Numbers 5:1-31

In the beginning, I was tempted to be sad and a little shocked by the passage on the ritual to test a woman's unfaithfulness.  My initial reactions were that perhaps it wasn't quite fair: a jealous husband with unfounded fears could humiliate his wife before the congregation; there seems to be no test for a husband who may have been unfaithful; and a woman, whether she repented or not, would lose her ability to bear children (something that defined her) if she were guilty.  There could be repentance, but not end to her consequences, no restoration.

Thinking a little further, though, showed me some things.  First, in a patriarchal society, such as Israel was, the husband had the right and opportunity to act as an overlord over his wife.  A jealous husband could make life very miserable for his wife.  Such a ritual would give the innocent wife an opportunity to silence all accusations.  She would have drank the curse before the priest and come away unscathed, showing herself to be innocent and pure.  If she was guilty, then she had not only sinned against her husband, but also against the Lord, and the consequence for her own actions would be on her own head.  True, it doesn't give any provision for an unfaithful wife who might experience a serious repentance and may need restoration, but sin was a very serious thing in the Israelite camp, as anywhere.  And God intended the Israelites to be the real city on a hill: they were to be God's people among ungodly nations.  Sin had to be dealt with in the camp, lest it run rampant.  After all, the Israelites were a stiff-necked nation (as we shall see throughout this book).

In reading some commentaries, I noticed that they all made special effort to point out that the ritual was not magic.  I hadn't thought so to begin with, but I begin to see their point: some of the elements of the ritual would seem to point that way.  The woman drinks water mixed with dust from the Tabernacle floor and the ink used to record her words promising that she's been faithful.  There would have been nothing harmful in any of these elements, nor were they intended to poison.  Rather, the ritual was supposed to be an outward symbol of the work the Holy Spirit would do in the wife's own life, bringing a spiritual ailment into the physical realm.  One interesting note I read in the BKC (Bible Knowledge Commentary) was that in drinking the ink brushed from the scroll, the woman was proverbially eating her words.  How's that for irony?

Tomorrow's Reading: Numbers 6:1-27