Adultery.

J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopaedia

Adultery in Ancient Law.   Christian moralists are so prone to represent Babylon and ancient Rome as epitomes of sexual wickedness that it is ironical to find that the law in both these civilizations punished adulterers very severely. A very wide range of lower peoples permitted the injured husband to kill an adulterer, and in several primitive civilizations (Mexico, Yucatan, etc.) the law was severe. The general idea was that adultery was an injury to a man's property (wife). in Babylon and Rome the ground of the law was moral. In Babylonian law (The Hammurabi Code, translation by C. Edwards, 1904) Clause 129 enacted that the erring pair were to be bound together and thrown - doubtless from a tower on the wall - into the river. A qualifying clause suggests that it was an old law that was not strictly applied, but rape (130), incest (154-8), and other sexual offences incurred the death sentence without reserve. Egyptian law of the Middle Kingdom prescribed 1,000 strokes of the lash, but the clause does not seem to have been operative; though the "Tale of Two Brothers" (from which the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife is adapted) and other literature show that adultery was condemned. In ancient Rome the Lex Julia imposed heavy fines on both parties, and Augustus sentenced his favourite daughter to a painful exile for life for loose conduct. That the Jews would stone "the woman taken in adultery" is one of the many errors of the Gospel writers, but she was sentenced to death in Jewish law. Christendom abolished legal penalties on adultery, yet its apologists have succeeded in persuading the world that it has saved society by imposing a more severe view of adultery than the Romans held.
     

 

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