This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been dedicated by Rabbi Diana Miller and Scott Abrams in honor of Rabbi Jonah Rank.
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Parashat Naso details the organization of the Israelite camp. Naso (נָשֹׂא, meaning “lift up” or “count,” as per Numbers 4:22) seeks the ones who are lifted up, who count, who carry, and who are compelled to carry. The Levites carry the instruments of the tabernacle; the tribal chiefs carry the sacrificial offerings; the priests carry the divine Name upon Israel (Numbers 6:27). But at the center of this sacred architecture appears a woman made to carry something else entirely, the weight of patriarchal suspicion.
Before introducing the sotah (סוֹטָה, the “‘deviating’ woman”), Naso opens by stating two perfect symmetries. Just as all impure persons are expelled from the camp “male and female alike” (Numbers 5:3), acts of confession and sacrifices brought to account for human wrongdoings are likewise stipulated identically for men as for women (Numbers 5:6). For everyone, transgression demands confession, restitution, and compensation for the physical or moral injury (Numbers 5:6–7). Around the middle of the first millennium C.E., the sages of the Babylonian Talmud generalized this kind of formulation through the principle הִשְׁוָה הַכָּתוּב אִשָּׁה לְאִישׁ לְכׇל עוֹנָשִׁין שֶׁבַּתּוֹרָה (“Scripture equates the woman to the man for all penalties in the Torah,” as stated in Bava Kama 15a and Sukkah 28b).
Yet the sotah brutally shatters this logic. The sotah is not an adulterous woman but a married woman suspected of adultery in a situation where witnesses could not verify wrongdoing. In the words of Numbers 5:13, וְנֶעְלַם מֵעֵינֵי אִישָׁהּ (“the matter is hidden from the eyes of her husband”) and וְעֵד אֵין בָּהּ (“there is no witness”). The next verse even explicitly entertains innocence by stating וְהִיא לֹא נִטְמָאָה (“she has not defiled herself”). The rite, we are told, does not respond to a situation of flagrante delicto where guilt would be certain but rather to what Numbers 5:14 calls רוּחַ־קִנְאָה (“a spirit of jealousy”)—the eruption of male suspicion.
In her 1984 article “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah,” Dr. Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1943–2006) showed that the sotah belongs to the category of an ‘ordeal.’ Where human judgment cannot establish the facts, the ritual hands the matter over to God. The treatment of the sotah in no way resembles the egalitarianism of sacrifices and confessions that we saw earlier in Naso. The Torah records no ceremony that would ever try to tease the truth out of a man whose wife suspects his infidelity. Instead, our parashah presents a radically gendered procedure in which the husband suspects, the priest administers, the other man nearly vanishes from the scene entirely, and the woman drinks what Numbers 5:18 calls מֵי הַמָּרִים הַמְאָרְרִים (“bitter waters that bring a curse”). Holy water, dust from the Mishkan, erased ink, and ingestion make the female body the site where a truth that witnesses cannot speak must somehow appear. The missing proof does not suspend the accusation, as would be the case in so many contemporary courts; the missing evidence migrates onto the body of the wife.
Commenting on Numbers 5:12, the French commentator Rashi (c. 1028–1105) writes: תֵּט מִדַּרְכֵי צְנִיעוּת וְתֵחָשֵׁד בְּעֵינָיו (“she turns away from the ways of modesty and becomes suspect in his eyes”). Rashi’s emphasis of בְּעֵינָיו (“in his eyes”) reveals the nodal point where the woman becomes a sotah through the male gaze. The sanctuary transforms this viewpoint into a degrading liturgy. The required offering confirms that suspicion has already produced its effects, for what Numbers 5:15 labels this מִנְחַ֤ת קְנָאֹת֙ (“offering of jealousy”) is מִנְחַ֥ת זִכָּר֖וֹן מַזְכֶּ֥רֶת עָוֺֽן (“an offering of memory recalling the transgression”). Reading this latter verse, Rashi understands the offering’s barley as akin to animal fodder and notes that the absence of oil here—the absence of a glistening substance—suggests a deprivation of light. Before the woman has even drunk, the rite has already reduced her to bestiality. Before any truth is produced, shame is manufactured. The absence of oil and incense speaks of a relationship stripped of all beauty, all nobility, all tenderness. Jealousy has devastated the house; the sanctuary does nothing but give this devastation a stage.
Dispossessed, the woman is granted no opportunity to speak her case; instead she is instructed to respond to the ritual twice in the affirmative: אָמֵן אָמֵן (“amen, amen,” as per Numbers 5:22). Her speech is captured. She does not narrate, does not plead, does not challenge her husband’s jealousy. She ratifies a court who subjugates her. Near the year 200, the Mishnah, Sotah 1:6, intensified this violence by making it visible to all. In the Mishnah’s retelling of the sotah ritual, the priest undoes her hair, manipulates her clothing, removes her ornaments, and כׇּל הָרוֹצֶה לִרְאוֹת בָּא לִרְאוֹת (“whoever wants to see comes to see”). The rite becomes spectacle. In his book, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual, Dr. Ishay Rosen-Zvi has shown that this theatricalization is not the mere preservation of an ancient practice but an ideological construction in which the woman’s body is put on display in order to produce preventive control over other women. The apparatus does not merely seek to know but also to discipline. It does not merely punish a possible transgression; it establishes a legal order ruled by this male gaze. The sanctuary is no refuge for the suspected woman and becomes the space where male suspicion is administered, aestheticized, legitimized. Holiness does not automatically protect against violence. It can also give violence a grammar.
Yet the rabbinic tradition also produced the instruments of its own deactivation. The Mishnah, Sotah 1:1, requires that the husband’s warning be issued in front of witnesses. Private suspicion is made conditional. The Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 47b, rereads the words of Numbers 5:31 וְנִקָּ֥ה הָאִ֖ישׁ מֵעָוֺ֑ן (venikkah ha’ish me’avon, “the man shall be free of iniquity”) and inverts these words into a restrictive principle by which the waters function only if the man is himself מְנוּקֶּה מֵעָוֹן (menukkeh me’avon, “free of iniquity”). If he is not, there can be no sotah ritual for his wife. The accuser becomes examinable. Finally, Mishnah Sotah 9:9 declares that מִשֶּׁרַבּוּ הַמְנָאֲפִים פָּסְקוּ הַמַּיִם הַמָּרִים (“when adulterers became abundant, the trial of the bitter waters ceased”). A society in which men transgress massively loses the moral right to organize a mechanism of judgment directed against women. A culture of male adultery cannot continue to produce truth upon the bodies of women in the name of God. The tradition recognizes here that a biblical rite can become morally inadministrable. It does not simply say that the Temple no longer exists. It declares that male hypocrisy renders the rite impossible.
In her book Beyond Brutality, Rabbi Dr. Jane Kanarek has shown that the Babylonian Talmud works even more deeply against the brutality of the apparatus by reintroducing, within the tractate Sotah itself, great female figures such as Miriam, Yocheved, and the midwives of Egypt. Opposite the woman reduced to the silence of a double amen, the Talmud juxtaposes women who speak, protect, disobey, save children, and confront Pharaoh. This counternarrative is not decorative. It is structural. The tradition cannot erase the sotah, but it can encircle her with other women, other gestures, other forms of power. Against the theater of humiliation, it sets a politics of care and resistance. In Mishnah, Sotah 3:4, Ben Azzai states: חַיָּב אָדָם לְלַמֵּד אֶת בִּתּוֹ תוֹרָה (“a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah”). This opinion, however marginal, strikes at the heart of the apparatus. The woman whose body is interpreted by the husband, by the priest, and by the public must be able to interpret the Torah that claims to judge her. A woman deprived of Torah remains an object of exegesis. A woman who learns becomes a reader, a dissenter, an authority. That is precisely what religious society needs most: not merely pious followers, but people of all genders capable of reading texts, ultimately unveiling their agency.
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