paramour, whose potential existence, until now, has been largely ignored. The Mishnah considers that the superfluous appearance of the phrase “and they shall enter” implies that the waters will test not only the woman who is forced to drink them but also the paramour, wherever he is, by adversely affecting him in the same way as her. This symmetry suggests that the rabbis found it morally unacceptable for only one of two partners in crime to be punished. If she has sinned and is consequently harmed seriously by the waters, then he, too, who would never be charged, should and will, they assert, suffer a similar punishment. (According to. Maimonides [Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Sotah 3:17], he will die the same death that she dies, at the very same moment!)
The Mishnah goes on to say that just as she is forbidden to her husband until she drinks the bitter waters and even afterwards if she is guilty, so too she is forbidden to the paramour. Should the opportunity arise for her to reconnect with the paramour, because of the death of the husband or divorce, or a delay in punishment for her, the rabbis feel that it would not be right for her to do so. If it were allowed, then this tractate would be teaching a woman how to jettison one man for another: Have an adulterous relationship with the man to whom she took a fancy, arouse her husband’s suspicion, bring it about that he divorce her, and then be free to continue the relationship with the paramour. In fact, the rabbis in M Nedarim 11:12 (and elsewhere) express their fear that women will do exactly that. Note the symmetry in this mishnah: The rabbis speak of two situations, one in which a woman and another in which a man (the husband of an adulteress) is treated unfairly in their eyes, even though the rules of the Torah are followed. Presenting these two situations together, and casting them in the same literary/midrashic form, suggests that the authors were finding fault with the water ordeal in toto, pointing out its pervasive absurdities, and not just tinkering with it to make it more fair.
Abolishing the Ordeal
The last powerful critique of the ordeal of the bitter waters appears in chapter 9. After discussing the rules of breaking the neck of a calf if a corpse is found near a city (eglah arufah, Deuteronomy 21:1–9), the Mishnah says:
When the number of murderers grew large, they stopped performing the eglah arufah ritual; … when the number of adulterers grew large, the bitter waters stopped, and it was R. Yohanan b. Zaccai who stopped them, as it says, “I will not punish their daughters for fornicating, nor their daughters-in-law for committing adultery, for they [themselves turn aside with whores … ]” [Hosea 4:14]. (M Sotah 9:9)
According to a midrash appearing in both Talmuds (BT Sotah 47b, PT Sotah 9:9; 24a), this mishnah is saying that once sexually immoral behavior becomes standard, the waters will no longer be able to test wives: The husbands of many of these women will be guilty of the same act themselves and therefore ineligible to invoke the test. The midrash derives the need for guiltless men from the concluding verse of the Sotah section (Numbers 5:31), which says that “the man shall be clear of guilt,” implying that only men who are themselves clear of guilt may test their wives. In other words, this ritual was discontinued because of its inherent unfairness: It punished women but not men who committed the very same crime, and who were, themselves, the ones who initiated the test for the women. But the Tosefta (14:2) interprets the mishnah differently. It says that when adultery became common and hence public knowledge, they (the authorities) could no longer administer the bitter waters because the test works only in a case in which there is a doubt and in so many of these cases the transgression was certain.8Cf. Judith Wegner, Chattel or Person? (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54.
These different approaches suggest that there are two interpretive stages: The older approach, represented by the Mishnah and the Tosefta, treats the abolition matter-of-factly. According to the mishnah, because there was a backlog of cases, a long line of angry husbands waiting to test their wives, the time-consuming ritual had to be abolished, just like the eglah arufah ritual. The mishnah’s verse from Hosea, supporting the notion that adultery had become rampant, singles out women as adulterers and says that, despite their sin, God would not punish them—an apt prooftext. Note that the verse describes men’s sin as seeking out prostitutes, not adultery. The Tosefta’s tradition, attributed to R. Yohanan b. Zaccai, a Tanna who lived at the end of the Temple period, gives a rationale that is an alternative to the mishnah’s backlog of cases, but still offers no moral critique of the ordeal. However, the later rabbis and also the redactors of the Bavli and Yerushalmi felt the need to explain the Mishnah’s abolition in a different way altogether, as a response to the hypocrisy of a ritual that permitted guilty but unpunished husbands to punish a guilty wife. As time passed, moral instincts seem to have prodded rabbis into explaining the abolition as a moral necessity.
Was this ritual ever carried out? Need one take this line of the Mishnah at face value? There is no obvious answer. Only one mention is made in rabbinic literature of the actual subjection of a woman to this ordeal (Mishnah Eduyot 5:6; PT Sotah 2:5; 18b). We read, however, in Mishnah Yoma 3:10, that Helene, the queen of Adiabene who converted to Judaism in the time of the Second Temple, made several generous donations to the Temple, among them a golden tablet on which were inscribed the verses of Sotah. The purpose of this tablet, presumably, was to make it easier for the kohanim to prepare the Sotah’s scroll. I find it ironic, and a bit too didactic, that a woman would make a gift to the Temple to be used to test women for sin.9Cf. Ilan, Jewish Women, 137.
Conclusions
What has this holistic study of Mishnah Sotah yielded? To begin with, we saw that the tractate begins on a note that radically transforms Torah, requiring a husband to warn his wife about a particular man and then, only if she paid no attention to the warning and secluded herself with that man in front of witnesses, allowing him to subject her to the ordeal. Whereas the Torah prescribes the ordeal for instances in which there are no witnesses, the rabbis inject witnesses, thus ensuring that the administration of the waters will be permitted only in cases where the man’s jealousy is reasonably justified. So, the tractate opens with a rabbinic rendition of this institution that does not deviate as much from the rules of due process as one may at first think.
Then, in the course of reading through the tractate, we hear the message loud and clear: First, the rabbis are interested in limiting the implementation of this ordeal to the extent that they can; second, they believe that with divine intervention, the paramour, too, if there was one, will be punished exactly as she is; third, they believe that a history of good deeds on her part will postpone the implementation of the punishment; and, finally, because so many men were committing adultery with so many women, they abolish the ordeal of the bitter waters altogether.
This tractate, although it presents a detailed, gruesome description of the ritual, bordering, one might say, on the pornographic, at the same time suppresses this hostile and offensive core by the later addition of the elements mentioned above. When we read this tractate, we get the impression that overriding the disdain and even disgust the rabbis feel for a woman who may have been extramaritally involved is the even greater dislike they had for the ritual itself, probably because of its inherent injustice: An innocent woman could be humiliated, whereas a guilty man could be neither humiliated nor punished. On the surface, this tractate appears to endorse and develop the ritual of the bitter waters as set down by the Torah, but in reality, in all of its elaborate expansion, the rabbis eliminate this ancient ritual, paragraph by paragraph, until, almost anticlimactically, at the end of the volume, they supply a historical note, that the waters were, in fact, abolished by R. Yohanan b. Zaccai.10A very brief version of this chapter appears in my article “An Assessment of Women’s Liberation in the Talmud,” in Conservative Judaism 26, no. 4 (Summer 1972).
All of this change notwithstanding, the image of marriage presented in this tractate and related rabbinic materials is one of a dominant husband and subordinate wife. As in other tractates, marriage is constructed here as a patriarchal institution: Men take women to be their wives, may dismiss them at will, and may deny them the compensation set forth in the ketubah if they have transgressed the rules of Jewish marriage, such as the requirement of fidelity. Although the rabbis do give a man these rights, they warn him time and again not to exercise absolute control over his wife.
It seems to me that the major achievement of the rabbis of the Talmud with regard to women, in this tractate and also in general, was significantly to improve their status in a variety of important areas. Since by the rabbis’ own account, the ordeal of the bitter waters was abolished in the last days of the Temple, and thus was completely inoperative for most of the rabbinic period, this entire tractate may be seen as a lengthy statement of rabbinic dissatisfaction with patriarchy as they knew it. Moreover, since the men in this tractate were not, in fact, yielding any new rights to women or making any concessions in their comments, which almost explicitly reject the ordeal, they probably intended to show that rabbis take action when they see unjust treatment of women. Such action does not mean that they granted women full equality with men, such as the ability to make demands of marital fidelity on a husband, but that, within a patriarchal framework, they took steps to reduce women’s legal disabilities.
Throughout this chapter we have read the Bible through the eyes of the rabbis, noting how they adapted a single biblical institution to their more progressive social outlook. It is noteworthy that a similar claim has been made by Bible scholars about the biblical institution of Sotah itself. As grossly unjust as Sotah may seem to the uninitiated reader of the Bible, when read in the context of Ancient Near Eastern literature, the ritual appears to have been reworked by the priestly legislators “in order to protect a suspected but unproved adulteress from the vengeance of an irate husband or community by mandating that God will decide her case.”11The JPS Torah Commentary, Numbers, 354. Strange as it may sound, the point of the biblical reworking of the ordeal, according to Jacob Milgrom, is to improve women’s lives. Just as Milgrom has read Bible in its ancient setting—literary, legal, and social—so have I attempted to read Talmud. And it has yielded similar results: although Tractate Sotah seems sexist on the surface, a contextualized reading shows that the underlying intent of the rabbis is to erase the inequities of the ritual and thereby diminish, although not eradicate, its patriarchy.