Who Put That in the Bible?

Passage: Numbers 5:11-31

When you follow a systematic reading plan like the One Year Bible, you’re forced to study passages you’d otherwise avoid.  And if you belong to a tradition that sees the entire Bible as the inspired word of God, you have to navigate the dilemma of passages that are either unsettling or inscrutable.  This passage is both.

It falls within the Old Testament books of the Law.  And it’s an obscure instruction that you will likely never hear in a sermon.  Unless you go to a really weird church.  It’s a test for infidelity – specifically, for a woman suspected of cheating on her husband.  At first reading it feels like we’re straying into Monty Python-esque witch-burning territory here.  Which is why the passage deserves a second glance. 

Three observations aid our interpretation.  The first is that the default rule in most ancient societies was that if a man suspected his wife of infidelity, no further evidence was needed.  He could dispatch her himself, or subject her to whatever punishment the law of the land endorsed.  There was no check or balance.  In fact, many cultures today allow men to use the suspicion of infidelity to justify all manner of violent acts against their wives. 

The second is that this law presupposes that God is real, and knows the truth of the situation in question.  As such, the only way that the test will prove “positive” is by the supernatural intervention of God.  When you read through the test, and the specificity of proof-positive conditions, you can only draw one conclusion: that it was a very rare occasion in which the infidelity test came up positive. 

The third consideration is the personality type of someone who would want a divination-type test of his spouse’s infidelity.  The term paranoia comes to mind.  A prescribed, society-wide test would actually serve to protect innocent women from jealous or paranoid spouses, and vindicate them in a public setting. 

With all this in mind, the test God assigns can be seen not as misogynistic or regressive, but compassionate and egalitarian.  Perhaps even – dare we say – ahead of its time?

Of course, this explanation only takes into account practical considerations.  Commentator Mary Douglas claims that this law goes beyond the practical to the symbolic.  She argues that 

“every mention of a law concerning women in Numbers might be taken to refer, not to ‘women’, but to ‘a woman’, Israel.  The law sections on women make much better sense as shifts from the local to the general situation of Israel in relation to their Lord.  The prophet had told Israel: ‘thy maker is they husband’ (Isa. 54.5).”  (Douglas, In the Wilderness, 161)

What does this mean?  That the kind of marriage supported by the law in question is the kind of marriage God intends to have with his people: one in which fidelity is pursued as its own reward, and infidelity has intrinsic, rather than imposed, consequences.  God gives his people a law which doesn’t impose a punishment on alleged infidelity.  But spells out clearly that marital infidelity leads to personal and corporate degeneration.  The fact that infidelity leads to degeneration and death, and fidelity leads to fulfillment and life, is the guiding principle.  The threat of physical violence or humiliation is removed as the primary motivation for living the way people were created to live. 

This is the way God intends us to live his Law.  Not as an institutionalized code with imposed punishments, but as a rule of life that his intrinsic rewards and consequences.  We live it not because we’re afraid of being punished or shamed, but because it’s the way we were created to live.  And life is better when we live God’s way.