In titling his book The Rite That Was Not, Ishai Rosen-Zvi points to the main argument, which he persuasively outlines in the sixth chapter of this study—namely, that the rite of the suspected adulteress (the sotah), as it is designed and developed in the Mishnah, never took place. The other side of Rosen-Zvi's argument is that the rite of the sotah in its mishnaic form also could not have been: the violence it involves, the breaching of all of the laws of female modesty, and the blatant public abuse it entails make it not only an aberration of rabbinic legal norms as found elsewhere, but also inherently dangerous, as it becomes a source of temptation unto itself. Nevertheless, unlike other cases, such as that of the rebellious son or the idolatrous town, of which it is explicitly said that they “never were and were never meant to be,” the tannaitic sources never suggest that the rite of the suspected adulteress is just a legal fiction. Quite the contrary: the degree to which the creators of the Mishnah are invested in restructuring the biblical rite and infusing it with procedural components that are not even remotely implied in the Bible suggests that this rite, for them, was not something to “interpret away” but rather a “privileged site,” an opportunity to grapple with some of their own cultural concerns.

Rosen-Zvi presents his study as an attempt to solve a riddle: how is it possible, he asks, that the sotah rite as designed by the Mishnah is so different not only from its biblical origin, but also from the rabbinic ethos and norms? The answer to this question might seem obvious enough to those well versed in some of the gender-oriented scholarly works of the past few decades, in rabbinics as in other fields: clearly, the rabbis are anxious regarding female sexuality and are looking to control it, if not to oppress it. Rosen-Zvi's outstanding accomplishment in this book is not in suggesting why the Mishnah's imagined rite is so abusive and brutal toward women (although his answer to this question is more fine-tuned than the aforementioned crude formulation, he largely follows it). Rather, it is his scrupulous and skillful analysis of how the Mishnah systematically devises and shapes a “textual rite,” as Rosen-Zvi calls it, with its own cohesive ideological structure and underlying logic. Rosen-Zvi chooses to focus on small units of texts—specifically, on the mishnaic passages that present blatant deviations from biblical law—and to dissect them structurally, linguistically, and in comparison to parallel texts. Only by attaining a close understanding of what the mishnah (passage) does, he claims, will we be able to reconstruct what the Mishnah (tractate) is.

The first four chapters of the book follow this imperative of close and careful textual analysis by focusing on rather small textual units and attempting to “use” their incoherencies and peculiarities as a gateway to exploring the processes of their formation and the ideological choices underlying them. Chapter 1 deals with M. Sotah 1.2, which prescribes the legal procedure through which the husband proclaims his jealousy to his wife: while the husband orders the wife not to talk to a certain man, the mishnah declares that she is suspected only if she was in a “hidden place” with him. Through this discrepancy, Rosen-Zvi traces an ongoing polemic on the question of women's freedom of movement and association. Chapter 2 examines the peculiar manner in which the high court in Jerusalem “threatens” the wife (M. Sotah 1.4), noting that in the Mishnah, in contrast to the Tosefta and the midrashim, the “threat's” purpose is not to make the woman recede from drinking the water, but rather to make her admit her transgression, because for the Mishnah, there is no viable option that the woman is not guilty. Chapter 3 looks closely at each and every component of the woman's physical degradation (nivul) in M. Sotah 1.5–6, scrutinizing its symbolic meaning and cultural resonance, as well as the careful organization of these components; Rosen-Zvi argues that the Mishnah transforms the rite from an ordeal into a punishment unto itself, and moreover, into a punishment whose very essence is its being a public spectacle. Chapter 4 examines the description of the aftermath of the drinking (M. Sotah 3.4–5), according to which the woman dies immediately upon drinking the water, as well the notion that a woman's merit (zekhut) might detain her death for months or even years. As Rosen-Zvi shows, the Mishnah juxtaposed two opinions that were originally in disagreement so as to present death as the only possible end of the rite.

Throughout these captivating discussions—and indeed, Rosen-Zvi ought to be commended for his elegant presentation and lucid rhetoric even when addressing highly intricate textual questions—a specific methodology seems to prevail, which we may refer to as “the road not taken”: in almost every case, Rosen-Zvi contrasts the mishnah with traditions preserved in the Tosefta, in the halakhic midrashim, and in the two Talmuds, and, by showing what the Mishnah does not include and how it does not arrange its material, he suggests that we can see its organization in terms of conscious editorial choices steered by a specific ideology. This methodology rests on a critical presupposition that Rosen-Zvi never explicitly fleshes out—that we may ascribe the Mishnah (or at least the tractate) to a “strong” redactor who was proactive in choosing and organizing his sources to create a cohesive whole (rather than, for instance, that it is a conglomerate of different traditions compiled together, such as J. N. Epstein implies, or that it is a textbook whose redactor chose his materials based on pedagogical concerns, as Abraham Goldberg argues). While I find Rosen-Zvi's arguments highly persuasive, because this work strives—and succeeds—to sketch some new directions in the study of the Mishnah in general, an explicit outlining of his methodological convictions would have been all the more important.

In the second half of the book, Rosen-Zvi attempts to present a more comprehensive portrait of the mishnaic sotah ritual as a whole. He starts (Chap. 5) with the Mishnah's own reflection on the rite in M. Sotah 1.7 and its elaborate parallel in the Tosefta, which present the punishment of the sotah as a mimetic duplication of the woman's sin (which is marked not as adultery but rather as temptation). The purpose of the rite/punishment is to “reveal” what has been hidden, and thus it belies the axis of the mishnaic rite as having to do with the desire to control women's “hidden” sexuality. In Chapter 6, he explores the question of the “historicity” of the mishnaic rite, arguing that it should be understood as an academic (beit midrashic) creation rather than as a remnant from the Second Temple period; he also convincingly dismisses some of the claims that the Mishnah preserves voices that object to the rite (thus fortifying his unspoken claim on the tractate's cohesive redaction). Chapter 7, in my view the strongest chapter in the book, shows that the mishnaic sotah rite was created in the image of the prophetic parables that describe the punishment of the “fornicating wife”—particularly in Ezekiel 16 and 23, as well as possibly influenced by the Roman arena and its “fatal charades,” as Kathleen Coleman named them.

Finally, the last two chapters suggest a more comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding the tractate and possibly the Mishnah as a whole: the notion of a “textual ritual,” a ritual that attempts to capture a cultural fantasy whose only performance might be its textual creation and recitation, and the notion of a “discursive site” as a key to understanding the Temple's role in the tannaitic Beit Midrah. Both of these chapters suggest further directions for the study of the Mishnah as a composite work, which I find extremely valuable, and which I believe to mark an alluring new path in the exploration of rabbinic texts: a detailed and textually based examination of the complex relation between fantasy and reality, while staying aware that mental constructs are not necessarily less “real” than material facts. This notion, as Rosen-Zvi artfully shows through this excellent study, is reflected in the shift from the epistemological claim that the biblical sotah poses—that the “real” be known—to the ontological claim that the mishnaic sotah poses: that the “real” can be produced.