One of the most troubling facets of the Torah is its apparent acceptance of the dominant patriarchy that pervaded the ancient world (and much of the modern world too). The Ten Commandments are clearly addressed specifically to the men (“Don’t covet your neighbor’s wife”) as are many of the mitzvot, the preponderance of heroes are men, and even God is addressed primarily in masculine terms. Of late, that male perspective and focus has become a bit of a stumbling block for those who would look to the Torah for vindication of the notion of the equal worth of men and women. In fact, an entire school of interpretation, feminist Bible interpretation and theology, has emerged as a result of this tension, producing some powerful and surprising re-readings of familiar texts.
No portion of the Torah has caused more consternation or anguish than the one we read this Shabbat, in Parashat Naso. There the Torah recounts the procedures whereby a jealous husband who suspects his wife of having committed adultery may bring her before the priests to submit to a trial by ordeal. In this trial, the accused woman is forced to drink a potion made from sacral water, dirt from the Tabernacle floor, and the written curses containing God’s name (which are dissolved in the water itself). After accepting the priest’s curse, the woman must drink the potion. In theory, her guilt is established if her belly distends and her thighs sag “but if the woman has not defiled herself and is pure, she shall be unharmed and able to retain seed.”
We read of this accused woman and wonder why her paranoid husband isn’t forced to take such a test. Why is it the woman who is the only one who must endure the humiliation and public trauma of the Sotah ritual? What of the men involved: her husband and the possibility of another lover?
In fact, our concern with the apparent imbalance of the Sotah trial is not new: the sages and r
Rabbis of the Talmud and midrash also shared that concern. Perhaps it is for that reason that the rabbis took the biblical verse now translated as “The man shall be clear of guilt, but that woman shall suffer for her guilt” and transposed its meaning to a more egalitarian “If the man is clear of sin then that woman shall suffer her guilt (Sifre Bamidbar).” That same midrash quotes the prophet Hosea in support for their novel interpretation: “I will not punish their daughters for fornication, nor their daughters-in-law for committing adultery; For they [the men] themselves turn aside with whores and sacrifice with prostitutes.” The rabbis of the Talmud (Massekhet Sotah) therefore limit the Sotah trial’s effectiveness to the case in which the accusing man was himself innocent.
Even this move toward equalizing the Sotah trial wasn’t sufficient for all, and by the time of Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai, even while the Second Temple still stood, he eliminated the trial entirely. The Mishnah records that his motivation was the rampant frequency of male adultery, which made punishing the woman alone ludicrous. Tosefta Sotah, a collection of tannaitic statements rejected for inclusion in the Mishnah but often found in the Talmud, adds a more cynical reason: the adultery of the Sotah was performed in secret, in shame. By the time of the rabbis, adulterers were more brazen, seeing no reason to hide their deed. As a result, the use of a trial to ferret out adulterers was neither necessary nor a deterrent.
A modern scholar, Rabbi Jacob Milgrom suggests yet another way to read the imbalance of the Sotah trial: in a world controlled by men, in a society in which women were transferred from the authority of one man (her father) to the authority of another man (her husband), a woman who had an affair was in danger of lynching. By turning her over the priests, and by explicitly stipulating that her only punishment was physical disfigurement, the Torah specifically precludes her execution. As Rabbi Milgrom notes: “The answer…is inherent in the ordeal. It provides the priestly legislator with an accepted practice by which he could remove the jurisdiction over, and punishment of, the un-apprehended adulteress from human hands and thereby guarantee that she would not be put to death.”
In that reading, not only the rabbis of the Talmud, not only the rabbis of the Mishnah, not only the prophets, but even the priests of the Torah were looking for ways to mitigate the rampant patriarchy of the ancient world. Their willingness to do so in their age ought to empower and encourage us in our own to continue their precedent: to create a society which truly recognizes the divine image in each and every human being.
Shabbat shalom.