🔢WEB · Numbers 5:21
What does Numbers 5:21 mean?
"then the priest shall cause the woman to swear with the oath of cursing, and the priest shall tell the woman, “Yahweh make you a curse and an oath among your people, when Yahweh allows your thigh to fall away, and your body to swell;"
— Numbers 5:21 (World English Bible)
Surrounding context
The priest shall set the woman before Yahweh, and let the hair of the woman’s head go loose, and put the meal offering of memorial in her hands, which is the meal offering of jealousy. The priest shall have in his hand the water of bitterness that brings a curse.
The priest shall cause her to swear, and shall tell the woman, “If no man has lain with you, and if you haven’t gone aside to uncleanness, being under your husband, be free from this water of bitterness that brings a curse.
But if you have gone astray, being under your husband, and if you are defiled, and some man has lain with you besides your husband:”
then the priest shall cause the woman to swear with the oath of cursing, and the priest shall tell the woman, “Yahweh make you a curse and an oath among your people, when Yahweh allows your thigh to fall away, and your body to swell;
and this water that brings a curse will go into your bowels, and make your body swell, and your thigh fall away.” The woman shall say, “Amen, Amen.”
“‘The priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out into the water of bitterness.
He shall make the woman drink the water of bitterness that causes the curse; and the water that causes the curse shall enter into her and become bitter.
Explanation
Numbers 5:21 comes from the middle of a strange and difficult ritual described in Numbers 5:11–31, often called the ordeal or ritual for a suspected unfaithful wife (sometimes referred to by its later rabbinic name, the "sotah" ritual). In plain language, this verse describes the priest making a woman swear a solemn oath before God when her husband suspects her of adultery but has no witnesses or proof. The priest tells her that if she is guilty, God himself will bring a visible, physical curse upon her body — her "thigh falling away" and her body swelling, likely a euphemism for reproductive or abdominal affliction, possibly connected to miscarriage, infertility, or a wasting condition. If she is innocent, the ritual assumes no harm will come to her.
The book of Numbers is traditionally attributed to Moses, addressed to the Israelites during their wilderness journey after the Exodus, as they were being organized as a covenant community with laws governing worship, purity, and social order. This particular law addressed a real social problem: a husband's suspicion of his wife's infidelity when there was no concrete evidence and no way to prove guilt or innocence through normal legal means (which required witnesses, per Deuteronomy 19:15). Rather than allowing the husband to act on suspicion alone — through violence, divorce, or public shaming — the law placed the matter into God's hands through a formal, priestly, sanctuary-based procedure. This was actually a protection for the woman: it removed the power of judgment from the jealous
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