Fully acknowledging that Judaism, as described in both the Bible and the Talmud, was patriarchal, Judith Hauptman demonstrates that the rabbis of the Talmud made significant changes in key areas of Jewish law in order to benefit women. Reading the texts with feminist sensibilities, recognizing that they were written by men and for men and that the
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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.1
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
:
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
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-R2 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.3
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 (T 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 T 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 acknowled...
