Who is the Sotah?

The Sotah is an adulterous who leaves no witness.  She is forced to drink “bitter waters, the ashes of a parchment on which the priests wrote a name God. Numbers 5:11–31. According to the rabbinical tradition if she is guilty of adulatory, she dies; if she is innocent, she will conceive a child.

So imagine, for a second that non-one ever died, that God did not visit death upon adulterous women, while men could have multiple spouses and concubines. Under this assumption this ritual is a dose of magical thinking put to the service of the extremely noble goal of legitimizing the woman’s baby, conceived by the other man; restoring social order and saving the child for the disastrous results of bastard-ships. Mamzers or biblical bastards cannot marry a non-bastard for ten generations.  The ancients were able to pay lip service to monogamy, while having their cake too.

The Talmud emphasizes this point by adding an extra detail missing in the bible narrative –the woman can choose not to undertake this ritual, and then the husband is forced to divorce her. Thus the woman who was in fact innocent, and wanted out of her relationship could do so (only men had the power to grant divorce), and the woman, who was in fact “guilty” and needed a baby daddy, could undergo the ritual, and get herself a socially sanctioned baby daddy.

I see the Talmudic Sotah as a moment where room is created for the reality of human yearning, where magic (aka ritual) rescues the unfathomable brutality of patriarchal law.  Today, without the magic we are left with only the brutality.