TO GO ASTRAY, to turn aside — the verb behind the whole ordinance of Numbers 5:11-31, though the word most readers know for it, 'sotah,' never actually occurs in the Bible itself; it is the later rabbinic name (the Mishnah devotes an entire tractate to it) built on this same root. ⚠ Satah is a verb of DIRECTION before it is a verb of morality — the ordinary sense is simply to turn off a path — and the law built on it treats the accusation the same way: not a settled fact but a suspected turning, to be tested rather than assumed. The noun form of the same root, mastteh, elsewhere names something that literally causes deviation; here the deviation itself is what is on trial. → first discussed at Num 5:12