Ulysses Essay 4 (9:25)
Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 4
“A bowl of bitter waters”

Looking down from the tower at Dublin Bay, the scene of a recent drowning, and described by the egregiously crude Malachi Mulligan only a moment ago as “the snotgreen sea”, Stephen is reminded of the bowl of green bilious vomit at his dying mother’s bedside. Immediately, the “bitter water” of the Book of Numbers (5:17-21) seeps into his consciousness. Mosaic Law dictates here that if a jealous husband suspects that his wife has had a sexual relationship with another man, although definite proof of the affair is lacking, he is at liberty to subject her to a trial by ordeal conducted by a priest who has been engaged for this purpose in return for a “jealousy offering” of barley meal. The priest fills an “earthen vessel” with “holy water” and the wife, having denied the charge of adultery, is instructed to drink the “bitter water” after being told that if she is indeed innocent of the charge, all will be well, but warning her, “Im at satit” (“If you have gone astray” i.e., been sexually unfaithful), God would cause her “belly to swell” and her “thigh to rot”.

Trial by ordeal for suspected adultery seems to have been commonplace in the ancient Middle East (the Hammurabic code specifies a similar process) and in other cultures. The Talmud devotes a whole tractate “Sotah” – “The Deviant Woman” – to the issue, deriving the name of the tractate from the biblical word “satit” (“you went astray). The psychological basis of the ritual was probably based on the assumption that a frightened woman who had indeed had an extramarital sexual liaison would rather confess to her misdoing than undergo the terrifying consequences of having her “guilt” revealed by the “bitter water”. In any event after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the entire rigmarole was abandoned along with all the other sacrificial rituals that were so integral to the Temple service, although orthodox Jewish liturgy still recalls them with longing, especially on festival days, and most of all on Yom Kippur, when, as described in the midday Musaf prayer, the High Priest would make his once a year entrance to the innermost sanctum of the Temple, “the Holy of Holies”, where he would pronounce God’s ineffable name “loudly and clearly” while beseeching forgiveness on behalf of the nation.

However, the term “soteh” (the masculine of “sotah”) and its derivative noun “stiyah” live on in Modern Hebrew. They are still in use as a collective appellation for far-out sexual deviancies (such as pedophilia), but more commonly they simply imply “off track”, as when a discussant wanders away from the subject under debate or a driver does not stick to his or her correct lane. And perhaps the most utter demythologization of the biblical “sotah” is its derivative usage in Israeli statistical jargon, where “stiyat teken” refers to nothing more than the standard deviation from the norm.

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