Sotah 087

נושא: Sotah

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

The following do not retire [from the battle arena]: one who has constructed a porter's lodge, a portico, or a balcony; one who has planted four fruit trees or five non-fruitbearing trees; one who remarries his divorced wife, a widow [who marries] a high priest, a divorcée or woman who has undergone Ĥalitzah with an ordinary priest, an illegitimate woman or a woman who was a 'natin' who were married to an Israelite, a Jewish woman married to an illegitimate man or to a 'natin' – [these] would not retire. Rabbi Yehudah says that even someone who had built a house on its own foundation would not retire. Rabbi El'azar says that even someone who built a building of bricks in the Sharon would not retire.

1:
Our mishnah continues from where the previous mishnah left off. Having detailed which members of an Israelite army were invited to leave the field on the even of a battle, our mishnah now details those soldiers who were not entitled to leave the battlefield. To us this seems incredible (and when we reach mishnah 5 we shall see something even more incredible). I think we must assume that the Torah [Deuteronomy 20:1-9] is trying to indicate in the most idealistic manner that victory is not ensured by numbers but by divine favour and divine support. The book of Judges [Judges 7:5-7] – which is enthused by a similar Deuteronomistic fervour – tells the story of Gideon who dismissed from the ranks of his army a large number of would-be soldiers before a battle with the Midianites:

Everyone who laps of the water with his tongue, as a dog laps, him shall you set by himself; likewise everyone who bows down on his knees to drink. The number of those who lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, was three hundred men: but all the rest of the people bowed down on their knees to drink water. God said to Gideon, By the three hundred men who lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand…

2:
In mishnaic times people generally lived in 'courtyards'. These were groups of three or four buildings, each of two stories, in which several families would live – rather akin to the modern apartment block. In order to preserve a modicum of privacy the tenants in each 'courtyard' would club together to close it off from the public thoroughfare with a wall and a gateway. Next to the gateway they would set up a small lodge and maintain there the services of a porter to prevent unwarranted access. Such a construction is not considered by our present mishnah as affording the right to retire from the battlefield.

3:
A portico is a row of columns set apart from and along the length of a wall and joined to the wall by a roof, thus creating a corridor-like passage shaded from the sun.

4:
The women mentioned in our mishnah are representatives of forbidden unions. The Torah [Deuteronomy 24:1-4], by implication, permits a man to remarry his divorced wife only if she has not married another man in the mean time. The Torah [Leviticus 21:13-14] requires a high priest to marry only a virgin and specifically rules out the possibility of his marriage to a widow. That same source [Leviticus 21:7] precludes the marriage of an ordinary priest (one who is not High Priest) with a divorcée. We have explained on several occasions the Ĥalitzah ceremony by which a childless widow extricates herself from a union with her deceased husband's brother.

5:
When we studied tractate Kiddushin I gave the following definitions:

Mamzer: a person who was born of parents who were prohibited from marrying each other by Torah law. For this reason translations such as 'bastard' and 'illegitimate' are misleading. In western law a bastard is a person whose parents did not happen to be married at the time of his birth. A Mamzer (or Mamzeret) is a person whose parents were prohibited by Torah law from marrying at the time of her conception; the parents could not have married even if they had wanted to. The main cause of mamzerut is adultery by the woman. The non-adulterous union of a Kohen with a woman, contrary to Torah law, does not cause mamzerut. (Many Conservative rabbis today consider the restrictions on the marriageability of a Kohen to be obsolete, and they have substantial halakhic reasons to support their opinion. In any case, this has nothing to do with mamzerut.)

Natin [one 'given']: a person who traced descent back to the Canaanite inhabitants of the town of Gibeon. According to the biblical book of Joshua [9:1-27] the Gibeonites secured a non-aggression assurance from the Israelites by deceit and subterfuge. Joshua was true to his word, but the Gibeonites (a village a few miles north of Jerusalem) were 'given' [va-yitnem] to the Israelites as "woodchoppers and water-drawers". According to the Gemara [Yevamot 79a] Joshua decreed that they should not be permitted to intermarry with the rest of the Israelite nation, and King David later (9th century BCE) confirmed this decree.

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