Sotah 002

5:
Before we commence the study of our present mishnah we should address the issue of reciprocity, since for the sages this does not seem to have been an issue - at least, not in the same way that it is for us today. According to Torah law and custom a woman was 'acquired' by the act of kiddushin, betrothal. That is to say that she consented to the fact that her husband should have unique tutelary rights over her. A married woman was termed Eshet Ish which means literally 'some man's woman'. By accepting the man's offer of kiddushin she bound herself to him domestically, economically and sexually. She could have one husband and one husband only as long as that marriage existed - and as far as she was concerned, her marriage could be brought to an end only by divorce or the death of her husband. (All this we learned when we studied the first chapter of Tractate Kiddushin.) There was no reciprocal equivalent of Eshet Ish because the husband was not bound uniquely to his wife: he could have more than one 'woman' at the same time, and therefore none of his 'women' could accuse him of marital infidelity.

6:
While monogamy seems to have been the customary norm among Jews for many previous centuries, this situation was not altered legislatively until Rabbenu Gershom, in 10th century Germany, managed to get his contemporaries to accept that no man should have more than one wife at any given time. (This was, in fact, a technical adjunct to his main provision which was that henceforth no woman could be divorced against her will.) Even those sections of the Jewish world that never formally accepted the edicts of Rabbenu Gershom almost universally practiced monogamy.

7:
The first stage in the reinterpretation that the sages made of the legislation of the Sotah in the Torah was to introduce a judicial element. This means that the fate of the woman was not to be left to the whim of her husband (who may well have had ulterior motives for his accusations), but was to be based on testimony weighed and accepted by a duly constituted court of law. This completely new realisation of the Torah was achieved by two interpretive acts.

8:
The Torah uses the Hebrew root qof nun alef to indicate what we have translated so far as 'suspect'. This root supports two major meanings in biblical literature. Most often it indicates 'impetuous violent behaviour'. This is best illustrated by the assassination of Zimri and Kozbi [Numbers 25:1-15]. Another example is when Elijah the prophet incites the masses to massacre the priests of Ba'al [I Kings 18:40]. The other meaning of this root is 'to demand one's rights'. This is best illustrated by those passages where God warns Israel that he is 'a demanding God, visiting the sins of the fathers upon their children...' [Exodus 20:5, Exodus 34:7, Numbers 14:18, Deuteronomy 5:9]. Obviously, the sages attributed this second meaning to the crucial verb in the Sotah passage, even though elsewhere, in this meaning, it is only attributed to God.

9:
So, the husband is not now 'suspicious' of his wife; he is now 'demanding his legitimate rights'. But 'legitimate rights' must be established in law, which brings us to the second interpretative innovation of the sages in regard to this passage. Against all accepted usage of biblical Hebrew they seem to have understood the main verb as being not in the past tense, but in the past perfect tense. The first verses of the Sotah passage that we have already quoted were: