Feminists have no difficulty pointing out obvious sexist passages in the Bible. In their arsenal of evidence they usually reserve the coup de grace for the case of the suspected adulteress (Numbers 5:11–51).
These are the facts of the case: An irate husband suspects that his wife has been unfaithful. Having no proof, his only recourse is to bring her to the Sanctuary, where she undergoes an ordeal. The priest makes her drink a potion consisting of sacred water to which have been added dust from the Sanctuary floor and scrapings from a parchment containing a curse. The curse spells out the consequences. If she is guilty, her reproductive organs will swell so she will not be able to conceive. If the water has no effect on her, she is declared innocent and will be blessed with seed.
Such humiliation! There is no evidence, only her husband’s suspicion. Her protests of innocence are ignored. Her husband’s “fit of jealousy” (Hebrew qin’ah) suffices to drag her to the Sanctuary, where she is forced to drink a cursed potion.
Ironically, feminists have chosen the worst possible witness. As I shall demonstrate, her public ordeal was meant not to humiliate her but to protect her, not to punish her but to defend her.
There is clearly something bizarre in her sentencing that should have given pause to all the commentators and critics, a hint that behind this public humiliation another scenario was being played out. And like a palimpsest, the underlayer of the manuscript cannot be read until it is held up to the light.
In the Bible, adulterers, both male and female, are sentenced to death (Leviticus 20:10). However, an adulteress proven guilty by the ordeal of drinking the potion, that is, by God Himself, is not sentenced to die. Her punishment is poetically just. She who engaged in illicit sex is doomed to barrenness. Yet the gnawing question remains: Having been proven guilty of adultery, why is she not summarily put to death?
The key is that the allegedly guilty woman was unapprehended. That this element is most significant is shown by the fact that it is cited four times in her indictment, each time in a different manner: (1) “unbeknown to her husband”; (2) “she keeps secret” (or “it was done clandestinely”); (3) “without being apprehended”; and (4) “and there is no witness against her” (Numbers 5:13). These redundancies lead one critic to assert that the purpose is “to give weight to what might be seen as a transparent charade…to protect the woman as wife in the disadvantaged position determined for her by the mores of ancient Israel’s society.”1
This stylistic inflation, however, may have been deliberately written with a judicial purpose in mind: to emphasize the principle that the unapprehended criminal is not subject to the jurisdiction of the human court. Since the suspected adulteress has not been apprehended—as the text emphatically repeats—then the community, especially the overwrought husband, may not give vent to their passion to lynch her.
Indeed, even if proved guilty by the ordeal, she may not be put to death. Unapprehended adultery remains punishable only by God, and there is no need for human mediation. The punishment for this sin against the husband and God is inherent in the ordeal.
Supportive evidence for this position may also be inferred from the absence of the precise verb for committing adultery, na’af, which is found in the Decalogue (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17) and the priestly code itself (e.g. Leviticus 20:10, four times in one verse.) Thus, although the biblical legislator expressed the woman’s infidelity in four different ways, it is no accident that he refrained from using the legal term na’af, for he wished to disassociate this woman’s fate from the death penalty imposed for adultery. The bold omission of the term na’af is another indication that jurisdiction in this case lies outside the human court.
Finally, that the suspected adulteress is not put to death either by man or God provides the necessary clue to explaining how an ordeal—with its inherent magical and pagan elements—was allowed to enter the legislation of the Torah. Or, to answer the paradox as it was phrased by the medieval commentator Ramban (Nachmanides): This is the only case of biblical law where the outcome depends on a miracle. The answer, I submit, is inherent in the ordeal. It provides the priestly legislator with an accepted practice by which he could remove the sentencing and punishing of an unapprehended adulteress from human hands and thereby guarantee that she would not be put to death.2
Feminists have no difficulty pointing out obvious sexist passages in the Bible. In their arsenal of evidence they usually reserve the coup de grace for the case of the suspected adulteress (Numbers 5:11–51). These are the facts of the case: An irate husband suspects that his wife has been unfaithful. Having no proof, his only recourse is to bring her to the Sanctuary, where she undergoes an ordeal. The priest makes her drink a potion consisting of sacred water to which have been added dust from the Sanctuary floor and scrapings from a parchment containing a curse. The curse […]
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H.C. Brichto, “The Case of the Sota and a Reconsideration of Biblical ‘Law,’” Hebrew Union College Annual 46 (1975), pp. 55–70.
2.
See Jacob Milgrom, “The Case of the Suspected Adulteress, Numbers 5:11–31: Redaction and Meaning,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, ed. R.F. Friedman, (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981) pp. 69–75; and Milgrom, Numbers, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), pp. 346–354.
