Trial by Ordeal

Shabbat Naso, Numbers 4:21-7:89

Rav Edmond H Weiss, Ph.D.

Naso outlines the ministerial functions of the Levite clan, including their stewardship
over the valuable property of the mishkan (which is actually a retrojected version of the
Temple in Jerusalem). Levites are further responsible for inspecting those who have
become unclean and making them fit for re-entry into the community, including
overseeing the processes of repentance and the associated sacrifices. This sedra also
describes the discipline of an especially devoted group of chaste, ascetics called the
Nazarites, the most famous example of which appears later in Judges: Samson.

These themes of property, purity, chastity, and repentance coalesce in the section
dealing with the sotah, a wife suspected of adultery.1 The parashah contains a procedure
to follow when the fidelity of a man’s wife is suspect. First, to whom does the law
apply?

This is the law in cases of jealousy, when a wife, while under her husband's authority,
goes astray and defiles herself, or when a spirit of jealousy comes on a man and he is
jealous of his wife; then he shall set the woman before Adonai, and the priest shall apply
this entire law to her.

1In priestly law, only a married woman could be charged with adultery. Further, although it offends the
modern sensibility, adultery is in many ways a property crime—especially when a paternity is in doubt.

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Notice that there is no factual predicate necessary for the application of the law.
Jealousy or the spirit of jealousy is enough. There is no “probable cause” or “writ of
habeas corpus” required—although one gets the sense in reading the Sotah tractate of
the Talmud that the cases often involved a suspicious pregnancy.

Jewish Voodoo

The jealous husband takes the sotah to the priest (not the court) and registers his
complaint. The priest, after first making his own sacrifice to Adonai2, urges the woman
to confess (thereby averting the imminent ordeal). If she maintains her innocence, the
priest gets an earthen bowl full of water, to which he adds some of the dust from the
floor of the temple. The process that follows is so astonishing, I’ve included it all below:

Then the priest shall make her take an oath, saying, "If no man has lain with you, if you
have not turned aside to uncleanness while under your husband's authority, be immune
to this water of bitterness that brings the curse. But if you have gone astray while under
your husband's authority, if you have defiled yourself and some man other than your
husband has had intercourse with you," --let the priest make the woman take the oath of
the curse and say to the woman--" the ADONAI make you an execration and an oath
among your people, when the ADONAI makes your uterus drop, your womb discharge;
now may this water that brings the curse enter your bowels and make your womb
discharge, your uterus(thigh) to drop!" And the woman shall say, "Amen. Amen."

Then the priest shall put these curses in writing, and wash them off into the water of
bitterness. He shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that brings the curse,
and the water that brings the curse shall enter her and cause bitter pain. The priest shall
take the grain offering of jealousy out of the woman's hand, and shall elevate the grain
offering before the ADONAI and bring it to the altar; and the priest shall take a handful
of the grain offering, as its memorial portion, and turn it into smoke on the altar, and
afterward shall make the woman drink the water. When he has made her drink the water,
then, if she has defiled herself and has been unfaithful to her husband, the water that
brings the curse shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall discharge,
her uterus drop, and the woman shall become an execration among her people. But if the

2For reasons that defy modern understanding, we are commanded not to add oil to the meal-
offering of the wife suspected of unfaithfulness and not to add frankincense to the meal-offering of
the wife suspected of unfaithfulness.

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 woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be immune and be able to
conceive children.

This is a classic trial by ordeal: If she is innocent, nothing happens; if guilty, some sort
of physiological calamity occurs, interpreted by some rabbis as the explosion of her
abdomen, causing death, and by others as the destruction of her reproductive organs,
rendering her infertile. Maimonides suggested that, if guilty, she would die on the spot
and, moreover, the guilty man—wherever he was—would at that moment die also.
(“As the water probes her [the alleged adulteress], it probes him [the adulterer] as well”
[Mishnah Sotah 5:1].)

The mitzvah of the bitter waters3 is distinguished from all other mitzvot by the fact that
it requires a direct intervention by God, a miraculous transformation of the guilty
woman’s words into an instrument of pain or death. This, indeed, is the warrant for all
forms of trial by ordeal: the accused can only survive through the protection of God.

The notion of trial by ordeal is supported by a long list of arch and debatable
theological beliefs. For the outcome of such a trial to be just…
• God must exist as an intelligent being.
• God must have full knowledge of the events transpiring.
• God must know the truth.
• God must have powers of agency to affect the outcome.
• God, if necessary, can reverse the laws of nature to produce a miracle for the
defendant.

This last point is most evident in the trial-by-ordeal practices of the medieval church,
where the power of God was assumed able to counter the effect of burning and
drowning, for example. God was presumed not only to be able to determine the
outcome of a sword-fight, but even protect the skin from flames.

In the case of the bitter waters, though, its hard to say whether a special ink makes it
inherently poisonous (plus, imagine the residue on the floor of the temple, from which
the dust is drawn), or whether the guilt or innocence of the subject alters the potability
of the water. Or just whether the sonorous pronouncements of the priest put enough
fear and suggestion into the mind of the young girl that the effect is the result of priestly
voodoo.

3 Elsewhere in the Torah, “bitter waters” are taken to mean poisonous, or at least sickening. In this case,
though, the innocence of the women eliminates the poison.

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There is no evidence—and much scholarly doubt—that the sotah ritual was widely
performed, or even performed at all. The destruction of the Temple shifted such marital
disputes to the civil courts, where controversies were, presumably, resolved without
such drama. But, even so, what reason do we have to believe that our ancestors thought
this might actually produce a just conclusion?

Sotah in in the Talmud and Elsewhere

The Sotah ritual shows up in other ancient literature. Philo, the Alexandrian Jewish
philosopher, mentions it in "De Specialibus Legibus,” in which he, long before
Maimonides, attempts to organize and present systematically the commandments in the
Torah, using the Ten Commandments as a category scheme. Sotah, and other matters
related to marriage, is discussed under the “adultery” category. Josephus Flavius also
mentions Sotah in The Jewish Antiquities, but scholars doubt that he ever saw the process
applied.

Of course, Sotah gets an entire tractate in the Talmud.4 The Mishna version is much
more elaborate and detailed. Prior to the actual ordeal, the woman is subject to
extended counseling with her husband; an attempt is made to collect and evaluate
whatever evidence may be available; in the shalom bayit tradition, the husband is urged
to say he was mistaken or that his jealousy was unwarranted.

Ultimately, though, when this pre-trial mediation breaks down, the Talmud’s version of
the ceremony is even more frightening and spectacular. The woman has her hair
disheveled, loosed from all fasteners and head coverings, and is seen thus exposed by
all in the community. (Remember, a modest woman hides her hair in public.) Then,
according to the various rabbinical opinions, her dress is either opened or completely
pulled down, revealing her breasts to those assembled. The Talmudic version, thus,
increases the humiliation she experiences and, ultimately, adds to the fear and shame
that might activate the voodoo of the bitter waters.

Elsewhere in the Talmud, Tractate Yoma (which deals with Yom Kippur) describes one
of the furnishings of the temple as a golden plate on which the names of each sotah was
inscribed. And in Tractate Eduyot, there is a story of a man who is offered power if he

4About two-thirds through the tractate, the topic shifts to the 12 spies (regilim) that Moses sent into
Canaan.

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will deny the rightness of his legal rulings. One of those rulings, interestingly, refers to
the sotah:

One may not make a converted woman nor a freed maidservant drink [from the "bitter waters"
that were drunk by a woman suspected of adultery as a test]. But the Sages say: [They are]
made to drink. They said to him: There was the case of Karkamit, a freed maidservant in
Jerusalem, who was made to drink by Shama'ya and Avtalyon! He said to them: They made her
drink an "example" [i.e. the "bitter waters" they made her drink were not authentic]. They
excommunicated him, and he died in excommunication, and the Court stoned his coffin.

Most amusing is a comment by one of the Tannaim who claims, centuries after the fact,
that the sotah ritual was ultimately abolished when adultery became so widespread and
public that men and women didn’t even bother to conceal it anymore!

The Bluff of Jewish Justice

Christians have a way of characterizing the Jewish conception of justice as bloodthirsty

and merciless; in contrast to the Jewish model, they like to compare their Christian
commitment to mercy and forgiveness. Part of this mischaracterization comes from
misreading the Torah. For example, “an eye for an eye” has nothing to do with eyes; it
is a poetic essay on civil damages, on the need to match the punishment to the offence.
And this at a time when the standard punishments were execution and lashes.

Understandably, feminist students of Torah look at the sotah process as an egregious

illustration of religiously sanctioned abuse of women. They see the treatment of wives
as chattel; they see the discounting of a woman’s oaths; they see public humiliation and
draconian punishment for an act that should be resolved through discussion and
conflict resolution. Indeed, in today’s social environment, the doubting of the woman’s
testimony is an incendiary issue.

The reputation of bloodthirstiness, though, is invited by many passages throughout our

texts: grisly (perhaps capital) punishment for infidelity; stoning for disobedience to
one’s parents; exclusion from the community for eating a fish without scales.5 The irony
is that, if one studies the implementation of these laws, as described in the Talmud and
elsewhere, we realize that they were rarely enforced6. Tractate Sanhedrin, for example,
sets the evidentiary bar so high in capital cases, it is doubtful that many people were

5Do we really believe that the coffin of the misguided judge was also stoned?
6Do we really believe that a priest’s wife, caught in adultery, would have molten metal poured down her
throat, as prescribed in the Talmud?

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executed at all. Famously, a unanimous verdict of guilty from the seventy members of
the Sanhedrin resulted in an acquittal. The argument was that if all seventy agreed on
the guilt of the accused, he could not have had an adequate defense.

Similarly, in this sotah trial by ordeal, a woman who is not terrified of the priest and not
fooled into thinking the brew is poisonous will survive even though guilty. Although
the notion of trial by ordeal is grotesque, we must note that this single instance of it in
the Jewish scriptures protects the accused, not the accuser. In the typical trials-by-
ordeal used by the Catholics of the Middle Ages to persecute innocent citizens,
including thousands of Jews falsely accused of crimes, only a miracle would save the
innocent from certain death. Note the distinction: a guilty woman could survive the
ordeal by resisting the priest’s voodoo suggestions, but neither an innocent nor a guilty
woman could have survived the Church’s fires, drownings, and other tortures.

This is still another indication of the degree to which Jewish philosophy and law favor
the rights of the accused, his or her civil rights, and perhaps explains why Jews are so
over-represented among constitutional lawyers and civil rights activists. It also
illustrates why it is never a good idea for governments to be in the thrall of religious
zealots. Fundamentalists of every stripe, but especially Christians and Moslems, have
little patience with the presumption of innocence.

The sotah passage, then, even though many doubt its actual implementation, remains a
topic of interest to contemporary readers. In Israel it has been the basis for plays and in
Ruth Calderon’s woman-centered discussion of the Talmud (A Bride for One Night), she
creates a modern midrash in a which a guilty and pregnant woman escapes the bitter
waters when her similar-looking sister takes her place.

The unwarranted abuse and punishment of innocent women has been with us since the
beginning of civilization. Remember: None of those murdered women were actually
witches. The refusal to place a woman’s testimony on an equal footing with men’s
remains in most communities dominated by fundamentalist religion. The modern
reader should note, therefore, that a Torah discussion of Parashah Naso, which contains
so many other interesting topics, should explore this obscure priestly ritual as well. It
can be the basis for a lively and urgent discussion about men, women, and claims of
misbehavior made by each and about the other.

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