The Cost of Being Sure

About This Talk

Sotah 1 turns a husband's jealousy into a procedure and then spends the chapter closing it off. A binding warning means telling his wife, in the presence of witnesses, not to enter into privacy with one named man, and it holds even where the man named is her father, her brother, a gentile, a servant or one physically incapable; the seclusion that triggers the waters must be with that man, before two witnesses, lasting long enough for relations, which the Rambam measures as the time to roast an egg and swallow it, and in an era when the waters are unavailable she is forbidden permanently and divorced without her ketubah. The failures are listed at length: an instruction not to speak to the man is not a warning at all, witnesses who saw only conversation saw no seclusion, a warning naming a boy under nine or an animal does not bind, and where no warning was issued even two witnesses to a full seclusion leave her permitted. Most consequentially, a husband may forgo the warning before she secludes, in which case it is as though he never issued it, but not afterward, since the obligation has become the Torah's rather than his; divorce nullifies a warning and remarriage requires a fresh one. The court itself warns a woman who is gossiped about whose husband cannot speak or hear, has lost his mental faculties, is overseas or is imprisoned, not to bring her to the waters but to disqualify her ketubah, and on his return he must give a get and cannot make her drink, because the warning was not his. A woman who drank and lived cannot be made to drink again over the same man, though another man reopens the waters repeatedly, and a second husband may make her drink over that very same man. The chapter's strangest pattern is that knowledge closes the waters: if he warned her and saw the seclusion himself, or if the gossip has reached the women weaving by moonlight, or if one witness testifies to the seclusion and he relies on him, he must divorce her and pay her ketubah in full, while a single witness to actual relations forbids her forever, bars her from drinking even to clear herself, and costs her the ketubah, from "there is no witness against her." Because the Torah accepted one witness here, ordinary disqualifications fall away, so a woman, a servant, a maidservant, a relative or one disqualified rabbinically may testify, and even the five presumed hostile women may, though only to forbid her and not to void her ketubah; one witness carries the weight of two, so a later contradiction is disregarded while a simultaneous one sends her to the waters, one acceptable witness balances many unacceptable ones, and among unacceptable witnesses the majority rules with an even split sending her to drink.