a condemnation by a priest, in which the woman stands with hair loosened, her guilt is assumed, and divine intervention (due to the priest's involvement) will cause a miscarriage/abortion as punishment. Other early biblical scholars thought that the ordeal is itself a fusion of two earlier rituals (pre-dating the original priestly text), one using water, and the other dust. The use of dust might be connected to necromancy. In other historic Semitic cultures there are many instances in which holy water was regarded as taboo, and therefore that contact with it, or its consumption, was dangerous. However, recent Biblical scholars have recognized that whatever "literary prehistory" the text may have had, it now has a unified structure, and the repetitions in the text are simply examples of typical Biblical style rather than proof of multiple authorship. Similar rituals Trials by ordeal are found in other societies of the ancient Near East such as in the Laws of Hammurabi (§132). Pre-Islamic Arabic culture similarly had an adultery ordeal, although in scientific terms, compared to the Israelite ritual it relied more on nausea, than on directly poisoning the woman. In this pre-Islamic Arabic ritual, the woman simply took oaths attesting to her innocence, and asking the divinity to cause her to have a miscarriage/abortion, should she be lying. Ordeals involving the risk of harm, including potential injury resulting from the drinking of certain potions, were common in antiquity; in parts of Europe, their judicial use even lasted until the late Middle Ages. Such ordeals were once believed to result in a direct decision by a deity, about the guilt or innocence of the party/parties undertaking the ordeal; typically divine intervention was believed to prevent the innocent from being harmed, or to ensure that the guilty were. Modern applications According to scholars such as Helena Zlotnick, after the ordeal of bitter water was no longer practiced it remained a reference point in the search for replacements for the test of adultery. See also Jewish views of marriage Nocebo Women in Judaism References Further reading . Daniel Friedmann: From the Trial of Adam and Eve to the Judgments of Solomon and Daniel Luzia Sutter Rehmann: "The Doorway into Freedom - The Case of the 'Suspected Wife' in Romans 7.1-6" in Journal for the Study of the New Testament (JSNT) no 79, 91-104. Book of Numbers Hebrew Bible words and phrases Jewish marital law Judaism