The Sotah Ritual: Mistrusting Women and Their Torah Study

I dedicate this piece to my eldest daughter Shara Naomi, on the occasion of the anniversary of her Bat Mitzvah.

Marc Brettler, The Bible and the Believer (Oxford UP, 2015), 57; idem, “Biblical Authority: A Jewish Pluralistic View,” in Engaging Biblical Authority: Perspectives on the Bible as Scripture, ed. William P. Brown (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 1–9 [pp. 5ff].

The Laws of Hammurabi, for instance, prescribe the river ordeal for a woman suspected of cheating:

^{LH §131} If the wife of a husband has been accused by her husband but she has not been caught copulating with another male, she shall swear a solemn oath and return to her home. ^§132 If a finger has been pointed at a man’s wife because of some male, but she has not been caught copulating with another male, she shall leap into the River (i.e., submit to the river ordeal) for the sake of her husband.

M.E.J. Richardson, Hammurabi’s Laws: Text, Translation, and Glossary (London: T&T Clark, 2004 [repr. of 2000]), 83. The premise is that since the husband has circumstantial evidence at best for the affair, the woman will submit to the river god, who will allow her to live if innocent or drown her if guilty. Similarly, the sotah waters will have an adverse effect on the woman if she is guilty, but will have no effect if she is innocent.

See for example, Jacob Milgrom, The JPS Torah Commentary: Numbers (1990), pp. 346-348. See also Michael Fishbane, “Accusations of Adultery: A Study of Law and Scribal Practice in Numbers 5:11-31,” HUCA (1974), 26–29, and William McKane, “Poison: Trial by Ordeal and the Cup of Wrath,” Vetus Testamentum 30.4 (October 1980), 474–492. Both Tikva Frymer-Kensky and Hilary Lipka argus that it was not a trial by physical ordeal but rather a purgatory oath, which is often accompanied by the drinking of a potion. See Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Numbers V 11-31),” Vetus Testamentum 34:1 (January 1984), 24–25. See also Hilary Lipka, Sexual Transgression in the Hebrew Bible (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2006), 116; Alice Bach, ed., Women in the Bible: A Reader (Routledge, 1999).

Emmanuel Rackman, “The Case of the Sotah in Jewish Law: Ordeal or Psychodrama?” National Law Review 3 (1988), pp. 49-64.

See discussion in, Lisa Gruschow, Writing The Wayward Wife: Rabbinic Interpretations of Sotah (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 2.

^{משנה סוטה א:ה} וְכֹהֵן אוֹחֵז בִּבְגָדֶיהָ, אִם נִקְרְעוּ נִקְרָעוּ, אִם נִפְרְמוּ נִפְרָמוּ, עַד שֶׁהוּא מְגַלֶּה אֶת לִבָּהּ, וְסוֹתֵר אֶת שְׂעָרָהּ... ^א:ו הָיְתָה מְכֻסָּה בִלְבָנִים, מְכַסָּהּ בִּשְׁחוֹרִים; הָיוּ עָלֶיהָ כְלֵי זָהָב קְטַלָּיוֹת, נְזָמִים וְטַבָּעוֹת, מַעֲבִירִים מִמֶּנָּה, כְּדֵי לְנַוְּלָהּ. וְאַחַר כָּךְ מֵבִיא חֶבֶל מִצְרִי, וְקוֹשְׁרוֹ לְמַעְלָה מִדַּדֶּיהָ. וְכָל הָרוֹצֶה לִרְאוֹת בָּא וְרוֹאֶה...

^{m. Sotah 1:5} And a priest takes hold of her garments— if they were torn then they were torn, if they were ripped at the seam then ripped at the seam— until he uncovers her bosom and loosens her hair…. ^1:6 If she was dressed in white, he would dress her in black. If she was wearing jewels of gold and chains and noserings and finger rings, they would be taken from her to deface her. And then he brings a rope of wicker and ties it above her breasts. And whoever wishes to watch comes and watches…

Translation from Ishay Rosen-Zvi and Orr Scharf in, The Oxford Annotated Mishnah, ed. Shaye J. D. Cohen, Robert Goldenberg, and Hayim Lapin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 2.226.

Translation from, Oxford Annotated Mishnah, 2.232.

In b. Yebamot 63b, Ben Azzai, a man who reputedly was engaged to Rabbi Akiva’s daughter (b. Ketubot 63a) but never actually married, becomes a mouthpiece for the conflict between erotic and intellectual desire, and between the family life and the world of the Beit midrash: Ben Azzai preaches in the Beit Midrash the paramount importance of marriage and procreation, saying that anyone who does not engage in procreation sheds blood and diminishes the divine image, but nevertheless desists himself from this mitzvah, saying, וּמָה אֶעֱשֶׂה שֶׁנַּפְשִׁי חָשְׁקָה בַּתּוֹרָה, אֶפְשָׁר לָעוֹלָם שֶׁיִּתְקַיֵּים עַל יְדֵי אֲחֵרִים – what can I do when my soul desires Torah. This quotation that becomes important for pioneering feminist Hebrew scholar / writer Hava Shapiro, a descendent of a famous family of Hebrew printers, who like Ben Azzai, opts to leave her husband and son to pursue higher education. See Wendy Zierler and Carole B. Balin, To Tread on New Ground: Selected Hebrew Writers of Hava Shapiro (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2014), 28

In the famous story of the Oven of Akhnai (b. Baba Metzia 59a-b), R. Eliezer elicits miracles and a heavenly voice to endorse his position on the ritual status of the oven.

In Hilkhot Torah 1:13, for example, Maimonides expands Ben Azzai’s idea of the merit of women’s Torah study beyond the immediate sotah context, but also immediately undermines and discounts this merit; while repeating R. Eliezer’s equation of women’s Torah study with licentiousness, he supplies additional reasons to discourage and denigrate the idea of women’s Torah study on the basis of disinterest and intellectual inferiority.

Daniel Boyarin, “Women’s Bodies and the Rise of the Rabbis: The Case of the Sotah,” in Jews and Gender, ed. Jonathan Frankel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 95, 97.

Ishay Rosen-Zvi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 23. See also Ishay Rosen Zvi, The Sotah Spectacle, TheGemara (2015).

Bonna Devora Haberman, “The Suspected Adulteress: A Study of Textual Embodiment,” Prooftexts 20:1-2 (Winter/Spring 2000), 12-42

Haberman, “The Suspected Adulteress,” 17.

Tikva Frymer Kensky makes the intriguing suggestion with respect to the clearing of the sotah and her consequent conception that “the waters themselves, coming from the sacred realm (holy water, with dust from the tabernacle floor) and bearing the name of God,” might have been “believed to function as an impregnating force, and that the woman was believed to become pregnant as a direct result of this trial. Tikva Frymer Kensky, “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah,” Vetus Testamentum 34:1 (Jan.1984), p. 19.

Haberman, p. 32.

Haberman, p. 12. According to Haberman, this potion, composed of water, dust from the floor of the Tabernacle, and the dissolved words/ink of a curse that includes God’s name, points to a convergence in the sotah case between the private domain of marriage and the public domain of religion, between monogamy and monotheism. Ishay Rosen-Zvi makes a similar observation about the ritual as re-constructed in the Mishnah, arguing that the ritual is shaped in the mold of prophetic descriptions of punishment against adulterous women, who are meant to stand for the idolatrous, betrayal of the (feminized) people of Israel. See Rosen-Zvi, p. 3.

He lived in Warsaw, Odessa, Moscow and finally in Berlin.

For more on the dual aspects of the stories in Bamidbar see Tsipporah Kagan, “Ma’aseh hasippur – Sippurei Bamidbar leDavid Frischmann,” Dappim lemhqar besifrut 7 (1990): 95-110.

David Jacobson, Modern Midrash, Modern Midrash: The Retelling of Traditional Jewish Narratives by Twentieth-Century Hebrew Writers. (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), p. 69.

The framing of the stories suggests the possibility of an alternative feminine tradition to that represented in the classical sources. As far back as 1887 Frischmann had been encouraging female Hebraism as a way of establishing a new Hebrew literature. See David Frischman, Mikhtavim al devar sifrut, Letter 1 https://benyehuda.org/read/19014.

David Frischmann, “Meholot” (Dances), https://benyehuda.org/read/2802. My translation.

Of course, for such a tradition to exert influence it had to be alive and ongoing. In the sotah story retold by Frischmann’s narrator, the female protagonist is too young, unschooled, and cut-off from sources of education to avail herself of these resources and to use them for her safety and advantage.

David Frischmann, “Sotah,” https://benyehuda.org/read/8526. All translations from this story are mine.

His insistence that it is inappropriate to offer a sacrifice “beseter panim,” with her face hidden by a veil, cynically overturns one of the rabbinic concretizations of “ruaḥ kin’ah,” namely that in order fairly to activate the sotah ritual, the husband has to have warned his wife before witnesses not to enter לְבֵית הַסֵּתֶר – a house of seclusion with the other man (m. Sotah 1:2).

If R. Abahu interprets R. Eliezer’s rejection of women’s Torah study as causing evil cunning to enter into a woman (b. Sotah 21b), here it is the powerful, knowing priest who uses cunning to maleficent ends.

It’s worth comparing for a moment what happens in Frischmann’s story with Naomi Ragen’s popular 1992 novel, Sotah, which features a modern-day ḥaredi protagonist named Deena, who, on suspicion of being an adulteress, is torn away from her husband and child by the community “Morals Patrol,” and is put through an ordeal of communal separation and shaming. In Ragen’s modern rendering of the sotah ritual, Deena wistfully wishes for “a holy Temple, that I could drink the bitter waters in front of the whole town and they’d see I’m innocent.” (New Milford CT: Toby Press large print edition, 2003), 691.

This is from Job 1:21, when he learns that his children are all dead.

^[30] For the most famous and earliest instance of this, see Judah Leib Gordon’s 1878 poem, “Kotso shel Yud.”