The Water That Reads the Husband

About This Talk

Chapter 3 lays out the whole procedure, and almost every ruling in it narrows the accuser or opens an exit for the accused. The husband states his case on the record before his city court, naming the man, the warning and the privacy, and the court hears his witnesses directly, then assigns him two sages to watch over him since she is forbidden to him until the matter resolves, and sends the case to Jerusalem, because only the Supreme Court of seventy elders in the Temple may compel a woman to drink. There she is seated with her husband absent, and the court's opening effort is spent talking her out of the test: it frightens her deliberately so she will not want to drink and cause the Name to be blotted out, tells her that wine, frivolity, immaturity and bad neighbors have power and that greater men have faltered, and recounts Judah and Tamar, the plain reading of Reuben, and Amnon, expressly to make admission easier, since either an admission or a bare refusal ends the case with divorce and loss of her ketubah. If she persists she is walked around the eastern gate to tire her, dressed in what does not flatter her and stripped of jewelry, watched publicly and kept from her own servants. The ritual is then specified exactly: the oath in a language she understands with her Amen, Amen, the order of the signs stated aloud to protect the water's reputation, kosher parchment written letter for letter in Biblical Hebrew with ink free of kankantum and with the intent required for a get, a never-used earthenware vessel holding half a log from the priests' basin, dust from beneath the marble tile floating visibly, wormwood, the writing dissolved until no trace remains, the tearing of her clothing stopped by a rope tied above her breasts, the husband's isaron of barley meal placed in her hands to weary her, no oil and no frankincense on pain of lashes, and the cup held in her sight until she drinks. The outcomes follow quickly, the adulterer sharing her signs wherever he is, before halacha 17 lands the decisive condition: all of it applies only if the husband never engaged in forbidden relations in his life, and if he ever did the waters do not check his wife, while a husband who compels the test anyway adds transgression by causing the Name to be erased for nothing and defaming the water. The closing rulings limit the test further, with merit from Torah delaying death, survival restoring her even to a priestly husband unless belly and thigh are affected, innocence bringing strength and blessing, late witnesses forbidding her though a single late witness does not, the compelled woman and the unintentional woman and the woman embraced without intercourse excluded altogether, and the Sanhedrin itself nullifying the bitter water when open adultery became common in the Second Temple era.