Sotah 007

1:
If the woman admits to the Sanhedrin that she was indeed unfaithful to her husband he (the husband) is required to write her a Deed of Divorce and the marriage is ended without the woman receiving the sum of money specified in her Ketubah which she was to receive in the event of the marriage breaking down. As we learned when we studied tractate Kiddushin, the main provision of the Ketubah is the financial security of the wife. It is intended to ensure the woman's economic stability in the event of arbitrary divorce by the husband. Obviously, it was felt that the husband should not be required to compensate his wife when he did not initiate the divorce but was required to divorce her by law because of her own actions.

To be continued.

I wrote: In the third situation, the woman's refusal to take the test must be presumed to be an indication of her guilt, despite her protestations to the contrary, for otherwise why would she not be anxious to clear her name?

Art Evans writes:

In the first shiur under this tractate, you describe the ordeal the woman must undergo (with further deletions by me):

She might well want to clear her name but be unwilling to consume 'the dust that is on the floor of the sanctuary'. Seems reasonable to me.

I respond:

It sounds less reasonable to me though not, of course, impossible. In earlier times concepts of hygiene were not as developed as ours are today. I still feel that the main reason why a woman would refuse to drink the 'cursing waters' is psychological – the dread of imbibing the ineffable Divine Name of God. I fear that this dread might have been sufficient to induce even an innocent wife to admit guilt rather than undergo the ordeal.

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Bob Rottenberg writes:

During a discussion about the 'trial by ordeal' in my shul last year, one woman suggested that one factor mitigating against the indiscriminate use of this ordeal would be that the husband would come out looking bad: Just by bringing such an accusation against his wife makes the man appear unable to keep his wife happy which, after all, is one of the commandments attached to marriage. It was an interesting perspective, that seems to suggest that this really isn't about the woman – it's about the man!

I respond:

While not being able to confirm or deny the validity of the suggestion made in Bob's congregation I must agree that the motives of the husband are certainly important in this matter. The sages said [Sotah 3a] that a man does not not warn his wife unless a spirit of impurity has entered him. In other words, the husband suspects his wife of doing the same as he has been doing! This thought led some of the sages to the conclusion that the rules and regulations prescribed by the Torah in the matter of the Sotah are not to be understood as being required but only permitted. That is to say that they thought that if a man suspects his wife is unfaithful to him he may or may not charge her at his discretion. (The majority of the sages thought otherwise – that he is required to charge her by law.)

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Nisan Chavkin writes:

You made the following comment incidentally: Throughout this and subsequent mishnayot the woman who has been unfaithful to her husband is euphemistically described as being 'defiled'.

It's been a while, but I was taught that defilement was not an euphemism at all but quite literally the issue in Biblical society. A central premise of social life in the Torah was cleanliness and defilement, both for the individual and perhaps more significantly for the community as a whole. When an individual sinned, that person entered into a state of impurity, one which occasionally [e.g., in the case of murder] imperiled the purity of the entire community. A key objective of the purification process was to restore the sanctity of the community, not just the individual. Is this an accurate assessment?

I respond:

A major consideration of biblical law most certainly was the distinction between purity and impurity, but I think that initially there was always a physical consideration involved. Food, disease, childbirth, a corpse and so forth were sources of ritual defilement. (The major concern in the case of an unsolved homicide is that of blood guilt, I think.) This is why I believe that when the sages use the term 'defilement' in connection with a woman's adultery it smacks of euphemism.

Nisan continues:

As you have taught, the Sages reinterpreted the Torah text in fundamental ways. One of the real changes, I think, from Biblical to Pharisaic ideology was the transformation of the meaning of purity and defilement into individual terms. [Whether this was a deliberate intention of the Rabbis or simply reflected an change in understanding and practice, I do not know.] Do you agree with this characterization?

I respond:

I do not really understand the premise of the question. Are we to assume that when the Torah requires a woman to undergo a ceremony of purification after childbirth (for instance) that this is a general consideration and not a personal one? It seems difficult to me to deny that all cases of ritual defilement were problems of the individual. Possibly I have misunderstood something here.