Why Does Adultery Carry with It the Penalty of Capital Punishment?

Many are unaware of this, but God actually tolerates some sexual relationships in the Old Testament that He does not allow in the New. For instance, although there are laws against the daughter of a priest becoming a prostitute, or fathers making their daughters into prostitutes, there is no law against prostitution itself. Likewise, there is no law against divorce and the law even acknowledges the divorce situation without sanctioning or condemning it. Polygamy is tolerated as well. They are all viewed as less than God's will, but they do not carry with them a legal penalty much less a death penalty.

I’ve argued in the past that these are tolerated because although they are not desirable for preservational purposes they are capable of fulfilling creational ones. Many wives have many children (Gen 30:1-24). A divorced young wife can still bear children from her new marriage. Likewise, even prostitution can still be a means of creation (Gen 38:15-24).

But, of course, adultery still produces children. It just doesn’t produce it for the person to whom the woman is married. And that is precisely one of the reasons it deserves the death penalty. In an act of betrayal much like when a husband murders the wife he is sworn to protect, it takes the life of the husband from him.

Now, it should be said that adultery in the ancient Near East and Old Testament always involves a married woman. A married man who has sexual relations with an unmarried woman is not considered adultery in the Old Testament. The New Testament will expand it to woman, and therefore, what I say here will apply to the woman as well, but it was first and foremost a sin against the husband.

One of the reasons that it is a sin against the husband in the Old Testament is because the purpose of the sexual act was to procreate and the marriage union was made to give the husband multiple opportunities to produce children for his household. Children are one with their father. They are a part of him and expand his household in the ancient Near Eastern world. Every sexual encounter, therefore, with a man’s spouse is an opportunity where a child might be created and the man would live on upon the earth even after he dies. Every sexual encounter stolen away robs him of this opportunity and the very extension of his life through his children. Hence, when a woman robs a man of these sexual encounters in order to give them to another man to whom she is not married, she is essentially taking his life away from him.

The covenant of marriage, therefore, not only includes the idea that the man will take care of his wife with food, shelter, etc., but that both the husband and the wife will give these sexual opportunities to one another, and when they do not, it is a breaking of the covenant. But refraining from a sexual opportunity to be celibate is not equal to refraining because that opportunity is given to another.
Much like the idea that sexual immorality is a sexual act performed that is not procreational and not the same as refraining from sexual activity even though it can be sinful to do so, adultery is giving the opportunity to extend the husband’s life and household that was promised in the covenant of marriage to one to whom the wife is not married and has not covenanted with her. The act of betrayal is something like a woman who says she will feed her kids but later takes their food and gives it to the kids down the street to whom she is not obligated instead while her kids starve to death.

In this regard, adultery is a supreme act of hatred toward one’s spouse, i.e., the very person that she promised to love. Adultery is not often spoken of in terms of murder and hatred, but it is very much a part of that same type of act. Jesus says that degrading your brother is an act of murder, and John repeats that not providing for your brother’s need is an act of hatred and murder. How much more is it an act of murder to degrade one’s spouse, steal away the child who might have had through the sexual act given to another, and deprive him of his need to be the image of God in his sexuality? Is it not the wiping out of his child so that the child of another might live. Is this not a type of murder too? And does not murder deserve the death penalty?

What the New Testament does is acknowledge that this very same thing is true when it comes to men going off with other woman to whom they are not married. Hence, adultery is expanded to be this type of betrayal regardless of which spouse is involved. For this reason, when these covenantal promises are expanded to be more consistent with God's purposes of marriage revealed in Genesis 1-2, suddenly divorce and remarriage, prostitution, and polygamy become adultery as well, and are therefore prohibited by the New Testament.

This is sexual immorality also in that because adultery carries the death penalty with it, even the child who is created through the adulterous union will be killed, and thus, it is also anticreational (something that cannot be said strictly of prostitution, divorce and remarriage, or polygamy) and therefore sexually immoral (Lev 18:30). To be sure, there are other issues, other sins involved in the sin of adultery.  There are issues of ownership and issues relating to the picture and work that God means to convey through the marital relationship and its sexual practices. But adultery seems to carry the death penalty primarily for its theft of life from the spouse, namely, the life of the possible child who God might give to the spouse through it.

Our culture tends to portray adultery as fun and exciting, and present faithfulness in marriage as boring, spouses as undesirable or less desirable than non-spouses, and adultery as a casual commonality that often has good reasons behind it. It is hardly viewed as a type of murder for which there is never a good reason because it the sexual act is not linked to procreation. The marriage covenant, therefore, is not linked to procreation. So people are left with the sense that they are not really doing anything hateful toward their spouse except deceiving them. This is why some couples also think that as long as they are open with one another, adultery is morally acceptable, but it remains evil for the same reasons above whether the other spouse accepts it or not. And if he or she really knew what it was, only a fool and an evil person would be accepting toward an act of hatred and murder committed toward him or her and his or her children.

This also means that pornography, day-dreaming of another person, masturbation, contraception, abortion, etc. are acts of adultery in the sense that they steal the opportunity for the sexual act to give a spouse a child and are guilty, therefore, of the same crimes mentioned above.