The Suspected Adultress in the Bible and Early Judaism

The Biblical Ordeal of the Sotah

Numbers 5:11–31 describes a procedure for cases in which a man suspects his wife of adultery but is unable to prove it. The suspected adulteress—called a sotah, a “straying woman”—is brought before a priest at the sanctuary and made to undergo an ordeal that involves drinking a solution called “bitter waters.” If the woman has committed adultery, the waters are said to cause her belly to swell and her “thigh” (often a euphemism for genitals) to “fall,” perhaps a description of a prolapsed uterus. If she has not committed adultery, she retains the ability to become pregnant.

Rabbinic Treatment of the Sotah

Because the sotah ritual could be performed only in the Tabernacle or Temple, it was not utilized in the rabbinic period. In fact, m. Sotah 9:9 states that the ritual ceased to be performed even before the Temple was destroyed. (Whether or to what extent it was ever actually performed is unknown.) Yet a full tractate of the Mishnah and Talmud, tractate Sotah, is devoted to discussing and elaborating on this ordeal. The rabbis set a very high—arguably unrealistic—bar for subjecting a woman to the ordeal, which suggests that these discussions were more an intellectual exercise and an expression of rabbinic values than a legal prescription or attempt at genuine memory.