Today, I am reading and commenting on Numbers 5-6.

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The law for cases of jealousy never really seemed that important until the last few years when I started to see it used as an example of how terrible God’s laws in the Old Testament are.  However, if you believe that God does miracles, that God does intervene in the world, this law is not so terrible.  If you believe that God gave this law and that He does intervene in this world, then you believe that He will ensure that wives who are not guilty of cheating on their husbands will be free of any suffering (other than the terrible taste of the “water of bitterness”) from this test.  Even if you do not believe that God gave this law, or that He intervenes miraculously in this world, if you think this through you will realize that it is not as terrible as it seems at first.  Consider how a woman ends up taking this “test”.  It happens because a spirit of jealousy has come upon her husband and he is convinced that she is cheating on him.  Think about the things which men have done to their wives or girlfriends because they are convinced, often without cause, that they were cheating on them.  Further, think about the number of people who thought they were justified in doing that because the woman was “cheating on them” (sometimes when there was no evidence of the cheating).

Now, let’s look at this law.  We think it’s terrible because of the results it says happens to a woman who is guilty of adultery, but let’s actually look at what is done.  The priest takes clean water (while there is more to holy water in this context than being clean, being clean is one of the pre-requisites) and puts some dust from the ground into it, then he writes the curse in a book and washes the ink off of the book into the water he placed dust from the ground in.  Also, let’s take a look at where he got the dust to put into the water.  The dust comes from the floor of the tabernacle…everybody who enters into the tabernacle needed to be ritually clean…and that meant that they were likely to be actually clean, and that they were at a low risk of carrying a disease.  Now, when I look at what went into the “water of bitterness”, it seems that, without divine intervention, the overwhelming majority of people who drank it would suffer no consequences.  So, with this law in place, a man who believes that his wife is cheating on him, but has no proof, can bring her to the priest in order for this test to be applied, or he can just remain silent.  If she suffers no harm, he must conclude that he was mistaken.  If he does not bring her before the priest for this test, he cannot justify assaulting her, or killing her, for cheating on him (unless he has the specific evidence specified for determining adultery in other laws, and then he needs to follow what those laws specify).

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.