Spirit Possession and Intimate Partner Violence in the Law of Jealousy (Numbers 5:11–31)

Abstract Historically, interpretation of the “law of jealousy” (Num 5:29) has focused on the supposed “straying” wife (Num 5:12) and assumed that resolving the consequences of her behavior was the primary purpose of the text. More recently, feminist interpreters have demonstrated how the law of jealousy functions to validate a husband’s suspicions and protect patriarchal power by subjecting his wife to a degrading public ritual regardless of her guilt or innocence. Building on these insights, in this essay I adopt the framework of spirit possession for assessing the “spirit of jealousy” (רוח־קנאה, vv. 14, 30) that overwhelms the husband. I analyze how notions of spirits and jealousy are related in the Hebrew Bible and other texts from antiquity, then compare this to data from fields outside of biblical studies, including ethnography, cultural anthropology, and social science research on intimate partner violence (IPV). I conclude that the nature of the husband’s spirit possession is not a suspension of his executive faculties but a spirit syndrome that operates like a pathology. The law of jealousy does not protect the woman from shame or mob violence, but rather protects the community by providing the husband with a contained ritual setting to mollify his jealous spirit.