Naso - Numbers 4:21-7:89 - 6/6/25

On Sunday BHT observed the holiday of Shavuot with a traditional dairy meal and text study, followed by the festival services and Confirmation. During the text study, we delved into some of the many traditional and contemporary texts on the mandate for Jews to engage in tikkun olam, acts of social justice. However, we must recognize that there are also those parts of our tradition which our ancestors might have thought to bring justice, but which today we would consider to be the opposite of just.

This week’s Torah portion contains within it a collection of disparate laws on a variety of subjects, including a social justice law on making restitution to one you have wronged. One section of the portion, however, details a particular ritual which today we would find unjust. It is the law of the Sotah – the ‘adulterous woman’.

Numbers 5:11-31 lays out the procedure for a suspicious husband to discover the truth and punish his wife for adultery. He is to bring her before the priest at the Tent of Meeting, along with a sacrifice. The priest offers the sacrifice of barley flour, a ‘meal offering of jealousy’. Then he bares her head, puts the meal offering in her hands, and gives her a potion of sacred water mixed with dirt from the floor of the Tent of Meeting. He curses her verbally and then writes the curses down on a scroll, which he then rinses in the potion. The priest then makes the woman drink the potion.

The curse says, if she is guilty, the potion will cause her belly to distend and her thigh to sag. The meaning of the Hebrew is unclear, but the end of the curse says, if she is innocent, nothing will happen to her and she will be able to ‘bear seed’. Again, this is unclear. Perhaps it means to indicate she will become infertile if guilty and fertile if innocent. Some see this ritual as intended to induce an abortion, on the assumption that the pregnancy is the result of adultery.

The Mishnah devotes an entire tractate to the ritual, Mishnah Sotah. By Second Temple times, the practice was abolished, and it is unknown whether it was ever actually implemented. Nevertheless, we have to acknowledge that this is one of those instances where the Biblical text reflects a cultural norm which was acceptable in antiquity, but which today we consider unjust.

-Rabbi Bonnie Margulis