Women’s Bodies and the Rise of the Rabbis: The Case of Sotah Daniel Boyarin (university of california at berkeley) In the very foundation legend of rabbinic Judaism, the legend of R. Yohanan ben- Zakai, 1 we are informed at one point that: When adulterers multiplied, [the rite of ] the bitter water [sotah] ceased, and R. Yohanan ben-Zakai brought it to an end, for it is written, “I will not punish your daughters when they fornicate and your daughters-in-law when they commit adultery, for they [the men] go off alone with harlots and sacrifice with sacred prostitutes” [Hosea 4:14]. 2 What we find here is a defining moment in the assertion of rabbinic power in the ab- rogation of a rite that is frequently associated with the most extreme misogyny—and precisely in the context of accounts of rabbinic misogyny. The abrogation, moreover, is engendered in the name of an attack on a version of the “double standard.” The battle for power is between the men of the rabbinic party and the men of the tradi- tional priestly circles for whom continuation of such biblical rituals was undoubtedly at the center of their religious lives and values. The new rabbinic regime of knowl- edge/power was epitomized (or perhaps, one might say, epistemized) via the concept of Torah, which is the rabbinic ideology of an oral tradition communicated and trans- mitted from Sinai and of which they were the sole possessors. Crucial to the success of this epistemic shift was the disenfranchisement of the previous holders of power/ knowledge, the priests, as well, as we shall see, of other traditional sources of knowl- edge, including women. The “feminism” of the abrogation of the sotah ritual is thus to be read as part of a larger struggle for power on the part of a new male elite. Ancient and contemporary analogies abound. 3 As Shahar Pinsker has recently written, The internal logic of the abolition suggests that the laws of the sotah and the heifer were possible to enact only in a world in which there are harmonious relations between God and the People of Israel. In the new situation that was created in the historical arena, there are different ways of dealing with the social order, and the one that the Mishnah privi- leges is the textual/discursive activity of Torah study. In this sense, R. Yochanan abol- ished the physical ritual, but its function as means of control and power (in the Foucauldian sense) is preserved through the activity of Torah study. This is a powerful 88