The Ninth Commandment

Trial by Ordeal

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Prerequisite/Law

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 13

Track: 108

Dictation Name: RR130BG108

Date: 1960s-70s

In the next few weeks as we study the laws of courts and of trials in connection with the Ninth Commandment, we shall be studying next week, Exodus 18:13-26; next week. Exodus 18:13-26, then the following week, Deuteronomy 21:1-9 and the week after, Deuteronomy 17:8-11. This week, our scripture is Numbers 5:11-31, “Trial by Ordeal and the Law of Nature,” Numbers 5:11-31:

“11 And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

12 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, if any man's wife go aside, and commit a trespass against him,

13 And a man lie with her carnally, and it be hid from the eyes of her husband, and be kept close, and she be defiled, and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner;

14 And the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be defiled: or if the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, and she be not defiled:

15 Then shall the man bring his wife unto the priest, and he shall bring her offering for her, the tenth part of an ephah of barley meal; he shall pour no oil upon it, nor put frankincense thereon; for it is an offering of jealousy, an offering of memorial, bringing iniquity to remembrance.

16 And the priest shall bring her near, and set her before the Lord:

17 And the priest shall take holy water in an earthen vessel; and of the dust that is in the floor of the tabernacle the priest shall take, and put it into the water:

18 And the priest shall set the woman before the Lord, and uncover the woman's head, and put the offering of memorial in her hands, which is the jealousy offering: and the priest shall have in his hand the bitter water that causeth the curse:

19 And the priest shall charge her by an oath, and say unto the woman, if no man have lain with thee, and if thou hast not gone aside to uncleanness with another instead of thy husband, be thou free from this bitter water that causeth the curse:

20 But if thou hast gone aside to another instead of thy husband, and if thou be defiled, and some man have lain with thee beside thine husband:

21 Then the priest shall charge the woman with an oath of cursing, and the priest shall say unto the woman, The Lord make thee a curse and an oath among thy people, when the Lord doth make thy thigh to rot, and thy belly to swell;

22 And this water that causeth the curse shall go into thy bowels, to make thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot: And the woman shall say, Amen, amen.

23 And the priest shall write these curses in a book, and he shall blot them out with the bitter water:

24 And he shall cause the woman to drink the bitter water that causeth the curse: and the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter.

25 Then the priest shall take the jealousy offering out of the woman's hand, and shall wave the offering before the Lord, and offer it upon the altar:

26 And the priest shall take an handful of the offering, even the memorial thereof, and burn it upon the altar, and afterward shall cause the woman to drink the water.

27 And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people.

28 And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.

29 This is the law of jealousies, when a wife goeth aside to another instead of her husband, and is defiled;

30 Or when the spirit of jealousy cometh upon him, and he be jealous over his wife, and shall set the woman before the Lord, and the priest shall execute upon her all this law.

31 Then shall the man be guiltless from iniquity, and this woman shall bear her iniquity.”

Our scripture this morning is a very interesting and an unusual one. A very interesting fact connected with this law is that it has a very long and significant history in Israel, up to the time of our Lord. In fact, an entire book of the Talmud, the Sotah is devoted to analyses of the cases which were tried under this law. The cases significantly, did exactly what this law declares.

What is the significance of this trial? Of this law? This law is given to us in contrast and in opposition to a kind of law that was very common in antiquity and to this day in many parts of the world: trials by ordeal.

Trials by ordeal appear in virtually every culture the world over. We find them among the ancient Babylonians, throughout Islam today, among the ancient Celts (that is the Irish, the Scotch and the Welsh), the Chinese, the ancient Greeks, the Hindus, the Burmese, the Iranians (or Persians) the Malagasy, the ancient Romans, the Slavs and the Teutons.

Trials by ordeal appeared in the Middle Ages, although the Church fought them with all its vigor. In the Middle Ages, you find them especially where the Anglo-Saxon people dwelt, because the Anglo-Saxon peoples in particular were addicted to trials by ordeal.

Now what was the nature of the trial by ordeal? It involved bringing the guilty party forward and his trial consisted of some such ordeal as the following: he had to plunge his hand into boiling water. If he were guilty, his hand would be very badly burned. If he were innocent, then (supposedly) his hand would not be affected. Or, a red-hot iron would be prepared and the person on trial by ordeal had to pick up that red-hot iron and supposedly, if he were innocent, his hand would not burn. Again, he would be asked to swallow poison. If it didn’t kill him, then he was innocent. This was the trial by ordeal. Injury always meant guilt. If he survived the injury, then he was executed, or punished in terms of whatever the penalty was.

This concept, the trial by ordeal is still common in many, many parts of the world. In much of Africa, it is the only, or the preferred method of trial. Sometimes, the trial by ordeal is successful. It does work. There are many contemporary accounts of its use in Africa. The significant form of trial by ordeal that does work is usually the trial by poison. In Africa, according to eye-witness accounts, when the ordeal is used, it is often used on a wholesale basis. Thus, if there has been a theft, all the possible suspects, everyone who could possibly have been guilty, is lined up and is given a poison. Those who were innocent immediately vomited because they are sure of their innocence and their stomach immediately rejects the poison because it is usually given with something that is quite distasteful. The guilty party, being nervous, and his normal reactions not prevailing, does not vomit it and dies. Thus sometimes, it does work. But very commonly, it does not.

The basic premise of the trial by ordeal is something that a Christian must reject. The basic premise is unsound and therefore by and large the results are bad. The true philosophy, the basic philosophy of the trial by ordeal is that nature is normative, that nature will deliver the innocent party because nature rejects all evil. Nature is perfect, therefore, nature is normative. Nature is the standard. This of course is the philosophy that has infected Romanticism that permeates many people who feel the natural way is the key way to everything. Nature is perfection. Therefore, in any trial by nature, which is what the trial by ordeal involves, nature will protect the innocent party and reject the evil-doer. Thus, because nature was worshiped, and nature was regarded as normative in all these paganisms, the trial by ordeal was the normal and the natural, the preferred way of trying a person. This is why in Medieval and early Medieval England, the basic desire of people was a trial by ordeal. It took the effort of Church and State insisting in terms of scripture that the ordeal was forbidden—it was against God’s Law—to end trials by ordeal. However, to this day occasionally in backwoods country on this continent, there are reports of trials by ordeal. It persists in Anglo-Saxon culture.

In terms of scripture, nature is fallen, and Man is fallen. Therefore, there cannot be any kind of absolute norm derived from nature or from man. It is God alone who is the standard and His Law. Therefore, to the people of Israel who were set in the midst of peoples who believed in the trials by ordeal, the law of jealousy was given as a singular trial which witnessed against the whole of the ordeal. Why? Because in the trial of jealousy, nature has nothing to do with it.

What is given to the woman as she is brought to trial? First of all, there had to be ground for suspicion. This law is related to Deuteronomy 22:13-21, Slander in Marriage. This law could not be invoked unless there were some grounds for suspicion with respect to the wife. An offering had to be offered to the Lord, provided by the husband, and offered by the wife. She was brought forward. Her head was uncovered, that is, no shawl or covering or veil, and her hair unbound to signify that for the time, she was not under authority, because her husband, instead of being her protector, was her accuser. Holy water from the sanctuary and a little bit of the dust from the Holy Place were mixed together; in themselves, totally harmless. The results either way were supernatural, thus if she were guilty, her reproductive organs immediately became effected and she became seriously ill and apparently (in terms of what Hebrew scholars have concluded from some of the words), fatally ill. If not, if innocent, the even though she were childless, she conceived. And she was blessed. Thus, both the innocence and the guilt represented supernatural intervention.

This trial, therefore, was a witness to Israel that nature has no standard, that the idea of the law of nature and natural law are illusions. That nature is fallen, that without the government of God, man and nature decline. I indicated that a book of the Talmud, the Sotah is given to reporting on cases in connection with this particular law. These are especially interesting, because the trials continued and were a matter of long record up to our Lord’s day when they ended.

We find first of all that the laws of the trial from the days of Moses specified that this law of jealousy would not work, the trial would not be efficacious, if the husband came with unclean hands, if he himself were guilty of adultery. He had to be innocent for God to intervene and to render his wife guilty. They were discontinued by order of the leading rabbi in our Lord’s day because, it was decreed, that so many of the husbands who came, came with prior guilty themselves, that there was no longer any validity to the trials. We shall return to that fact again later.

To return to the concept of the ordeal: the ordeal was eliminated from Western Civilization by the efforts of the Church. But it didn’t disappear entirely, because when the ordeal was eliminated, simply because the Church passed one strict rule after another, and succeeded in persuading the kings of England that they should do everything to bar it from the realm, its place was taken by a more refined manifestation of the same thing—a belief in natural law.

And natural law began to come into Western Civilization, the idea of natural law replacing divine law—Biblical Law. Now, in an appendix to my book on The Mythology of Science, I deal with the concept of the law of nature and natural law. First of all, there’s no such thing as nature. Nature is a collective noun for an uncollectivized reality. What we call nature is simply a term for trees, water, the heavenly bodies, air, ourselves also, the flowers and so on. Now there are laws of God that govern over this entire world of natural objects, but there is no law inherent in nature in and of itself. And nature is not a thing in and of itself.

The idea of nature and the law of nature goes back to Paganism where nature was worshiped as god. And the idea was that it was perfect. Well, if it were perfect, there would be no need for doctors because there would be no sickness, would there? But there is sickness and disease in the world, and there is sin in the world, so obviously nature is not perfect. And there is no such thing, is there, as a perfectly healthy person whose physical life is perfection itself. These are standards we import and impose as it were on nature and say let’s try to bring these things, our bodies, and so on, up to this standard of health. And we take trees and we try to develop them through selective breeding and animals also, to bring them up to a standard. So if you attempt to derive a law from these things, you end up with Rousseau and the Romanticists and the nudists who say, well, let us drop all clothes and drop all cooked foods and all cultivated foods and let’s go back and pick what berries nature produces and live that way, which is an absurdity.

The law of nature took the place of the ordeal. But for the Bible, God is the source of law and judgment. For the ordeal and the naturalist, law and judgment are derived from nature. Now, nature is normative. Then man, as the crown of nature, as the highest product of nature, is particularly normative. Man becomes the standard then. And this of course is basic to Rousseau, to Existentialism, to the faith in democracy, to the belief in the divinity of the common man.

This is why you have Primitivism all around you today. This is the error of the ordeal; primitivism and art. The more primitive it is, the more it resembles, say African art, and the more it represents the art of a child, the better it is. There have been cases when a chimpanzee has been given a brush and has dabbled the paint on a canvas and has won a prize. People laugh about it, but the judges are not upset. After all, the chimpanzee has represented better primitivism than man is capable of and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Primitivism means, therefore, that you look downward. The more primitive, the more natural, the more normative it is, the better a source of law. This is why, therefore, students rebel. They’re closer to nature. They’re raw youth and therefore they represent a higher standard. In other words, you look downward.

This is why so many people feel they are all the more an authority because they know nothing. They represent a primitive standard. And as a result, you have an arrogance on the part of nobodies today that is unique in history. It’s a product of this faith. Just a few days ago, in fact on the 4th of June of this month, 1970, a jetliner was hijacked by an unemployed truck driver. He demanded $100,000,000 ransom. Even after his arrest, he was arrogant, defiant, and sure he was in the right. While still in the air, on the plane, he sent a radioed message to President Nixon which said in part, “You don’t know how to count money and you don’t even know the rules of the law!” Now here is a man who was threatening to kill off the personnel and the passengers of that jet plane one by one, lecturing the President of the United States, a lawyer, about the rules of the law. This same man, 49 years of age had lost his job seven years earlier, and according to the paper, “Barkley sued the Teamsters Union when it would not support him in a dispute with his employer. Orin {?}, Secretary-Treasurer of Teamsters Local 274 said Barkley’s troubles stemmed from his feeling that he was the only one who knew how to run the company.”

I suspect just about every other working man today has that same feeling. They may not hijack planes, but they feel they’re the only ones who know how to run the company? Why not—they’re the common man, and this is the age of the common man. And the more common you are, and the more stupid you are, supposedly the more you represent nature. All this is a product of the law of the ordeal. As a matter of fact, this man’s wife defended him too. She felt that the way he had been treated was terrible, that they had arrested him, and she said, “He’s a man who believes in his country. He believed in what he was fighting for in World War II and now look at what they’ve done to him.”

After all, I the common man is the source for truth because he’s closer to nature, than the people up above, isn’t it a moral necessity then to wage war against the establishment and to defy law and order? And is it any wonder that the Negros riot? After all, they’re closer to nature than the rest of us, aren’t they? They’ve said so. They have a special pipeline to nature and to truth. And one writer, himself a radical, has written about the desire and he’s not condemned it, of the average white intellectual to imitate the Negro and to be a white Negro. This will give him more truth.

But the Bible denies this. Neither the common man nor the aristocracy nor anyone is to be trusted, for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Not man but God and the law is normative. This was the purpose of the trial of jealousy. It indicates that nature neither acquitted the innocent, nor the guilty. It didn’t do anything. God supernaturally intervened in the trial of jealousy, and it was witness to Israel that unless God’s Law is brought to bear upon the life of man, nothing happens except sin and deterioration.

We saw that the trial of jealousy was ended by the rabbis themselves. They did it in terms of scripture, and they did it in our Lord’s day. They did it in terms of Hosea 4:14, “I will not punish your daughters when they commit whoredom, nor your spouses when they commit adultery: for themselves are separated with whores, and they sacrifice with harlots: therefore the people that doth not understand shall fall.” In other words, what God declared through Hosea was this: when the men themselves are guilty, I will not condemn their wives. When all alike, old and young, are guilty, parents and children, then that people shall fall. Then I shall bring judgment. This is significant. In other words, when the rabbis themselves ended the trial by jealousy, they said God will only intervene now with judgment because the people have no capacity any longer to obey. They must be condemned. And so it was that our Lord pronounced judgment upon Jerusalem. And within the lifetime of the apostles, Jerusalem and Judea were destroyed and not one stone left standing upon another. This was God’s Law, not nature.

Let us pray.

Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, give us grace by Thy Spirit and Word to bring Thy Law-Word to bear upon the world around us, the world of men and of nature, to judge all things in terms of Thy standard and to submit all things to Thy government, that we may be a people again blessed of Thee. Grant us this, we beseech Thee, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Are there any questions now?

Yes.

[Audience] Are we … {?}ism, having the {?} to … {?}

[Rushdoony] No, it’s a part of it.

[Audience] {?} part?

[Rushdoony] Yes. In other words, while the Theory of Evolution presupposes that there is continual development, the vitality is down below, you see. And that which is a late-comer, evolutionarily speaking, is not as strong. You don’t know whether its survival potentiality is as great. Thus, reason is supposedly a late development in the history of man, a product of millions and millions of years of development and reason in its modern form may have a history of 5, 000 years. Therefore, reason is less trustworthy, you see, and the emotions, the feelings, are more trustworthy. The primitive has longer development and greater history, greater stability.

[Audience] {?} … to rely on the scriptures

[Rushdoony] Yes. It would seem to be the antithesis, but remember too that the philosophers of Evolution and the scientists thereof have also said we do not know yet that man himself is to survive or to be the superior animal. So that man’s superiority is problematical and the viruses and others have a longer history of man and therefore are potentially greater in their survival power. That aspect of man which is older, therefore, has more vitality and power.

Today, for example, some of the biologists are saying white man is destined to go and he ought to go, because he’s the one who’s polluting the atmosphere and creating the world wars and the primitive in Africa, for example, has survived and not done as much damage, therefore, he should survive and the white man should go. Ehrlich, of Stanford, has stated this on television and elsewhere. So you see, it does lead, one at the same time, to this paradox, that believing that the best is going to come, and yet putting your faith in the most primitive.

Yes.

[Audience] The forces that somehow … {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. Uh, supposedly by Natural Selection. That is, by a gradual weeding out through natural processes of the weak, the best will survive and there will be continual improvement.

Now, of course, the question that remains there when Darwin propounded Natural Selection was, how are you to judge what is the best, you see? Is it simply in terms of survival? Is that which survives best? Well, if the stick survives and the weeds, you have to say they’re best. And when the Black Death hit Europe, it took the young and the strong in its first round, you see. This poses a problem. You don’t allow any standard except that which is there, and survival becomes your standard. Therefore, that which has survived the longest is by necessity, that which is the best. Natural Selection, thus, presents a problem: how do you define the best that survives, except that it survives?

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, Margaret Meade is an immigrant to the Woodstock nation. She goes around with a witch’s cane and considers her part of that generation, although she belongs to the pre-World War I generation by a considerable margin.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, Mother Nature is a concept that comes right out of ancient paganism. The Magna Mater concept for example, of the Romans. Magna (the great), Mater (mother); the “Great Mother.” Nature is the great mother, and therefore nature is the standard. In terms of this, you see, the basic premise of Roman law as, not that there was some kind of standard you could import from beyond, and impose on the people, but the basic law as the health and the welfare of the people is the highest law.

[Audience] So .. {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, it has been a heretical opinion that has worked its way into Christendom that Mother Nature, as it were, is an adjunct of the Trinity, and to be associated with it in some way. But the whole idea of Mother Nature is a personification of an abstraction and it has no ground in reality.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] I can’t hear you.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] It’s not an ordeal, you see, it’s an anti-ordeal law, but it’s the only such law.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] There is no law comparable to the trial of jealousy. And it was one bit of legislation which was given then as a particular witness against the ordeal. This is why the ordeal never crept into Israel. No trace of it. And because it was so significant a witness against the ordeal, it especially attracted attention and has a long history. We know more about the history of this law than we do most laws, which is an interesting thing. And we know that it worked, which means supernatural intervention.

Yes.

[Audience] {?}

[Rushdoony] What’s to follow depends a great deal on what we do. The faith in Humanism is going to die. A new faith will take its place. Whether it takes its place quickly or we go through—some people think—a century or two of turmoil until it is born depends a great deal on us. I believe the new faith that will take its place is a truly biblical faith, which we’ve not seen for generations, and that this will revitalize civilization. Now how soon that will be is a question mark. But we’re seeing every year, a greater and a greater decline in basic law and order. We’ll be analyzing in about three weeks, something of the nature of that decline and why it is inescapable and what the answer to it is more specifically.

Yes.

[Audience] Was there a receptive {?} people who {?} to know better, {?} now are going through a {?}

[Rushdoony] The tests, however, represent an average. In other words, your achievement tests in schools change from year to year. This is why now in Christian schools, when children are given the same tests, grade school children test out as 12th graders and the like, because the 6th, 7th and 8th graders and the grade school are given the tests which represent the standard of achievement in the public schools across the country. Where that standard of achievement gets lower and lower each year, the Christian school, in its performance gets better and better. But it isn’t averaged in with them. So many of these children test out very well in terms of the standard, but they would not test out well in terms of the standards, say, of 50 years ago.

[Audience] Most people nowadays … {?} …. Or nearly graduate, have no {?}

[Rushdoony] They are brought up to believe in primitivism and its virtue. Therefore, they deliberately reject even the learning they have.

Our time is just about up, but I’d like to share one little item with you from this morning’s Herald Examiner, those of you who might be interested in a new religion—brand new! There is an ad, and I’ll read it in its entirety.

Let us pray each day to the delightful soul of John F. Kennedy, a cosmic reverend and rabbi, H.H. Blackschlager, {?} The Cactus Church, P.O. Box 188, Sun Valley, CA.

Now the Cactus Church suggests to me, peyote, a narcotic. I may be wrong there, but at least John F. Kennedy has now joined the rank of false god.

Yes.

[Audience] I counsel {?} ….

[Rushdoony] Let’s bow our heads now for the benediction.

And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.