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:

The sages have now 'understood' these verses as meaning:

Now, something had to precede the summoning of the wife before the priest: there had to already have been
a demand by the husband that she observe his unique sexual rights over her, and that demand was made in
reference to a specific third party.

To be continued.