The Sotah ritual—the ordeal of the woman accused of adultery—is already one of the strangest passages in the Hebrew Bible. The Targum Jonathan makes it stranger, adding psychological motivations, physical punishments for the guilty, and a stunning twist: the accused man is affected too.
The Targum specifies why the woman's offering was barley flour, the food of beasts: "because she may have brought delicacies to the adulterer, she ought to bring an appointed oblation of her own." Her offering mirrors her alleged crime. She fed her lover fine food, so her sacrifice is animal feed.
The priest took holy water from the laver, poured it into an earthen vessel—"because she may have brought the adulterer sweet wine to drink in precious vases"—and mixed in dust from the Tabernacle floor, "because the end of all flesh is dust." Every element of the ritual becomes a commentary on the suspected sin.
The Targum adds that the priest "bound a cord over her loins and upon her breast, because she should have bound her loins with a girdle," and uncovered her hair "because she had tied a fillet upon her hair." Each step of public humiliation corresponds to a specific act of vanity or seduction.
The woman swore a double oath: "Amen, if I was polluted when betrothed; Amen, if I have been polluted since my marriage." If guilty, the waters would cause her belly to swell and her thigh to become corrupt. But here the Targum makes its most striking addition: "The adulterer as well will be detected by these waters of probation, in whatever place he may be." The man would not escape. The bitter waters reached him too, wherever he hid.
If innocent, the woman's "brightness will shine forth, and she will find affection before her husband, and become the mother of a son." Vindication came with fertility.