|
So, welcome to Sotah.
Before beginning your study, it's worth looking at the Torah's description of the Sotah process and procedure in Bamidbar 5; 11 - 31. This "trial by ordeal" is unique in the Torah, and its ultimate aim or aims have been the subject of debate. Was it a method for protecting an innocent wife from the potential actions of a crazed, jealous husband? Was it a method of extracting a confession from a wife who in fact had committed adultery? (It's important to note that since there were no witnesses to the alleged adultery, the consequence for a wife who confessed would only be divorce without Ketubah.) Was the ordeal intended to serve primarily as a warning and a deterrent to the general public that was viewing it? Some combination of the above?
Also a subject of debate is whether the rabbis of the Mishna are hoping through their legislation to make the Sotah ritual an extremely rare event, or whether they were simply putting standard legal safeguards around it. Many of these questions are discussed in this essay that I came across, though I am positive that there are more out there on the web!
Perek 1 of Sotah addresses several topics:
(1) Mishnayot 1 and 2 address the two necessary prerequisites for the initiation of a Sotah ordeal. These are (a) a husband warning his wife to not enter a secluded space with a particular man, and (b) the wife nonetheless doing so
(2) Mishna 3 addresses situations in which for one reason or another, despite conditions (a) and (b) above having been meet, the Sotah ordeal will NOT be conducted. This results in the marriage needing to end, as in any instance in which conditions (a) and (b) have already been met the couple is forbidden to cohabitate again until the ordeal has been performed. If the ordeal will not be going forward, the marriage must therefore be ended.
(3) Mishnayot 4 - 7 get pretty intense in terms of the lead up to the Sotah ordeal. The questions raised above about ultimate purpose / purposes / intended outcomes come to the fore in these Mishnayot.
(4) Mishnayot 7 - 9 take an interesting twist, exploring what we typically refer to as "midah k'neged midah" (measure for measure), beginning by correlating the alleged actions of the wife to the forms of humilation she now suffers, and then moving from this case to other cases in Tanach that manifest the same principle. Interestingly, "midah k'neged midah" is used not only in the negative, punitive sense, but also in the positive, remunerative sense.
| 
