2. skin blanch. This English nonce term reflects the medical uncertainty of the Hebrew disease tsaraʿat (here in an adjectival form for the person suffering from it, tsaruʿa). The symptoms listed in Leviticus 13–14 make it clear that it is not leprosy (Hansen’s disease), as the older translations have it. Perhaps the term designated a group of diseases because the sundry skin lesions listed in Leviticus do not seem entirely compatible, with indications elsewhere (e.g., Exodus 4:6) that it involved a complete loss of pigmentation. In any case, the disease was regarded as contagious and, as other biblical texts record, required quarantine.

suffering from genital flux. This necessary clarification in translation does not do justice to the extraordinary compactness of the Hebrew, a single syllable, zav, “flowing.”

by a corpse. Literally, “for a [dead] person,” lanafesh. All three of these categories of impurity are clearly cultic, not moral. Pathology and death are viewed as contaminants, and the camp of Israel in the wilderness, in which God’s presence dwells with a specific locus in the Tabernacle, must be kept free of them.

6. any of the human offenses, to betray the trust of the LORD. The Hebrew ḥato’t haʾadam, “human offenses,” is unique to this text, and seems to indicate offenses of one person against another. The primary meaning of limʿol maʿal, “to betray the trust,” is to appropriate objects or goods that have been consecrated to the sanctuary. Here, the meaning has been extended to the illicit appropriation of another person’s property, which is equally seen as betraying the LORD’s trust.

7. the sum of its principal. “The sum of” represents the Hebrew particle b^e (“with”), which here has the sense of a price or sum paid for something. “Principal” is the technical monetary sense of the Hebrew roʾsh (literally, “head”). The fact that the wrongdoer is to pay back the value of the appropriated goods plus a fine of 20 percent, rather than a fourfold or fivefold restitution, suggests that what may be involved is some sort of embezzlement rather than outright theft.

8. if the man should have no redeemer. The most plausible construction is that the man referred to is the wronged person, not the wrongdoer. “Redeemer” has the technical legal sense, as in the search for a redeemer for Naomi’s deceased husband in Ruth 4, of a kinsman who can act as a surrogate for a deceased person. The case indicated, then, is one in which the wronged person is no longer alive to receive restitution and there is no relative who can be given the restitution in his stead. In such a case, the priest, God’s agent, becomes the proxy to whom restitution is made.

12. whose wife may stray and betray his trust. The law of the wife suspected of adultery is formally linked with the preceding section by the prominent use at the beginning and then repeatedly of the idiom “to betray his trust.” Similarly, the repeated characterization of the unfaithful woman as “defiled” verbally links this passage with the opening unit of this chapter concerning defilement of the camp by contact with corpses or diseased persons.

13. and a man lie with her in seed-coupling. If the Masoretic vocalization of the text can be trusted, the Hebrew makes “her” the direct object of “lie” (“lay her,” “bed her”), a usage that may highlight the brutality of the act. “Seed-coupling,” shikhvat-zeraʿ, is literally “seed-lying” or perhaps even “layer of seed.” In any case, the phrase clearly indicates vaginal penetration with emission of semen.

concealed . . . hide . . . no witness . . . not apprehended. The deployment of overlapping language stresses the clandestine nature of the act of adultery. With no concrete evidence of the sexual betrayal, with no more than his suspicions to go on, the husband is overcome by a fit of jealousy (verse 14) and has recourse to a trial by ordeal.

15. The man shall bring his wife to the priest. This troubling and also fascinating ritual is the only clear-cut instance of trial by ordeal in the Bible. It became the basis for a whole tractate of the Talmud, Sotah (“the straying woman”), and with the concern for the status of women in recent scholarship, it has been the subject of voluminous discussion and debate. Apologetic approaches seem questionable. The ritual reflects the strong asymmetry of sexual roles in the biblical worldview: a woman must submit to this ordeal on the mere suspicion of her husband, and the question of the man suspected of adultery is not even raised in the legal system. The ordeal, moreover, is based on a kind of archaic magic, however one seeks to square it with loftier versions of monotheism. Parallels have been noted with the Code of Hammurabi, which provides for an oath by the woman (compare verse 19 here) if her husband accuses her of unfaithfulness, and an ordeal of jumping into a river, sink or swim, if the accusation comes from someone else (compare the prominence of water here). Our passage powerfully records an ideology of marital relations, but in point of historical fact, there is no way of knowing to what extent it was actually practiced in ancient Israel. It is doubtful whether this was a living legal institution in the Second Temple period, and if the sanctuary setting of the ritual is the Tabernacle, it may even have not been observed in the First Temple period. In any case, it is a vivid male fantasy of testing and exposing sexual “defilement” in a woman.

her sacrifice . . . a tenth of an ephah of barley flour. A person seeking some sort of judicial or oracular determination from the sanctuary (understood to be from God through the priest) would have to come with an offering. But in consonance with the somber occasion for this visit to the sanctuary, this is a no-frills grain offering, not the usual semolina flour but barley, and devoid of oil and frankincense. As Rashi, citing Tractate Sotah, sharply puts it, “She did a beast’s act, and her sacrifice is a beast’s feed.”

offering of remembrance, a remembering of guilt. The verbal stem z-k-r manifested in these paired nouns refers both to the cognitive act of remembering and to making a record or explicit indication of something. The word for “guilt,” ʿawon, which can also mean “crime” and even “punishment,” is different from the term for “guilt,” ʾasham, used in verses 6–8.

17. holy water. This phrase does not occur elsewhere. It may plausibly be understood, as Abraham ibn Ezra and others have proposed, as a reference to the water in the basins of the sanctuary, set out for the use of the priests in ritual ablution. Two elements, then, of the sanctuary that are binary opposites are joined in the liquid vehicle of the trial by ordeal: water and earth. The latter, ʿafar (also “dust” or “dirt”), is not something one would ordinarily drink, and it is associated in biblical usage with mourning (ʿafar is placed on the head), and with death (“for dust you are / and to dust shall you return,” Genesis 3:19).

18. undo her hair. The Hebrew says literally, “undo her head,” a transparent metonymy. The loosening of the hair is an act of public shaming, so the woman in effect is exposed and vulnerable before she takes her oath and swallows the potion.

the bitter besetting water. Punning sound-play is crucial in the Hebrew phrase mey hamarim hameʾararim. The literal sense of the second of the two Hebrew qualifiers of “water” is “cursing” or “curse-conveying.” Verse 27 seems to indicate that the water turns bitter only if the woman fails the trial by ordeal (“if she . . . betrayed her husband’s trust, the besetting water will enter her as bitter”). The ever-acute ibn Ezra proposes that “bitter” is used proleptically, in analogy to “you . . . strip[ped] the naked of their clothes” in Job 22:6. It should be noted that in biblical idiom, bitter water is brackish or salt water that is unfit for drinking.

19. strayed . . . from your husband. The Hebrew says literally “strayed under your husband.” Some have interpreted this as “under the authority of,” a sense of the preposition for which there is scant biblical evidence. One recent interpreter reads it as “in place of,” one clear meaning of the Hebrew preposition, but which strains the syntax here. One might infer a symbolic or even sexual image of the husband on top, with the wife “straying” from under him.

20. And you. The woman is rhetorically buttonholed by this emphatic initial “you” at the beginning of this statement of the negative alternative of the oath.

put his semen in you. The term for “semen,” shekhovet, is derived from the verbal stem sh-k-v, “to lie,” used at the beginning of the passage, and appears to have this technical sexual sense. Its use, together with “seed-coupling” above, may offer support to those commentators who propose that the suspected woman is actually pregnant. Either the husband thinks he has grounds for suspicion that he is not the father (e.g., this wife has been frequently gone from the house at odd hours), or, in a case where he has not been having sex with his wife (whether through mutual estrangement or because he has been away), he thinks he can be certain. Bathsheba and Uriah would be an instance of the second alternative.

21. And the priest shall make the woman swear. This clause interrupts the move from the conditional clause of the oath (verse 20) to the consequence clause (“May the LORD make you an imprecation . . .”).

your thigh sag and your belly swell. Much futile energy has been devoted to working out what sort of medical symptoms might be indicated. “Belly” is often womb in the Bible, and “thigh” might be a metonymic euphemism for vagina, but not necessarily. In any case, something physically dire immediately happens to the guilty woman after she swallows the potion, and it happens in or around the organs of generation. If in fact she is pregnant, that could be a miscarriage, the ordeal thus becoming an induced abortion, though this remains uncertain.

22. this besetting water shall enter your innards. The verb for entering or coming into is also a biblical idiom for consummated sexual intercourse, so the penetration of the ritual potion into the woman’s innards answers to the act of which she has been accused.

23. these imprecations. Either the plural is a rhetorical intensification or it reflects the two symptoms, sagging thigh and swollen belly.

26. its token. Literally, “its remembrancing,” ʾazkaratah.

27. the woman shall become an imprecation. The ritual, for all its cruelty, does not prescribe a death penalty for the adulterers. (In Genesis 38, Judah’s judgment of Tamar presupposes the death penalty for such an act.) The punishment is public shaming and, one may infer, divorce without restitution of her bride-price.

28. sown with seed. This is the literal meaning of the Hebrew. If one sustains the assumption that the accused wife is pregnant, the phrase would mean that she retains her pregnancy, now proven to be legitimate, and will be rewarded with progeny. Otherwise, the phrase might suggest that her reward comes in her conceiving afterward by her husband: in this reading, the trial by ordeal would be a means of reconciliation between spouses separated by the husband’s suspicion.

29. This is the teaching. The Hebrew torah means “teaching,” “regulation,” “prescribed procedure.”

31. and the man shall be clear of guilt, and that woman shall bear her guilt. The asymmetry between the sexes is vividly summarized in this concluding verse. If the woman should fail the trial by ordeal, she will of course bear her own guilt, as the language of the oath that the priest has imposed on her makes clear. But even if she is proven innocent, the husband incurs no guilt in subjecting her to the ordeal: if he thinks he has grounds for suspicion—indeed, if he is simply caught up Othello-like in a “spirit of jealousy,” a jealous passion—it is his prerogative as husband to make her submit to the ordeal.