1And YHWH spoke to Moses, saying,
2“Command the children of Israel that they shall have every leper and everyone who has an emission and everyone who is impure by a person go from the camp.
5:2. impure by a person. Meaning: something that has become impure because of contact with the dead body of a person.
3Male or female, you shall have them go; you shall have them go outside the camp so they will not make their camps, among which I tent, impure.”
4And the children of Israel did so, and they had them go outside the camp. As YHWH spoke to Moses, so the children of Israel did.
5And YHWH spoke to Moses, saying,
6“Speak to the children of Israel: A man or a woman—when they will do any of the sins of humans, to make a breach against YHWH—so that person has guilt,
7then they shall confess their sin that they have done. And he shall pay back for his guilt with its principal, and he shall add to it a fifth of it, and he shall give it to the one whom he wronged.
8And if the man does not have a redeemer, to pay him back for the guilt, the guilt that is paid back is YHWH’s, for the priest, apart from the ram of atonement by which he will make atonement for him.
9And every donation of all the holy things of the children of Israel that they will bring forward to the priest shall be his.
10And each man’s holy things shall be his; what each man gives to the priest shall be his.”
5:10. shall be his. Meaning: shall be the priest’s.
11And YHWH spoke to Moses, saying,
12“Speak to the children of Israel, and you shall say to them: Any man whose wife will go astray and will make a breach of faith with him,
5:12. go astray. Hebrew root 
This situation is known therefore as the case of the 
5:12. go astray. This section deals with the case of the suspected : a woman whose husband suspects her of adultery, but who has not been proved guilty by evidence or witnesses. It would not merit special notice as anything more than any other law, especially since it has not been practiced for at least two millennia (and, I would say, probably more than two-and-a-half millennia), but it has acquired special importance because, first, it is regarded as the only case of trial by ordeal in the Torah and, second, because questions about the legal status of women have risen to prominence in this generation.
The woman is made to drink a mixture of holy water, dust from the Tabernacle’s floor, and ink from a document expressing a curse if she is guilty. Then, if “her womb swells and her thigh sags” she is understood to be guilty. There have been many attempts to understand what is going on in this strange case. The traditional Talmudic belief is that a miracle is expected to occur through this procedure. Another view is that the procedure is designed to scare guilty women into confessing rather than face the ceremony and the curse. Another is that, since drinking water with dust and ink does not produce these symptoms, this is a law that is designed to find all women not guilty—and thus protect suspected women from their husbands’ or town’s vengeance. Another view is that this procedure can result in the condition of a prolapsed uterus.
All the views leave questions: Why not have some procedure like this for a man who is suspected of adultery? In fact, why not have a procedure like this for any other crime, by a man or a woman? Also, even if the woman is shown guilty, she is not executed, which elsewhere is the penalty for adultery (Lev 20:10; Deut 22:22). So, to begin with: this procedure must relate specifically to something (1) about women and not men, and (2) about sex and adultery. I believe that all of the past explanations are mistaken, and I offer the following explanation of this case:
If we were told that a woman’s “womb is swelling and her thigh is sagging,” nearly 100 percent of us would understand this to mean: she is pregnant. So, in this case, it is explicitly about a woman who has had sex with another man in place of her husband. That is, she has not slept with her husband recently, and that is why her pregnancy is proof of adultery. The purpose of drinking the mixture is not to prove her guilt but to bring about the curse through her pregnancy. (Thus it is called “the bitter cursing water”; and the priest says, “Let YHWH make you a curse and an oath among your people when YHWH sets your thigh sagging and your womb swelling.”) This is why the law applies only to women and only to the matter of adultery: it is the only offense in the Torah in which guilt can be determined by this biological fact, even when there are no witnesses and no other evidence. And this is why the woman cannot be executed: She has not been proved guilty in front of judges in a court of law through witnesses. She has been shown to have done this in front of priests at the Tabernacle. Therefore, she “shall bear her crime” (see the comment on 5:31).
This has a more general implication as well. The reason that we have had such difficulty understanding this case for millennia is that law is constructed on analogy: we decide cases by precedents, by consistent principles that apply to cases in a variety of circumstances. But pregnancy is a condition that is without analogy in human experience. That is why this case reads like no other. And that is why there are agonizing, passionate debates in the present age over whether to save the mother or the baby in a medical crisis during labor, over rights to sperm and eggs that have been preserved, over surrogate mothers, and, above all, over abortion: with arguments about when the developing being inside the womb is a living human in its own right, and about the legal rights of the mother over her own body in balance with the legal protection of the fetus. There simply is no other experience in which two lives are so utterly interconnected.
Why are the rabbis of the Talmudic era so unclear about the actual procedure if it had been practiced in recent memory? Because, I think, it had not been practiced since the time of the First Temple in Jerusalem. It required dust from the Tabernacle floor, and the Tabernacle was only in the First Temple, not in the Second. (A report in the Mishnah that Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai abolished this procedure makes no sense historically. By the time of his authority, even the Second Temple was gone.) And so it came about that the actual meaning of this ceremony was forgotten after many centuries of not being practiced, and the result has been uncertainty and confusion about its meaning.
13and a man has lain with her—an intercourse of seed—and it has been hidden from her husband’s eyes, and she has kept concealed, and she has been made impure, and there is no witness against her, and she has not been caught,
14and a spirit of jealousy has come over him, and he is jealous about his wife, and she has been made impure, or a spirit of jealousy has come over him, and he is jealous about his wife, and she has not been made impure:
15then the man shall bring his wife to the priest and shall bring her offering along with her: a tenth of an ephah of barley flour. He shall not pour oil on it and shall not put frankincense on it, because it is an offering about jealousies, an offering of bringing to mind: causing a crime to be brought to mind.
16“And the priest shall bring her forward and stand her in front of YHWH.
17And the priest shall take holy water in a clay container, and the priest shall take some of the dust that will be on the Tabernacle’s floor and put it into the water.
5:17. holy water. This is the only reference to holy water in the Torah. It may be the water from the basin that the priests use for washing (Exod 30:17–21); the basin is among the things that are identified as “holy of holies” (30:28–29).
5:17. dust. The woman must drink the water containing this dust (5:24). Some have claimed that there is a parallel between this case and the episode of the golden calf. Moses grinds the golden calf thin as dust (Exod 32:20; Deut 9:21), scatters it in water, and makes the people drink (Exodus 32). My reaction is that such a view is tenuous at best. The people in Exodus are guilty! The case is a process designed to determine guilt. And the dust from the Tabernacle is something positive, while the dust of the calf is the opposite. It is true that the people of Israel’s turning to pagan gods is sometimes compared to adultery in the Tanak: Israel is described as a faithless wife. And the term that means “a breach of faith” (ma‘al) with a husband here refers to breaches of faith with God in all its other occurrences in the Torah. But the cases of the and the golden calf have so many fundamental differences that drawing a connection between them may mislead more than shed light.
18And the priest shall stand the woman in front of YHWH and loosen the hair of the woman’s head and put the offering of bringing to mind on her hands; it is an offering of jealousies. And in the priest’s hand shall be the bitter cursing water.
19And the priest shall have her swear, and he shall say to the woman: ‘If a man has not lain with you, and if you have not gone astray in impurity with someone in place of your husband, be cleared by this bitter cursing water.
5:19. in place of your husband. Suggesting that if she is pregnant it must be by the other man, not the husband. Those who have other views of the procedure understand this phrase to mean “under your husband,” and they interpret it as meaning “under his authority.” But there is no reason why that had to be mentioned in the context of these instructions. Moreover, the term here, Hebrew 
, means “in place of” sixteen times in the Torah but never means “under someone’s authority” (the term for that is “under the hand of,” Hebrew yad; cf. Gen 41:35).
20But you, if you have gone astray with someone in place of your husband and if you have been made impure, and if a man other than your husband has had his intercourse with you,’
21then the priest shall have the woman swear a curse oath, and the priest shall say to the woman, ‘let YHWH make you a curse and an oath among your people when YHWH sets your thigh sagging and your womb swelling,
5:21. womb. Hebrew be
en. This word is commonly understood to mean the woman’s “belly,” but in every one of its other ten occurrences in the Torah it means “womb” (see, e.g. Gen 25:23). This is further evidence that pregnancy is what this is all about.
22and this cursing water will come in your insides, to swell the womb and make the thigh sag.’
“And the woman shall say, ‘Amen, amen.’
5:22. to swell the womb and make the thigh sag. It is not clear whether this refers to God’s making this happen (as is explicit in the preceding verse) or to the water’s making it happen. It appears to me that God is understood here to bring about the pregnancy—in the sense that all pregnancies are understood to be enabled by God—and that the water brings about the curse: “the bitter cursing water.”
23“And the priest shall write these curses in a scroll and rub them into the bitter water.
24And he shall have the woman drink the bitter cursing water, and the bitter cursing water will come into her.
5:24. the bitter cursing water. Hebrew mê hamm
rîm hamme’r
rîm. The obvious alliteration is one of several cases of wordplay in this text: Hebrew 
(it has been hidden) reverses the root letters of 
(breach). Hebrew 
(a tenth) reverses the root letters of 
(barley). Hebrew 
(loosen the hair) reverses 
(dust). And Hebrew 
(cursing) has strong alliteration with 
(bitter). This wordplay involves much more than artistry with language. Each of these puns is linked to an aspect of this ceremony that is unique in some way: This is the only case in which (to make a breach) is used for an offense against a human rather than God (see the comment on Lev 5:15). It is the only time that (barley flour) is used for a grain offering. It is the only use of 
the It is the only time that (dust) from the Tabernacle. And this strange use of water (holy water, with a curse melted into it) is the most unusual of all. Puns are common in the Torah’s stories, but their appearance in a law is extremely unusual and unexpected. They highlight the unusual aspect of this case, and they summon to mind associations with the realm of magic, in which the artistry of language and poetry figure in incantations and ceremonies. Likewise, the dissolving of the words of the curse into the water, the dust from the Tabernacle, the water from the priests’ basin, the act of drinking a mixture that produces a curse: much of this has parallels in magic in other cultures, and all of this renders this ceremony mysterious. And it fits with the fact that the function of this procedure is not to establish legal guilt but rather to produce the curse.
25And the priest shall take the offering of jealousies from the woman’s hand and elevate the offering in front of YHWH, and he shall bring her forward to the altar.
26And the priest shall take a fistful from the grain offering, a representative portion of it, and burn it to smoke at the altar, and after that he shall have the woman drink the water.
27When he has had her drink the water, then it will be, if she has been made impure and has made a breach of faith with her husband, when the bitter cursing water will come into her, and her womb will swell and her thigh will sag, then the woman will become a curse among her people.
28And if the woman has not been made impure, and she is pure, then she shall be cleared and shall conceive seed.
29“This is the instruction for jealousies, when a woman will go astray with someone in place of her husband and be made impure,
30or when a spirit of jealousy will come over a man and he will be jealous about his wife. And the priest shall stand the woman in front of YHWH and do all of this instruction to her.
31And the man shall be clear of a crime, and that woman shall bear her crime.”
5:31. the man shall be clear of a crime. This is usually understood to mean that the husband is innocent of the crime of making a false charge against his wife. But this is a questionable reading since the text does not say that he has made any charge against her; he has just brought her to the priest to make the determination of whether his jealousy is correct or not. This may rather refer to the other man, the one who had intercourse with the woman. The procedure proves only that the woman has had intercourse; it cannot prove who the man was. It is therefore not possible to convict the man by this procedure.
This also answers the question of why this procedure applies only to women. A man accused of adultery does not go through this. Because only women can become pregnant, it is only women who can be proved to have committed adultery in the absence of witnesses or any other evidence. (This brings to mind the case of Bathsheba, who becomes pregnant through adultery with David. Her pregnancy while her husband has been away at war is what would make her adultery known; 2 Samuel 11.)