Trial by Water

Numbers 5

Works of art by Andi Arnovitz, Richard McBee and Unknown Ethiopian artist, Amhara region

Voyeuristic Violence

‘Sotah’ is the rabbinic term for a (suspected) disloyal wife, discussed in Numbers 5:11–31. Her husband, if doubting her fidelity, could bring her to the Tabernacle for a public trial, which would take the form of a ritual test. (The word ‘Sotah’ can also refer to the ritual itself.)

Richard McBee’s Sotah Drinks frames the ritual as a social spectacle in a timeless-placeless but recognizably non-ancient setting. If the effect is to bring it nearer to home, this is striking, for there is no record of the test having been performed in post-biblical times.

McBee’s Sotah stands by the Ark of the Covenant as she ingests the waters in front of her community. One half of the gathered assembly, dressed in black, appears mostly male and jostles to see the ordeal. The other half, in white, is subdued and reticent while being notably fewer in number.

The voyeuristic, perhaps even pornographic, nature of the ritual has been discussed by Rabbi Sarra Lev (2009). Rabbinic commentators, notably including Maimonides (Sotah 3), referred to the tearing of the Sotah’s clothing. This is a gesture richly invested in power, argues Lev, and is often enacted for the viewer’s (or reader’s) titillation. As in textual or visual pornography, Lev proposes that the (presumed) male viewer is invited to imagine being the actor, ‘the man’ in the scene—in this case the priest whose role it is to violate the Sotah, or else a spectator. The ripping of the garments can express grief in more traditional Jewish contexts, but in Lev’s contemporary reading, it can be viewed as a form of sexual assault.

Lev emphasizes the construction of blame in the ritual, in which the suspicion aroused by the wife is considered to be just cause for her punishment regardless of her potential innocence. McBee captures the complicity and sanction of the religious officials and communities in the procedure. Misogyny and patriarchy do not exist in a vacuum; in order to enact violence on women they require structural and societal support beyond the whim of a single jealous husband. The painting showcases both the voyeurism inherent in such an event as well as the extreme nature of it as a prohibitive example to others who look on.

References

Lev, Sarra. 2009. ‘1 Sotah: Rabbinic Pornography?’, in The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism, ed. by Danya Ruttenberg (New York: New York University Press), pp. 7–23

In it Together

Commentary by Maryanne Saunders

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In Buckle Church (part of the Göreme Open Air Museum) in Türkiye, a rare example of a visual depiction of the Sotah ritual is found, in the context of a fresco cycle dating from the tenth century. Rarer still is the fact it depicts the Virgin Mary and St Joseph being given the ‘bitter waters’ after her pregnancy becomes apparent. The second-century apocryphal text the Protoevangelium of James, followed by the seventh/eighth-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, details that Joseph and Mary had to drink the waters after being accused—not by each other, but by religious officials—of pre-marital sex.

Then Mary said, stedfastly and without trembling: O Lord God, King over all, who knowest all secrets, if there be any pollution in me, or any sin, or any evil desires, or unchastity, expose me in the sight of all the people, and make me an example of punishment to all. Thus saying, she went up to the altar of the Lord boldly, and drank the water of drinking, and walked round the altar seven times, and no spot was found in her. (Pseudo-Matthew 12)

The same scene appears to be depicted in an illuminated Gospel by the Ethiopian Amhara peoples in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. Here, we see Mary, third from the left, holding a chalice in a Temple setting. The figures around her are ostensibly male and look on as she drinks from the bitter waters.

This illumination places the scene as part of a sequence of events following the Annunciation and preceding the birth of Christ—a sequence very like that found in the Protoevangelium and Pseudo-Matthew. Its inclusion in an apocryphal Christian narrative from as early as the second century is intriguing, and may capture a much older anxiety around Jesus’s parentage and the legitimacy of the pregnancy stemming from first-century allegations of illegitimacy by anti-Christian writers, such as Celsus (Grushcow 2019: 288).

By including, alongside the Gospel account of Mary’s pregnancy, a fidelity test understood to have been performed at the time—a test which was ostensibly to be judged by God—the author is providing as much confirmation as possible for Jesus’s divine origins. This may explain the episode’s rare but enduring legacy in Christian visual art.

References

Cleveland Coxe, A. (ed.). 1916. Ante-Nicene Fathers. Volume 8: The Twelve Patriarchs, Excerpts and Epistles, The Clementina, Apocrypha, Decretals, Memoirs of Edessa and Syriac Documents, Remains of the First Ages (New York: Christian Literature Publishing), pp. 368–83

Grushcow, L. 2019. Writing the Wayward Wife (Leiden: Brill)

Schneider, G. (trans.). 1995. Evangelia infantiae apokrypha – Apokryphe Kindheitsevangelien, Fontes christiani, Bd. 18, (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder), pp. 61–65

Vulnerability and Resistance

Commentary by Maryanne Saunders

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The Sotah as a figure and a practice has been the focus for many feminist artists working within the Jewish tradition. American-Israeli artist Andi Arnovitz created The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife in 2009 from the key components of the Sotah ritual: hair, dirt, Hebrew letters, and paper.

The dress is made of transparent Japanese paper and displayed in a glass vitrine designed to reproduce the humiliation and exposure of the victim and emphasize the voyeuristic nature of the process. The inclusion of hair is especially poignant for Arnovitz, a practicing Orthodox Jew, as hair covering remains an important sartorial sign of devotion for Orthodox women after marriage.

Rather than politicizing the Sotah, Arnovitz turns the story away from the spectator and the spectacle and exteriorizes the shame and vulnerability that comes along with being sexualized by those around you. Scholars of feminist Jewish art such as Efraim Sicher have argued that ‘[m]uch feminist art makes the female body a site of resistance to policing by power hierarchies and sexualization’ (Sicher 2019: 271–96).

In her simultaneous revealing and concealing of the female body, Arnovitz is arguably demonstrating that actually this resistance has always belonged to the women who enact it in and with their bodies rather than making it a ‘site’ for argument’s sake. In this work, the body is the only site of resistance available as it is irrevocably implicated in the brutal social and physical consequences of the ritual.

References

Sicher, Efraim. 2019. ‘Written on the Body: Re-embodying Judaism in Contemporary Jewish Feminist Art’, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies,19.3: 271–96

Richard McBee :

Sotah Drinks, 2009 , Oil on canvas

Unknown Ethiopian artist, Amhara region :

The Trial by Water, from an Illuminated Gospel (f.7r), Late 14th–early 15th century , Parchment (vellum), wood (acacia), tempera, ink

Andi Arnovitz :

The Dress of the Unfaithful Wife, 2009 , Japanese paper, hair, dirt, film and threads

Hard to Swallow

Comparative commentary by Maryanne Saunders

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Numbers 5 outlines rules of purity, sin, and punishment. The separation of unclean things and people and restitution practices are closely followed by what is arguably the most famous part of the chapter.

The Sotah ritual or the ‘ordeal of the bitter water’ is found in Numbers 5:11–31, where it describes the test administered to a married woman accused by her husband of adultery. The practice was later elaborated in the Talmud (Mishnah Sotah) to include the stripping and uncovering of the woman’s hair and breasts. In the ritual, the ‘Sotah’ or suspected unfaithful wife is forced to drink parchment mixed in ‘bitter waters’: if she is innocent this will have no effect on her but if she is guilty her ‘uterus [will] drop, [her] womb [will] discharge’ (Numbers 5:27).

This ritual is not an ‘ordeal’ as that would technically be the judgement of the woman by human juries. Instead, the defendant takes a type of oath (v.21)—an oath in which she puts herself under divine jurisdiction and makes herself subject to punishment beyond the corporal justice system of the religious officials. But the human role remains far from negligible. We see this brought out powerfully in Richard McBee’s depiction of the ritual: it is still very much in the hands of the human judges as they watch on, implicitly approving.

The overriding contrast in the Sotah ritual, and the art depicting it, is between a notion of purity or righteousness and an action which is cruel or perhaps even bloody. Andi Arnowitz brings the human side of the Sotah back into focus with a garment—a piece of clothing that the viewer might imagine wearing themselves.

Faced with the woman’s vulnerability, as it is suggested in both McBee’s and Arnovitz’s works, we are left under no illusion as to the severity of the experience. The punishment has been interpreted as induced miscarriage or abortion by translations such as the New International Version, or as induced barrenness (Grushcow 2019: 276). Furthermore, Norman Snaith’s 1967 commentary names the drinks as ‘Waters of Abortion’ rather than the more familiar ‘Bitter Waters’.

The power of the husband (and to some extent the religious authorities) perhaps cannot be said to be absolute: Rabbi Joshua Kulp in his English commentary on the Mishnah expounds how:

The husband cannot force his wife to undergo the Sotah ritual, a ritual that as we shall see was humiliating and probably frightening for the woman. Her husband must divorce her, and he need not pay her ketubah, but he cannot force her to drink the bitter waters (Kulp 1.3.3).

This perspective is contested but provides an illusion of choice for the accused. However, if the alternative is mortal punishment for admitting adultery, or penury, one may see Sotah as a preferable alternative.

The inclusion of the ordeal in Mary’s story as it is recorded in the Protoevangelium of James and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, and illuminated in the Ethiopic Amara Gospel Book, provides a fascinating glimpse into the use of this account of the ritual beyond the bounds of Judaism. That Mary’s encounter with the trial is testing but not graphic or violent is perhaps unsurprising in a context where the Blessed Mother of God is the focus.

Although there is a suggestion in the medieval illumination that Joseph too was subjected to the ordeal, as found in Protoevangelium of James and Pseudo-Matthew, in the other depictions one is left wondering why there is no parallel test for men’s faithfulness. Ultimately, there is very little redemption for the Sotah practice in a modern reading or indeed in a modern Jewish context, particularly a feminist one. However, as is witnessed by the artworks shown here, this does not deprive the passage of a profound symbolic afterlife. It is one where the Sotah is multifaceted beyond the label of guilty or innocent.

References

Grushcow, L. 2019. Writing the Wayward Wife (Leiden: Brill)

Kulp, Joshua. 1997–2003. ‘English Explanation of Mishnah Sotah’, available at https://www.sefaria.org/English_Explanation_of_Mishnah_Sotah.1.3.4?lang… [accessed 18 March 2025]

Snaith, Norman H. 1967. New Century Bible Commentary: Leviticus and Numbers (London: Nelson)

Next exhibition: Numbers 11