ADULTERY (1) Defined. In the common acceptation of the word adultery denotes the sexual intercourse of a married woman with any other man than her husband, or of a married man with any other woman than his wife.
(2) Jewish. But the crime is not understood in this extent among Eastern nations, nor was it so understood by the Jews. With them, adultery was the act whereby any married man was exposed to the risk of having a spurious offspring imposed upon him. An adulterer was, therefore, any man who had illicit intercourse with a married or be trothed woman; and an adulteress was a betrothed or married woman who had intercourse with any other man than her husband.
(3) Fornication. An intercourse between a married man and an unmarried woman was not, as with us, deemed adultery, but forni cation—a great sin, but not, like adultery, involving the contingency of polluting a descent, of turning aside an inheritance, or of imposing upon a man a charge did not belong to him. Adultery was thus considered a great social wrong, against which society pro tected itself by much severer penalties than at tended an unchaste act not involving the same con tingencies.
(4) Polygamy. It will be seen that this Orien tal limitation of adultery is intimately connected with the existence of polygamy. If adultery be de fined as a bleach of the marriage covenant, then, where the contract is between one man and one woman, as in Christian countries, the man as much as the woman infringes the covenant, or commits adultery, byevery act of intercourse with any other woman; but where polygamy is allowed—where the husband may marry other wives, and take to him self concubines and slaves, the marriage contract cannot and does not convey to the woman a legal title that the man should belong to her alone. If, therefore, a Jew associated with a woman who was not his wife, his concubine, or his slave, he was guilty of unchastity, but committed no offense which gave a wife reason to complain that her legal rights had been infringed. If, however, the woman with whom he associated was the wife of another, he was guilty of adultery—not by infring ing his own marriage covenant, but by causing a breach of that which existed between that woman and her husband (Michaelis, Mosaisches It'echt.
art. 259; Jahn's Archaologie, th. i. b. 2, sec. 183).
(5) Punishment. By thus excluding from the name and punishment of adultery the offense which did not involve the enormous wrong of im posing upon a man a supposititious offspring, in a nation where the succession to landed property went entirely by birth, so that a father could not by his testament alienate it from anyone who was regarded as his son—the law was enabled, with less severity than if the inferior offense had been included, to punish the crime with death. It is still so punished wherever the practice of polygamy has similarly operated in limiting the crime—not, per haps that the law expressly assigns that punish ment, but it recognizes the right of the injured party to inflict it, and, in fact, leaves it, in a great degree, in his hands. Now death was the pun ishment of adultery before the time of Moses ; and if he had assigned a less punishment, his law would have been inoperative, for private ven geance, sanctioned by usage, would still have in flicted death. But by adopting it into the law, those restrictions were imposed upon its operation which necessarily arise when the calm inquiry of public justice is substituted for the impulsive ac tion of excited hands. Thus, death would be less frequently inflicted: and that this effect followed seems to be implied in the fact that the whole biblical history offers no example of capital pun ishment for the crime.
In the law which assigns the punishment of death to adultery (Lev. xx the mode in which that punishment lion Td be inflicted is not specified, because it was known from custom. It was not, however, strangulation, as the Talmud ists contend, but stoning, as we may learn from various passages of Scripture (e. g. Ezek. xvi :38 40; John viii :5) ; and as, in fact, Moses himself testifies (Dent. xxii :22-24). If the adulteress was a slave, the guilty parties were both scourged with a leathern whip, the number of blows not exceeding forty. In this instance the adulterer, in addition to the scourging, was subject to the fur ther penalty of bringing a trespass offering (a ram) to the door of the tabernacle, to be offered in his behalf by the priest (Lev. xix :20-22).