Here are my thoughts on this week's Torah portion, published by Masorti Judaism in Reflections.
Parshat Naso contains one of the Torah’s more disturbing
passages – the laws relating to an ishah sotah or ‘wayward woman’ (5:11-31). A man becomes jealous of his wife and
suspects her of adultery; there is no evidence against her and she may or may
not be guilty. He brings her to the
Tabernacle and presents a meal offering on her behalf. The priest rips the woman’s clothing,
dishevels her hair and makes her swear an oath, declaring that if she has
indeed defiled herself, the subsequent ceremony will cause her thigh to fall
away and her belly to swell and she will become a curse among her people. The priest now takes a jug of water into
which dirt from the Tabernacle floor has been mixed, blots the inky words of
the curse - written on a scroll - into the water, and makes the woman drink
it. If she is guilty, the predetermined
results ensue.
The Mishnah modifies this procedure in several important
ways. Before a woman can be subjected to
the ordeal, she must have been warned by her husband against secluding herself
with a named individual. Both the
warning and the seclusion itself must be attested to by witnesses. If such evidence exists, the woman is brought
to the high court in Jerusalem where the judges implore her to confess her
sins. If she does so at any point before
the curse is blotted into the water, her guilt is assumed and her husband may
divorce her, but she avoids the ordeal. And
even if a truly adulterous woman goes through with the ceremony, the effects of
the bitter water will be delayed by up to three years by any other good deeds
she may have done.
The contrast between the biblical and rabbinic accounts is
striking. As in other cases (laws
relating to the death penalty, the execution of rebellious children,
punishments of an eye for an eye) the rabbis, it seems, could not stomach some
of the Torah’s more barbarous prescriptions.
Thus, while notionally respecting the sanctity and integrity of the
text, they introduced so many procedural safeguards that in effect they
reversed the Torah’s intention. It’s
reasonably clear that to the rabbis, the bitter water had no physical
effect. Rabbi Shimon hints at this in
the Mishnah, arguing that if merit is understood to delay the punishment,
guilty women will cease to fear the water and the reputation of innocent women,
ostensibly cleared by the ceremony, may be called into question. None of this would be the case if the bitter
water worked, even occasionally. Rather
than a true trial by ordeal, the rabbis have rewritten the ceremony so as to
protect women from arbitrary accusations and as a judicial – not magical - disincentive
to adultery.
But this kind of revolutionary reinterpretation goes back
further than the Mishnah – right into the text of the Torah itself. Academic Bible scholars have noted that the
ritual of the sotah bears the marks of an earlier, pagan ceremony, which
served as the vehicle for a new, monotheistic religious message. The text itself appears to be fragmented:
read chapter 5 verses 24-26 and decide whether the woman drank the water before
the priest offered the sacrifice or vice versa.
This kind of repetition and inconsistency indicates to some scholars an
evolution and editing together of older traditions into a new text. Where once the bitter water was considered to
have magical powers of its own, the Torah makes clear that its function is
symbolic - any harm inflicted comes from God.
And while the procedure reflects patriarchal, sexist assumptions, it’s
possible to read the biblical text as an attempt to alleviate some of the worst
misogynistic excesses, providing a public, judicial alternative to the private
and arbitrary punishment of wives by jealous husbands.
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