The Waters That Refuse

About This Talk

The chapter is a catalogue of disqualification. A woman who admits the adultery, or who claims innocence yet refuses to drink, is divorced without her ketubah and forbidden forever, while a husband who says he does not want her to drink or who goes in to her after the seclusion blocks the test himself and must pay her ketubah as she departs. Fifteen categories are unfit to drink even when both parties want it, including a woman consecrated but not brought into the marriage, a yevamah awaiting yibbum, a minor married to an adult, an adult married to a minor, the wife of an androgynous man, and the wife of any man who is blind, lame, mute, deaf or missing a hand, together with a woman in any of those five conditions herself; each exclusion is a piece of the rite that cannot be performed, derived from the priest having her stand, the offering placed on her palms in the plural so that both hands must be sound, her saying the oath and her hearing it said to her, and the verse about what was hidden from her husband's eyes, and the Rambam then rules reciprocally that whatever prevents her from drinking prevents him from compelling her and vice versa. A warning to a betrothed woman or yevamah holds only if the seclusion follows consummation, since relations with the husband must have come first. The waters do not test the wife of a man who has engaged in any forbidden relations since reaching majority, even a single Rabbinic transgression with the woman he had consecrated while she lived in her father's house, from the verse that the man will be free of sin and the woman will bear hers; a wife forbidden to him by any commandment or even a sh'niyah cannot be tested, though a woman pregnant or nursing by another man can be, since that prohibition is not inherent to the relationship; and a childless man's barren wife, woman past childbearing or aylonit neither drinks nor collects her ketubah, while a man who already has children or another childbearing wife may compel even an aylonit, with each woman's status fixed at the moment of the warning rather than the seclusion. Converts, freed maidservants, the wives of converts, freed servants and impotent men, women of illegitimate parenthood and pregnant and nursing women all drink like any wife, but a woman whose husband dies before she drinks neither drinks nor collects. Wherever warning and seclusion occurred without drinking, she is forbidden to her husband and equally to the man she secluded with, who must divorce her even after many children; and where there was no warning but witnesses to a seclusion and unsavory behavior, the husband may divorce her and she may not then marry the suspected man, staying with him only if she bore him children, all of it conditioned on a day and a half of unbroken town talk and on neither party having enemies, except that two witnesses to an actual act compel the divorce in every case and always without the ketubah.