sotah

The priest then removes a handful and burns it and is entitled to the remainder of the meal-offering unless the sotah is the wife of a priest, in which case after the handful is removed, he burns the remainder on the ash pile.

Legal-Religious Status of the Suspected Adulteress (Sotah). leBeit Yoreh 2009

It is highly unlikely that the terminology for niddah impurity would be changed because of the desire to maintain a fence to prevent inadvertent sexual contact; the other available term, forbidden (asura), would have had the same connotations and was also used in other contexts such as the suspected adulteress (sotah), one prohibited by the incest laws, etc.

Female Purity (Niddah) Annotated Bibliography. leBeit Yoreh 2009

Chapter 5 includes two commentaries of Rabbi Akiva concerning the adulterer, who has not been mentioned until that point: the first asserts that the bitter, curse-causing water acts not only on the woman but also on her paramour, while the second states that the sotah is forbidden both to her husband and to her lover.

Sotah, Tractate. 2009

At the end of the tractate the Mishnah returns to the subject of the sotah, stating: “Since adulterers have proliferated,” the sotah ceremony has been abolished (9: 9).

Sotah, Tractate. 2009

Among those in the second category is also “the incident of the sotah,” which serves as the connection to the subject of the tractate.

Sotah, Tractate. 2009

The same mishnaic verse includes another opinion, that of Ben Azzai (early second century c. e.): “One must teach his daughter Torah so that if she must drink [the water that tests her fidelity if she is a sotah — a suspected adulteress], she will know that the merit postpones her punishment.”

Torah Study. 2009

She is even willing to be suspected as a sotah and debase herself in the humiliating ceremony of being forced to drink the water of bitterness, so that the Lord will give her children.

Hannah: Midrash and Aggadah. 2009

The Mishnaic Tractate Sotah, which appears in the Order of Women (Nashim), between Tractates Nazir and Gittin, deals mainly with the trial by ordeal undergone in the Temple by a sotah, a woman whose husband suspected her of adultery.

Sotah, Tractate. 2009

Thus I will be suspected of infidelity, and in order to test me, I will be given the water of the sotah to drink.

Hannah: Midrash and Aggadah. 2009

The increased severity of the treatment of the sotah even before the waters reveal her guilt includes various components that are more appropriate to a punitive ritual (such as the one presented in the punishment of the adulteress in Ezekiel 16, a verse of which is even explicitly quoted in the Mishnah, 1: 6) than in a divine trial.

Sotah, Tractate. 2009