We finally get back on track with Numbers! One of the more contentious readings, even. We open with a discussion of the duties off transporting the components of the Tabernacle and the labor divisions thereof between the various Levites, followed by some brief discussions of removing people with discharges or who are unclean in particular ways from the camp, as well as some reiterations on protocol for realizing and compensating people for wrongdoing.
And then we get to the messy bit! Chapter 5 contains an extended description for a spell that can be performed in cases where a man suspects his wife1 of adultery, whether or not he had any evidence that involved bringing her to the temple and offering a "meal offering of jealousy" on her behalf, followed by the priest taking water from the tabernacle's floor and mixing it with water. He'd then scrape the ink off some manner of scroll into the water, and then make the woman drink it; if she had done adultery, she'd get bloated2. In a nutshell, this isn't great! There's speculation that it was some sort of abortificant, but it's unclear how much it was actually practiced before being discontinued and it's very clearly encoding some real patriarchal shit! The most charitable reading is that it's basically a way to bullshit a jealous husband, and even that's got a lot to unpack. Speaking of unpacking, we [retrieved](ok so this is kind of interesting
https://valentine-wiggin.medium.com/the-ordeal-of-the-bitter-water-8e6dd85fe8c9) several sources doing just that if you want to read more about it.
Anyways, we think it's kinda fucked up.
The following chapter details how one takes the Nazarite vow, and it was interesting to see how it situated the consecration specifically in the hair. More interestingly, given that I think this is the first time Nazarites get mentioned in the Torah, at no point does it explain why someone would take this vow.
The portion closes out with an extended tongue twister, by which I mean I read the same passage twelve times detailing the offerings of the elders of the twelve tribes to the newly built Tabernacle3.
No clips from the commentaries this week, but we do have some music to set the mood for the offerings of the elders
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in an interesting point regarding the translation, there are various footnotes indicating that while the text is translated as, roughly, "husband and wife", the actual language in use is specifically about people in the presumed feminine or masculine roles of a ritual occurence, indicating a sort of textual gendering contingent on their positions within the immediate legal/ritual matter. There was further discussion as to force femming your husband by situating him in the womanly role.
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you may recognize this spell from a variation used during the incident with the golden calf, in which Moses performed a similar exercise with the dissolved gold of the calf on the entirety of israel to identify who worshiped it as an idol
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let it never be said that I won't commit to a bit
