Adultery with a Married Woman

Adultery with a Married Woman is a Deuteronomic law requiring the death of both a man and a woman when they are found having intercourse while she is married. The rule makes the married status of the woman decisive and places the offense among acts to be removed from Israel.

The Rule and Its Penalty

The law states that if a man is found lying with a woman married to a husband, both are to die: the man who lay with her and the woman. The stated purpose is to put the evil away from Israel. The provision is categorical in its wording; it gives no further account of investigation, evidence, or the manner of execution.

Distinctions Among Sexual-Offense Cases

The surrounding laws distinguish this case by marital status and circumstance. For a betrothed virgin, the text treats intercourse in the city differently from an assault in the field: in the latter case, only the man is to die, since the woman cried out and had no one to save her. The adultery rule, by contrast, names both participants as subject to death without stating a comparable exception.

The same passage separately addresses accusations about a wife's virginity and intercourse involving an unbetrothed virgin. These adjacent provisions impose different procedures and consequences, showing that the law does not treat all sexual cases as interchangeable: marriage, betrothal, consent as represented by the circumstances, and the kind of accusation all shape the prescribed outcome.

Household and Community Order

By making the woman's marriage explicit and assigning the same penalty to both participants, the rule defines adultery as a breach with consequences for the household and the wider community. Its closing formula frames enforcement as the removal of evil from Israel, connecting the regulation of intimate conduct to the community's covenantal order.