The following are excerpts from:
Tikva Fyrmer-Kensky, “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Numbers
V 11-31),” Vetus Testamentum 34, no. 1 (1984)
On the meaning of the phrase “her belly will swell and her thigh
will fall”:
The “bearing of seed” indicates
that the fertility of the woman is at stake; the most probable explanation of
the guilty woman’s punishment is that she suffers a prolapsed uterus. There is
no reason to suppose that the woman was pregnant at the time of the trial:
pregnancy is not mentioned, and nzr’h zr’ is a term for conception rather
than delivery. Conception is the reward for innocence, either in the sense that
the woman is capable of bearing seed (unlike the guilty woman, see G. R. Driver,
Syria 33 [1956], p. 76) or that she is being rewarded for her innocence
(Gray, Numbers, p. 48). We cannot discard the further possibility that
the waters themselves, coming from the sacred realm (holy water, with dust from
the tabernacle floor) and bearing the name of God, were believed to function as
an impregnating force, and that the woman was believed to become pregnant as a
direct result of this trial. (pp. 18-19)
The terms have been understood in various
ways. The Mishnah understood them to be symbolic: since the woman began to sin
with her thigh and continued with her womb, the penalty begins with the thigh
and then extends to the womb though the rest of the body does not escape injury
(M. Sotah I 7). Josephus took the two phrases together to describe dropsy (Ant.
II xi 6). . . . Driver sees alternative results: if the woman is pregnant, she
will abort; if she is not, her womb will get hot and dry (wĕṣāpābĕtâ biṭāh)
and she will not be able to conceive. The term nēpel refers to abortion In
Ps. lxviii 9; Job ii 16, and Eccles. vi 3. However, the term is applied to
the foetus itself: it is the foetus that “falls (out)”, rather than the “thigh”.
Since, moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the woman was pregnant at
the time of trial, it is unlikely that the “thigh falling” refers to abortion.
(19 n. 15)
The most likely meaning of the phrase is
that the woman suffers the
collapse of the sexual organs known as a prolapsed uterus. In this condition,
which may occur after multiple pregnancies, the pelvic floor (weekend by the pregnancies)
collapses, and the uterus literally falls down. It may lodge in the vagina, or
it may actually fall out of the body through the vagina. If it does so, it
becomes edematous and swells up like a balloon. Conception becomes impossible,
and the woman’s procreative life has effectively ended (unless, in our own
time, she has corrective surgery). . . . In ancient times, when women had more
pregnancies and no knowledge of preventive exercise, the condition may have
afflicted much younger women. However, it was certainly not a normal event, and
would have been considered a great calamity. In the case of the errant wife,
the potion that she drinks would be considered (through the agency of God) to
enter her innards and cause this condition, possibly by “flooding” (if the root
is cognate with ṣabû) the uterus and thereby distending it. Since the
prolapsed uterus is visibly and palpable swollen with fluids once it leaves the
body, it would have been natural to assume that all prolapsed uterus were
swollen, whether or not they fell out of the body. The phrase wĕnāpĕlâ yĕrēkāh
could also be an allusion to this “fall” of the uterus, with yārēk a
synonym for beṭen. yārēk might also refer to the genitalia, in
which case the “falling” might be the sagging of the cervix or of the external genitals
under pressure from the collapsed uterus. (pp. 20-21)
