Defining Adultery

There is an error about the nature of adultery that I have seen from time to time.  This position holds, contrary to reason and the Bible, that adultery occurs when a wife has sex with someone other than her husband, yet a husband does not commit adultery if he has sex with someone other than his wife.  It is unfortunately true that evangelical, conservative Christians are thoroughly mistaken about almost every detail of Biblical sexual ethics, but this area is one where they are correct.

In Mosaic Law, the case laws prescribing the just punishment for adultery might use the example of a man having sex with another man's wife (Leviticus 20:10, Deuteronomy 22:22), but Exodus 20:14 and Deuteronomy 5:18 plainly do not restrict adultery to only an act involving extramarital sex on the part of a wife.  Just as Exodus 21:18-19 condemns, by logical extension, all instances of the unjust striking of a person, though the case law provided deals only with a man assaulting a man, passages like Deuteronomy 22:22, in light of Exodus 20:14 and Deuteronomy 5:18, do not define adultery in a way that involves a sexist double standard.

Polyamorous marriages are not sinful [1], and a couple can have sex prior to marriage without sinning [2], but the Bible clearly condemns any extramarital intercourse that a married person could engage in.  Either spouse in a couple having multiple other spouses is not immoral, but either spouse in a marriage having sex with other people to whom they are not also married remains morally illegitimate (this is one of the few cases where evangelical Christians get sexual morality right).

In many cases, the genders used in Biblical case laws have nothing to do with the moral obligations or principles being illustrated.  Of course adultery occurs when either a wife or a husband has extramarital sex!  To teach that the adultery laws in the Bible inconsistently target women is to teach an unsound delusion.  The sole ways--and a way that is contrary to exegesis and rationality--to represent the Bible as condemning only a wife's extramarital sex are to isolate the case laws from other verses about adultery and distort the concept of sin into a gender-specific thing.

Neither of those things is Biblical, much less logical.  Adultery is, inevitably, the act of engaging in extramarital intercourse when one is married--irrespective of the gender of the person having extramarital sex.  It is nothing more, and it is nothing less.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/06/polygamy-and-polyandry.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/on-exodus-2216-17.html