the ritual of the sotah, it should not astonish us that the courts did not seek to replace the ordeal by any other procedure. Yet the problem of jealousy whether well or ill founded remained, but the court felt that it was not the proper place for a resolution. It was left to persuasion rather than the courts.
We, therefore, have a biblical attempt to legislate in this difficult area of human emotions and to solve the issues in the gray areas. The primary other effort was the last of the final statement of the Decalogue, which dealt with“coveting”; here, however, the statement was not followed by any specific legislation and so brought no problems for the courts. We do not know how the efforts covered by this paper were executed in the biblical period, but the detailed accounts in the Mishnah and the two Talmuds indicate that an attempt to carry out the scriptural obligations were made and ways of circumventing them discovered. In the later periods these efforts ceased. We may see these discussions as idealistic attempts to solve
human problems. Rabbinic Judaism, faced with the realities of making the legislation work, eventually gave up the mandatory route for hortatory efforts. The latter continued as witnessed through countless sermons and commentaries through the millenia.
Notes
I. Louis M. Epstein, The Jewish Marriage Contract- A Study of the Status of the Woman in Jewish Law(New York : Jewish Theological Seminary , 1927), p. 216.
3. A full discussion of this including the role of women examiners imay be found in Roni Weinstein’s Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews(Leiden : Brill, 2004), pp 400 ff. He also mentioned the custom, attested in the ninth century, of the groom not signing the ketubah until he had varified the bride’s virginity; something clearly at odds with the halakhah. He stated that this custom continued in Greece until the senteenth century