The SOTAH: Why Is This Case Different from All Other Cases?

THE SOTAH: WHY IS THIS CASE DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER CASES? Richard Elliott Friedman It is an honor to dedicate this essay to Hugh Williamson, who, in the three decades I have known him, has always epitomized what it means to be both a scholar and a gentleman. If one has any doubt that the law of the suspected adulteress, the sotah (Num 5:11–31), is a particularly perplexing case in biblical law, he or she has only to look at the variety of the scholarly literature. The remarkable range of utterly different explanations of what is going on in the procedure is striking even in our ijield, which is not exactly known for consensus. Also remarkable is how certain scholars, from ancient to contemporary times, have each been that their understanding was correct. A woman whose husband suspects her of adultery drinks a potion, and if certain physical conditions materialize, she is guilty and cursed. Shlomo Eidelberg wrote that “its sole purpose could only have been to force a confession from her as an alternative to the bitter potion.”1 Dennis Pardee, with no less certainty, wrote that “there can be no doubt that a form of illness—whatever it may have been medically speaking—was thought to follow the drinking of the water by a guilty woman.”2 Alice Bach, likewise writing with ijinality, said, “It reflects the patriarchal attempt to assure a husband that his honor could be restored if he had so much as a suspicion that his wife had been fooling around. Female erotic desire, then, was understood as erratic, a threat to the social order. By drowning such desire, the traditional order was assured of continuing dominance over women’s bodies.”3 Other scholars have been more circumspect in their explanations but no less diverse. Tikva Frymer-Kensky wrote of a particular medical 1 Shlomo Eidelberg, “Trial by Ordeal in Medieval Jewish History: Laws, Customs and Attitudes,” PAAJR 46/47, Jubilee Volume (1928–29/1978–79) [Part 1] (1979–1980): 105–20 (110). So Maimonides, Hilkot Sotah, III. 2 Dennis Pardee, “MĀRÎM in Numbers V,” VT 35 (1985): 112–15 (113). 3 Alice Bach, “Good to the Last Drop: Viewing the Sotah (Numbers 5.11–31) as the Glass Half Empty and Wondering How to View It Half Full,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible (ed. A. Bach; New York: Routledge, 1999), 503–22. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 371 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 372 richard elliott friedman condition that might be involved: a prolapsed uterus.4 Josephus wrote that it could be edema.5 One challenge for all of these explanations is that, in order to work, they require something that could not be counted on to happen. Drinking a potion (of ‘holy’ water, dust from the Tabernacle floor, and ink from words on a parchment) cannot be guaranteed to produce prolapsed uteri or any other particular condition in all guilty adulteresses. Nor can it be relied upon to produce their confessions. Jacob Milgrom, doubting that the potion that is described in this law could produce any sure symptoms, therefore proposed that the law’s effect was precisely to ijind all women not guilty and thus to prevent “lynchings.”6 The advantage of his explanation over most others was that it did not depend on something that could not be counted upon to occur. Rather it was based precisely on the fact that nothing would occur. But, like many other explanations, it still does not account for why this procedure is applied solely to adultery and not to any other crimes. Should not arsonists, thieves, and everybody else who is suspected of anything be protected from lynchings as well? Likewise for any explanation that sees this law as a trial by ordeal, the question remains: why use the ordeal only for adultery out of all the laws in the Bible and not for any other offence? Compare the law code of Hammurabi, which uses the river ordeal for a case similar to this one, but it uses it for a case of sorcery as well.7 What this situation of interpretive ‫ תהו ובהו‬reflects is that there is something in the wording and structure of this law that has been stymying us for centuries (for millennia, actually). It is ijilled with unusual wordings, unique procedures, and unprecedented components. We need to account for them, not in a one-by-one manner, but, if possible, in an explanation that addresses all of them consistently. 4 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Numbers V 11–31),” VT 34 (1984): 11–26; and in Bach, “Last Drop,” 463–74. 5 Josephus, Ant. III:vi:6. 6 Jacob Milgrom, “The Case of the Suspected Adulteress,” in The Creation of Sacred Literature (ed. Richard Elliott Friedman; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 69–75 (74); cf. Herbert C. Brichto, “The Case of the sotah and a Reconsideration of Biblical Law,” HUCA 46 (1975): 55–70. On the unity of the inscription, as seen in scholarship of recent decades, see Milgrom and Brichto above, and also Michael Fishbane, “Accusations of Adultery: A Study of Law and Scribal Practice in Numbers 5:11–31,” reprinted in Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible, 487–502. 7 Laws 2 (accusation of sorcery) and 132 (suspected adultery). 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 372 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM the sotah 373 The law states that it is about a situation in which a husband suspects that his wife has had an “intercourse of seed” with another man. She has not been caught, and there are no witnesses. He takes her to a priest and brings an offering of a tenth of an ephah of barley flour. The priest makes a potion of holy water and dust from the Tabernacle’s floor, and he rubs the words of curses from a scroll into the water. The priest loosens the woman’s hair and has her swear that if she has not gone astray with someone “in place of ” her husband then she will be cleared by the “bitter cursing water” but that, if she has been with someone in place of her husband, then Yhwh will make her a curse among her people when He sets her “thigh sagging and womb swelling.” If she has not been thus made impure, “she shall be cleared and will conceive seed.” As for the man, the law concludes that he shall be clear of a crime, while the woman shall bear her crime. I. An Enigmatic Text There are other biblical laws that contain ambiguities, enigmas, and elements that are open to a variety of understandings. This one, however, may very well be the law that offers the most. First, the entire context appears to be ritual rather than judicial. Why is its procedure performed in front of a priest, not a judge? Why is it at the Tabernacle, not at a court or city gate? Why does the law require that the husband bring an offering? Why does it require an ingredient called ‘holy water,’ which is something that appears nowhere else in the Pentateuch? Second, there are multiple questions of wording. Why does the law specify an intercourse of seed? That is not usual in other biblical laws concerning adultery. Would not any sexual acts between a man and a married woman be considered adultery? The law against adultery in Lev 20:10 does not mention seed. The law concerning sex with a betrothed woman in Deut 22:23, 25 likewise has just ‫ שׁכב‬without reference to seed. Nor does the decalogue commandment “you shall not commit adultery” specify seed. Only the law against adultery in Lev 18:20 explicitly forbids having an intercourse of seed with a man’s wife, but that is in a section that deals with impurity (which is also mentioned here in the sotah law), which necessarily must involve a fluid: blood or semen. That is, seed is not just a euphemism. It is not a non-speciijic term. It is mentioned only when it matters. So the question is: why does it matter in the case of the sotah? 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 373 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 374 richard elliott friedman Further, why does the law say ‘in place of ’ (‫ )תחת‬her husband rather than some wording that would convey ‘in addition to’ her husband or ‘as well as’ her husband? Indeed, why have this phrase at all? The sentence would make perfectly good sense without it. Interpreters and translators have usually taken ‫ תחת‬here to mean ‘under’ her husband, and then they have suggested that this probably means ‘under her husband’s authority.’ But ‫ תחת‬never has this meaning anywhere else in the Torah, whereas it means ‘in place of ’ twenty-four times. When referring to relations between people, ‫ תחת‬means ‘in place of ’ in every occurrence in narrative or law in the Torah (frequently with the sense of ‘instead of ’).8 When referring to being under a person’s power or authority, the Biblical Hebrew way of expressing this is rather the phrase ‫תחת יד‬.9 Again, why does the law add that ‘the man’ will be clear of a crime? In the ijirst place: which man? There are two men referred to in the very ijirst verses of this law, which outline the situation: the husband and the adulterer. Why does it not specify which of these two men is meant in the closing verses? We might have thought that this is because it is obvious that only one man, the adulterer, is in a situation of perhaps being responsible for a crime. But in fact interpreters have more often taken this verse to refer to the husband, not the adulterer. And when we ask: of what crime does the husband need to be cleared, the common answer is that he needs to be cleared of libel, of being a ‫ מוציא שם רע‬against his wife. But that seems to be groundless. In this text the husband has not accused his wife of anything. He suspects her, and so he does what the law prescribes. He takes her for the procedure that deals with the thing that he suspects. He makes no claim, and there is no libel. Finally on questions of wording: why is the law formulated like no other? It has multiple plays on words. Paronomasia is common in Biblical Hebrew prose and poetry, but it is not common in law.10 In this law 8 Gen 4:25; 22:13; 36:33–39; 44:33; Exod 21:23; 29:30; Lev 6:15; 16:32; Num 3:12, 41, 45; 8:18; 32:14; Deut 2:12, 21, 22, 23; 10:6; see also Gen 30:2; 50:19. 9 Gen 16:9; Exod 18:10; 21:20; see also Judg 3:30. Baruch Levine cites Ezek 23:5, “Aholah whored ‫ תחת‬me,” as proof of ‫ תחת‬meaning under someone’s jurisdiction; Baruch Levine, Numbers 1–20 (AB; New York: Doubleday, 1993), 197. On the contrary, it is at least as likely that the verse means that Aholah whored with someone in place of God rather than under God’s authority. Levine says that ‫ תחת‬there may be an “abbreviation” of ‫תחת יד‬, but that is groundless. It rather emphasizes the point that ‫ תחת‬and ‫ תחת יד‬mean two different things. 10 See, for example, Jack Sasson, “Wordplay in the OT,” IDB: Supplementary Volume, 968–70; Baruch Halpern and Richard E. Friedman, “Composition and Paronomasia in the Book of Jonah,” HAR 4 (1980): 77–92. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 374 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM the sotah 375 there is the patent alliterative pun on the bitter cursing water: ‫מי המרים‬ ‫המאררים‬. There is the use of the term ‫‘( נעלם‬hidden’) in the case of a woman who has ‫‘( מעלה מעל‬made a breach’). There is a similar metathesis of root letters in the term ‫‘( פרע‬loosening’ her hair) followed by the use of ‫‘( עפר‬dust’). And there is yet another metathesis of root letters in the term ‫‘( עשׂירת‬a tenth’) followed by the use of ‫‘( שׂערים‬barley flour’). Intriguingly, all of the puns occur in passages that involve some unprecedented element of the procedure. In the case of ‫מי המרים המאררים‬, this is the only use of ‘holy water’ in the Hebrew Bible. In the case of ‫נעלם‬ and ‫מעל‬, the woman’s making a breach is the only use of this word ‫מעל‬ for a breach against a man; elsewhere it refers only to breaches against God. In the case of the ‫ עפר‬and ‫פרע‬, the dust in this law is the only use of dust from the Tabernacle in biblical law. And as for the ‫ עשׂירת‬and the ‫שׂערים‬, the barley flour here is the only use of barley flour for a grain offering. What is the signiijicance of using plays in language in connection with four different unique, enigmatic aspects of this procedure? Third, there are puzzling aspects of the facts of the law. Why is it used only for suspicion of adultery but not for any other offence? Why is it used only on a woman but not on a man who is suspected of adultery? If it is a trial by ordeal, why is it the only case of ordeal in biblical law? And why is it that the woman is not executed even if the procedure reveals her guilt? Adultery is a capital crime in the Bible. All of these enigmas are pieces of the overarching question of why this one case requires such a different resolution from other cases of adultery and in fact from all other legal cases in the Pentateuch. II. The Enigmas as Signs Let us address ijirst the crux of the procedure, namely the speciijic physical developments that reveal whether the woman is guilty of having had an intercourse of seed with a man in place of her husband. These physical signs are the swelling of her womb and the sagging of her thigh. Now, what if a man were to tell an audience: “I have some news. Pretty soon you’re going to see my wife’s womb swell and her thigh sag.” What would a hundred out of a hundred people understand him to be saying? He is saying that his wife is pregnant (though she should not forgive him for the ‘sagging thigh’ comment). Likewise, if a woman were to initiate gossip, starting a rumor about another woman by saying, “Soon you’ll be seeing her womb swelling and her thigh sagging,” absolutely everyone who hears it would understand the implication: she is pregnant. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 375 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 376 richard elliott friedman What are the implications for our understanding of this law if the text means just what this phrase appears most naturally to mean: that it is a case about a woman’s being pregnant? How does this ijit with the text? The situation would be as follows: A man suspects that his wife has had intercourse with another man instead of him, but there is no proof, no witness, and she has not been caught in the act. There is only one thing that would prove that she has had this intercourse with another man rather than with her husband, and the proof would be one hundred percent certain: if she is pregnant. The husband takes her to the priest—not to establish that she is pregnant. That will be established in due time anyway, revealed by the changes in her ijigure. The purpose of the priest’s procedure is to administer a potion that, if she is pregnant, will produce a curse. The water’s function is not to make her womb swell. Its function is just what the text says: to be ‫—מאררים‬viz. to cause a curse.11 She becomes a curse among her community, and she will bear her sin, which is to say it is between her and God; there is no punishment from humans. If, however, she is not pregnant, then she can conceive seed in the future. And either way, whether she is pregnant or not, the man (i.e. the suspected adulterer, not the husband) is cleared. Nothing has established his guilt or innocence, and nothing has caused a curse on him. This scenario accounts for the law’s speciijically mentioning an intercourse of seed. No other sexual act can be tested by the sotah procedure. Only an act that can produce pregnancy is the subject of this law. It also accounts for why this law is used only for suspicion of adultery but for no other offence; and for the law’s repeated concern with impurity. The terms for purity and impurity are used nine times in the text of the law. As we noted above, impurity is explicitly associated with adultery elsewhere in the Torah only in the one case that speciijies an intercourse of seed (Lev 18:20). This reading of the law accounts for its specifying that it has to be a case of a woman’s having had intercourse with a man in place of—instead of—her husband. It has to be a situation in which she has had recent intercourse with the other man but not with her husband. That is the only way that her pregnancy would prove that she has committed adultery. This is precisely the situation in the narrative of David and Bathsheba. Her 11 Jack Sasson proposes a reading of “waters that bless” and “waters that curse” in “Numbers 5 and the ‘Waters of Judgment,’ ” in Bach, Women in the Hebrew Bible, 483–86. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 376 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM the sotah 377 husband Uriah is away in the army, and David has impregnated her. David brings Uriah back and tries (and fails) to get him to go home. Uriah rather swears that he will not “lie with my wife” (2 Sam 11:11). So David arranges Uriah’s death, and he takes Bathsheba as his own wife as soon as her mourning period is over (11:27). That way, when her pregnancy becomes visible, it will not be proof of adultery. Similarly in the New Testament, in the Gospel of Matthew (1:18–19) Joseph initially takes Mary’s pregnancy to indicate adultery on her part during the period of their betrothal. The scenario of pregnancy also accounts for why the law applies only to women and not to men suspected of adultery, and it accounts for the law’s notation that the man is clear of guilt. It is a law that is strictly for women. Only pregnancy can establish guilt, and the sotah potion works to produce a curse only in tandem with pregnancy. This also explains why the woman is not executed. None of the usual legal standards for guilt and execution are present. Elsewhere two or more witnesses are required for capital punishment (Num 35:30; Deut 17:6). Here, however, the text emphasizes in four different ways that there is nothing that meets the standard of proof of guilt in any other criminal matter: the ‘offence’ has been hidden from her husband’s eyes; she has remained undetected; there is no witness against her; she has not been caught. Her pregnancy leaves no doubt that she has done it, but it is an ex post facto, non-speciijic revelation of an act (or acts) that took place at an unknown time in the recent past. It does not reveal when, where, with whom, how many times, or under what circumstances the act took place. It does not reveal whether a woman’s intercourse of seed was rape or consensual, which elsewhere is required to establish a woman’s guilt (Deut 22:23–27). This then accounts for why the law is a matter for the Tabernacle and not for the courts. The law prescribes a ritual that, in the case of guilt, brings about a curse. If she is pregnant, then the bitter cursing waters do what a court cannot do. That is, her punishment is out of human hands. It is turned over to God. Thus the entire matter is a ritual procedure rather than a judicial one. Holy water, ink from words of curses, and Tabernacle dust are tools of magic and not of law. The text’s paronomasia, too, is more naturally associated with the language of magic than is the wording of legal texts.12 Magical language more commonly involves rhyme and/or 12 Shawna Dolansky, Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Biblical Perspectives on the Relationship between Magic and Religion (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008), esp. p. 80. For other magical aspects of the procedure, see Fishbane, “Accusations,” 501, n. 45. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 377 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 378 richard elliott friedman alliteration (‘abracadabra’) and playful language formulas (‘Now you see it, now you don’t.’) than does legal phrasing. What is attractive about this solution to the sotah case, then, is precisely that it presents a single consistent explanation for every one of the law’s numerous conundrums. Aside from its appeal in terms of Occam’s Razor, though, it is in fact the solution to which all of the conundrums point. We have long treated them as enigmas, but they were more properly signs, items of evidence, which pointed to the meaning of the case. III. Why the Signs have not been Read Accurately Now scholars have frequently understood that pregnancy ijigures in some way in this matter. In Gray’s commentary on Numbers, he cited a colleague who had proposed that this law had developed from an “original rite administered in cases of suspicion aroused by pregnancy.”13 But still no one went the next step to say that this was what was happening here in the biblical law itself. Driver wrote, “The woman is suspected by her husband of inijidelity but is not known to be pregnant.” This appears to be close to the scenario we have pictured, but then he wrote that since swelling is normal in a pregnant woman, it would prove nothing. Rather, he said, the swelling and the sagging are themselves the punishment rather than the proof: if she has committed adultery but is not pregnant, then she will become sterile; if she has committed adultery and is pregnant, then “she will lose the unborn child in her womb by miscarriage.” And if she is innocent, then she “will bear seed.”14 But this explanation is still subject to the same criticism as many other proposals: it requires an outcome that cannot be counted upon to occur. Frymer-Kensky eschewed such views because, she said, “There is no reason to suppose that the woman was pregnant at the time of the trial,” even though she acknowledged on the next page that “A swelling belly seems to be a description of pregnancy rather than of unfortunate events.”15 Baruch Levine seems to have come the closest to our understanding of the text. He wrote: 13 George Buchanan Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Numbers (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1903), 49. 14 G. R. Driver, “Two Problems in the Old Testament Examined in the Light of Assyriology,” Syria 33 (1956): 73–77. Driver further said that, since the procedure would not in fact produce these results biologically, they were rather psychologically-induced effects. 15 Frymer-Kensky, “Strange Case,” 467–68. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 378 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM the sotah 379 In the case projected here, the husband in question had cause to suspect his wife, most likely because she had become pregnant. The husband had reason to conclude that the pregnancy was not attributable to him.16 Levine here seemed to have captured the situation, but then he wrote: If the woman was truthful in denying the charge, she would retain her conception and carry to term. If, however, she was lying, the liquid mixture would produce deleterious somatic effects, causing the woman’s belly to distend and her thighs to sag. This is probably a way to describe a miscarriage.17 He thus turned his explanation into one that, again, required an outcome that could not be counted upon to occur. Not understanding ‫תחת‬ to mean in place of her husband, he still imagined that there would be uncertainty over whether the pregnancy was caused by the husband or by the other man.18 He therefore needed the mixture to produce biological effects miraculously. But water with dust and ink in it does not cause miscarriages; a distended ‘belly’ and sagging thighs are not a description of miscarriage even metaphorically; and an innocent woman who was unlucky enough to have a miscarriage would be regarded as proven to be an adulteress in this view. Levine, further, saw the husband as following this procedure so as to strengthen the husband’s case for divorcing his wife. There is, however, no basis for this view. There is no mention of divorce or the husband’s motives in this law, and, in any case, we know nothing at all about what the standards or requirements of divorce are in the Priestly law because divorce is never mentioned at all in the Priestly source (other than that a priest cannot marry a divorcée). Levine asserts: “The Priestly view of divorce followed the Deuteronomic interpretation that the only basis for divorce was adultery or serious sexual misconduct (Deut 24:1).”19 But there are no grounds for this claim at all. We do not know that the Deuteronomic law saw illicit sex and adultery as the only grounds for divorce; that appears to be a rabbinic derivation from the case of remarriage in Deut 24, which is far from certain; and we do not know that the Priestly law followed the Deuteronomic law on this point or, for that matter, on anything. 16 17 18 19 Levine, Numbers 1–20, 181. Levine, Numbers 1–20, 182. See above, n. 9. Levine, Numbers 1–20, 193. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 379 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 380 richard elliott friedman Most scholars thus sensed that pregnancy ijit somewhere in this picture, but none concluded that this law—in which a woman’s swelling womb and sagging thigh establish that she has had sex with a man—was thus about this woman’s being pregnant. Why did we never understand the law this way? First, there was a matter of the timing. Readers imagined that the swelling and sagging take place immediately, right there at the ceremony. But there is no reason to think this at all. The text does not say or imply it. The timing of the physical signs is simply not mentioned in the law. Second, the law’s wording implied to many interpreters that the potion is what causes the physical effects: “this cursing water will come in your insides, to swell the womb and make the thigh sag.” This, however, is not clear in the text. Just before this, the text says that it is God who causes the physical effects. (That is, God brings about pregnancies.)20 In that context, the clause in question may mean “this cursing water will come in your insides at the swelling of the womb and the sagging (or causing to sag) of the thigh.” The potion, in this case, is, at most, part of the divine agency, not something that can, in itself, magically cause bodily effects. Third, the word ‫ בטן‬is commonly misunderstood to mean ‘belly’ rather than ‘womb’ even though it means ‘womb’ in every other occurrence in the Torah. God tells Rebekah, “There are two nations in your ‫( ”בטן‬Gen 25:23). Jacob tells Rachel, “Am I in place of God,21 who has held back the fruit of the ‫ בטן‬from you?!” (30:2). The narrator says about both Rebekah and Tamar, “And here were twins in her ‫( ”בטן‬25:24; 38:27). And Deuteronomy refers to offspring as “fruit of the ‫ ”בטן‬ijive times (Deut 7:13; 28:4, 11, 18, 53). English versions commonly translate all of the occurrences of ‫ בטן‬in Genesis as ‘womb.’ But when these very same translations get to Num 5, they change it to ‘belly.’ Even though the word refers to pregnancy everywhere else in the Pentateuch, and even though it refers to bodily evidence of a woman’s intercourse of seed here in Num 5, interpreters and translators resisted seeing the plain sense of the word here. And this opened the door for a variety of alternate biological explanations of the law. Why did they resist seeing the plain, consistent sense of ‫ בטן‬here? The probable reason was that they had already made one or both of the two leaps that are described above. That is, once they assumed that the swelling and sagging take place right there at the ceremony, and/or once 20 21 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 380 Elsewhere God enables pregnancies and withholds them. This text, incidentally, uses ‫ תחת‬to mean “in place of.” 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM the sotah 381 they assumed that the potion was the thing that caused these physical effects, the idea of pregnancy no longer occurred to them, and the womb did not seem to be the point. Fourth, it may be that, even if there was once a period in which this ceremony had actually been performed, it had not been performed for many centuries before its earliest interpreters—Josephus and the rabbis of the early centuries of the Christian Era—began to try to understand it. The law in Numbers speciijically requires that dirt/dust from the floor of the Tabernacle is a necessary ingredient of the potion. We have argued elsewhere that a Tabernacle was present only in the ijirst Jerusalem Temple.22 If that is correct, then this law had not been practiced for some six centuries before our earliest interpreters. Indeed, the rabbinic sources assert that Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai abolished the sotah practice,23 but that makes no sense. At most, such an act would have been a formal abolition of something that had ceased to be practiced by his time anyway. Eidelberg says as much, and cites Saul Lieberman.24 Did ben Zakkai even have the authority to abolish it while the (second Jerusalem) Temple was still standing? Would that not have been up to the priests? And after the Temple was destroyed, what was the point of abolishing it? That is: whatever the status of the Tabernacle in the ijirst Temple, the rabbis’ (and Josephus’) recent acquaintance was only with a (second) Temple that surely contained no Tabernacle, and so they had no way of knowing what this already ancient, moot law was about. In any case, whether or not one is persuaded by the evidence that there was an actual Tabernacle located in the ijirst Temple, the questionable rabbinic claim about ben Zakkai, as well as Josephus’ questionable claim that the procedure produced edema, are further indications that the law of the sotah was not current in memory by the ijirst century ce The gap in time between the practice and the interpretation has meant that all of us who have tried to explain it in the last two millennia have started from scratch on an exceptionally enigmatic legal text. Why then does this text stand out among enigmatic laws, and what has made it so difijicult to interpret? The reason may be related to the 22 Richard Friedman, “The Tabernacle in the Temple, BA 43 (1980): 241–48; The Exile and Biblical Narrative (HSM 22; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1981): 48–61; “Tabernacle,” ABD 6:292–300. 23 m. Sotah 9:9. 24 Eidelberg, “Trial by Ordeal,” 111 n.; Saul Lieberman, Toseftaki-Fshutah, VIII: Nashim (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1973). 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 381 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM 382 richard elliott friedman fact that it concerns pregnancy. Law is constructed upon precedent. It is on the basis of precedent that it is understood and applied. But there is no precedent in human experience for pregnancy, no other situation in which two lives are so utterly intertwined (except, remotely, the case of conjoined twins). Thus, the other best known biblical law relating to pregnancy has been similarly perplexing and has produced a comparable range of readings. It is the case of the ijighters who impact a pregnant woman (Exod 21:22–25). Its wording, “and her children go out, and there will not be an injury,” has been understood in two, nearly opposite ways: (1) the woman has a miscarriage, and there is no further injury to her, or (2) the woman gives birth, and there is no injury to the child. Besides this central point, there is a plethora of questions of detail and wording in the law.25 In both the case of the ijighters and the case of the sotah, we have little recourse to other laws for precedents. Pregnancy is as unique legally as it is biologically and socially. This, we believe, is what has made the case of the sotah so challenging. It is almost entirely self-contained, without parallel or precedent elsewhere in the laws. In the end, it is the law’s uniqueness—and all the idiosyncratic elements and terms that this uniqueness generates—that points to its meaning. 25 See the treatment of these multiple questions in William Propp, Exodus 19–40 (AB; New York: Doubleday, 2006), 221–30. 371-382_Provan & Boda_F30.indd 382 12/21/2011 2:17:21 PM