The Writing on the Floor
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Writers and readers of texts ignore floors. Characters stand on them, their words echo off them, but more often than not we pay them no attention. Indeed, if a floor gets a mention at all, it is probably significant—although, even then, readers may not notice. Archaeologists, on the other hand, pay attention to floors, piecing them together from fragments. Recent archaeological work on a particular floor provides a piece we have long been missing to help us puzzle out the significance of a text with unanswered questions: the story of the woman accused of adultery in John 8:2-11. The floor I am referring to is that of the Temple.
As reported in BAR in 2016, the Temple Mount Sifting Project reassembled geometric patterns of opus sectile tiles that were found in at least covered porticoes and perhaps much more of the Temple.a Even though the story tells us that Jesus was in the Temple courts and “wrote” on the floor, readers often ignore this. Our inattention to the precise context—that it took place specifically on the floor of the Temple courts—has led us to miss an important clue to the significance of Jesus’s action. It doesn’t matter whether we can reconstruct the precise flooring the author of the story envisaged being underneath the characters as the drama unfolds. We just need to notice and pay attention to the floor as part of the Temple setting.
Whether Jesus was writing on a section of flooring covered with geometric tile patterns or somewhere with plain stone slabs, these floors were trodden by countless feet on any given day. Wherever Jesus traced his finger through dust on the Temple floor, whether tracing letters or the edges of tiles, his aim could not have been to communicate something through specific words he wrote. Nothing he wrote that way would have been legible.
The Temple setting, the specific mention of dust on the Temple floor, turns our attention to another possibility. Had the woman actually been “caught in the act,” there would have been no legal matter to bring to Jesus, and there should have been two guilty individuals. Movies and television dramas sometimes depict the scene with people standing around, stones in hand, and the Temple nowhere in sight. An execution would not have been carried out in the Temple courts under any circumstances, as this was not permitted. The whole point is that this was a case brought to Jesus for his opinion on how best to resolve it, not an execution.
We are explicitly told that the Pharisees specify the punishment required by the Law for this case as stoning. Throughout rabbinic writings, the Pharisees were famous for trying to avoid the death penalty whenever possible. If they were testing Jesus, perhaps it was to see whether they could find a loophole to avoid her execution. The Pharisees also viewed strangulation as the appropriate penalty unless a different punishment was specifically mentioned. When they said that the Law required that the woman be stoned, it lets the reader know that she was a betrothed virgin (Deuteronomy 22:23-27). The scenario was more likely something like this: She probably had been “caught in the act” only in the sense that she was pregnant, and the fiancé did not accept the child as his. No one involved wanted this young girl to 073074die, and so this was the problem they brought to Jesus.
Suspicious husbands had a legal recourse in such cases. The ritual known as the trial of bitter waters, or sotah, involved a ritual after which, if no ill befell the accused woman, she was held guiltless. And significantly, the ritual, described in detail in Numbers 5:11-31, involved the woman drinking dust from the Temple floor.
When Jesus lowered his finger to the dust, perhaps Jesus was asking, why not subject the girl to the sotah ritual? However unpleasant that practice might seem, it was preferable to stoning. Mishnah Sotah 9.9 tells us that the use of the ritual was halted during the time of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, a contemporary of Jesus. When Jesus traced his finger along the floor of the Temple through whatever thin layer of dust was there, within view of the steps at the Nicanor Gate where a woman subjected to the ritual would have been brought, Jesus’s message was not formed in letters but in the very act of drawing attention to the dust on the Temple floor. He was criticizing the Temple authorities for the cessation of the practice—because eliminating it didn’t make things consistently better for women, as proven by the case that had been brought before him.
According to Mishna Sotah 9.9, ben Zakkai himself discontinued the sotah ritual because it seemed unfair to subject women to the ordeal when men were widely committing adultery. And while eliminating this practice may have been more equitable in the majority of instances, in some cases the removal of this option created a conundrum that might lead to an execution that most or all involved would have preferred to avoid.
Even if Jesus were critical of the decision to abolish a legal option without addressing these larger issues, he nevertheless applied the same basic principle as his rabbinic contemporary did: Those who are guilty ought not to be allowed to put others on trial, much less to judge and punish them. The Babylonian Talmud (Bavli Sotah 47b) says that the waters do not even work to evaluate whether the wife is guilty if the husband is likewise guilty. Jesus may have been making an analogous point: Stoning should not work when the community also is implicated in the guilt.
I explore this story further in my forthcoming book What Jesus Learned from Women.1
Jesus’s action makes sense when considered in its context—not only the historical, cultural, and geographical context, but the architectural context as well. His action has puzzled readers because interpreters failed to observe the things to which archaeologists dedicate so much of their professional attention. We failed to notice the floor, even when Jesus’s finger was pointing directly to it the entire time.
Writers and readers of texts ignore floors. Characters stand on them, their words echo off them, but more often than not we pay them no attention. Indeed, if a floor gets a mention at all, it is probably significant—although, even then, readers may not notice. Archaeologists, on the other hand, pay attention to floors, piecing them together from fragments. Recent archaeological work on a particular floor provides a piece we have long been missing to help us puzzle out the significance of a text with unanswered questions: the story of the woman accused of adultery in John 8:2-11. The […]
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Footnotes
1. Gabriel Barkay, Zachi Dvira, and Frankie Snyder, “What the Temple Mount Floor Looked Like,” BAR, November/December 2016.