ADULTERY. 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. But the crime is not under stood 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 betrothed woman ; and an adulteress was a be trothed or married woman who had intercourse with any other man than her husband. An inter course between a married man and an unmarried woman was not, as with us, deemed adultery, but foriIication—a great sin, but not, like adultery, in volving the contingency of polluting a descent, of turning aside an inheritance, or of imposing upon a man a charge which did not belong to him. Adultery was thus considered a great social wrong, against which society protected itself by much severer penalties than attended an unchaste act not involving the same contingencies.
It will be seen that this Oriental limitation of adultery is intimately connected with the existence of polygamy. If adultery be defined as a breach of the marriage covenant, then, where the contract is between one man and one woman, as in Chris tian countries, the man as much as the woman in fringes the covenant, or commits adultery, by act of intercourse with any other woman : but where polygamy is allowed—where the husband may marry other wives, and take to himself concu bines 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 un chastity, but committed no offence 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 infringing his own marriage covenant, but by causing a breach of that which existed between that woman and her hus band (Michaelis, Mosaireher Reeht. art. 259 ; Jahn's ibrhtiologie, th. i. b. 2, 183). By thus excluding from the name and punishment of adultery, the offence which did not involve the enormous wrong of imposing 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 any one who was regarded as his son—the law was enabled, with less severity than if the inferior offence 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, perhaps, that the law expressly assigns that punish ment, but it recognises 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 punish ment of adultery before the time of Moses ; and if he had assigned a less punishment, his law would have been inoperative, for private vengeance, sanctioned by usage, would still have inflicted 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 sub stituted for the impulsive action 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 punishment for the crime. In deed, Lightfoot goes further, and remarks, `I do not remember that I have anywhere, in the Jewish Pandect, met with an example of a wife punished for adultery with death. There is mention Hieros. Sanked. 242) of the daughter of a certain priest burned for committing fornication in her father's ; but she was not married' Won Hebr. ad Matt. xix. 8). Eventually, divorce superseded all other punishment. There are in deed some grounds for thinking that this had hap pened before the time of Christ, and we throw it out as a matter of inquiry, whether the Scribes and Pharisees, in attempting to entrap Christ in the matter of the woman taken in adultery, did not intend to put him in the dilemma of either de claring for the revival of a practice which had already become obsolete, but which the law was supposed to command ; or, of giving his sanction to the apparent infraction of the law which the substitution of divorce involved (John viii. -is). In Matt. v. 32, Christ seems to assume that the practice of divorce for adultery already existed. In later times it certainly did ; and Jews who were averse to part with their adulterous wives, were compelled to put them away (Maimon. in Geruskin, c. 2). In the passage just referred to, our Lord does not appear to render divorce compulsory, even in case of adultery ; he only permits it in that case alone, by forbidding it in every other.