You shall not commit adultery. Exodus 20: 14
We begin with the dramatic and sobering words from Proverbs seven, “For she has cast down many wounded, and all who were slain by her were strong men. Her house is the way to hell, descending to the chambers of dead” (vv. 26-27). “Adultery,” as this English translation of the Hebrew nā’ap suggests, is an unholy “mixture,” a crime against the purity of marital union, and is universally abhorred, referred to as “the great sin” in the Ancient Near East (Durham). Like murder, it is instilled in the conscience of humanity as natural law, cross-culturally recognized in wisdom literatures as destructive and foolish.
Adultery is a boundary motif. When God created the cosmos, He did not rid creation from the three great primal elements of chaos: darkness, watery deep and formless earth. Rather, He gave these elements boundaries. When these elements break boundaries, such as the day turning to night as in the Egyptian plague, or the ocean bursting over its shores, or the desert devouring fertile land, we have chaos. Chaos is that which is intolerable to human life. With these physical boundaries, God set moral boundaries. If they are broken, chaos ensues, and life becomes intolerable. These moral boundaries are called law. Law is a paradise motif, for without it there is chaos, but with it there is beauty, grace, peace, and joy.
In the Old Testament, adultery is separated from fornication and narrowly applied to married persons (Childs). Infidelity to one’s spouse, like murder in last week’s post, is something all married people are capable of. To whom has God given this command? Is it not to us all? Does not Jesus do with this commandment what He did with the Murder commandment in the Sermon on the Mount? He internalizes it to interior motions of the heart. But this is what makes this commandment so glorious. To live by it, to learn faithfulness to one’s spouse, indeed, by working through all the hard relational issues that present themselves when a man and a woman covenant together, is sanctification itself. We either grow closer to one another, and thereby closer to God, or we grow further apart, more vulnerable to adultery, and thereby further from God. To have lived a whole married life faithfully, to grow old together and ever deeper in love, is surely the most important thing we can give to our children and the most successful accomplishment a man or a woman can attain in this life. It is a slow process; indeed, it takes decades. This is why marriage is a sacrament, a means of salvation.
Adultery is linked in the Bible to idolatry. To fix our desires unlawfully on another person, we are making an idol of that person. We are shoving that person in God’s face, and telling Him that this person is “God.” This is not according to truth, and carries with it its own destruction. Ironically, when spouses are faithful to one another, they find God in one another. God is generous in marriage; a man whose life is rightly oriented towards God adores and worships his wife ─ yet in some mysterious way He worships God through his wife. Everything becomes one.
Two women are presented to us in the book of Proverbs, esp. chapters 1-9: Lady Wisdom and the Lady of the Evening, representing the bright side and the dark side of the beautiful woman motif respectively. A close examination of the two reveals that they are both engaged in seducing the “simple,” which can only mean men. Every man is “simple,” or “seducible,” and the only question remains, by which woman will he be seduced? In today’s world, a man does not have to physically visit the woman of the dark side; beautiful women are cheaply available online. But by thus engaging with her, he is committing adultery, a deadly sin, through the images that enter into his mind and heart. Increasingly, women are turning to porn as well. The result of all this is relational poverty and spiritual death.
On the bright side, the book of Proverbs ends with the “‘ēṧet ḥayîl” literally “a woman of might, or power,” often translated a “woman of virtue” (Proverbs 31:1). She becomes the incarnation of “Lady Wisdom” at the beginning of the book, indeed, of wisdom itself. Every man should seek out this woman for a wife, and every wife should aspire to be this woman. On an even deeper level we see one of the names of the blessed Mother is “Sedes Sapientiae,” the “Seat of Wisdom” on whose lap is seated Jesus, who is, ultimately, Wisdom Himself.
We see that this prohibition leads us to paradise, where we find Eve safely in the arms of Adam, before the deceit of sin entered in. It is designed to mitigate against the antagonism and distrust between the sexes that arose from the fall. Moreover, commitment to this law spares marriages from divorce and the breakdown of the family which is the fundamental social unit of civilization. In today’s western societies, adultery and divorce are pretty much accepted as an unavoidable given, even a healthy alternative to fidelity, if someone finds oneself in an unsatisfying relationship.
Takeaway: Adultery undermines the marital bond, tears families apart, sinks the soul into damnation, and weakens the social fabric of society.
Question: What do you find new or challenging in this post?
Resources Used:
Childs, B. The Book of Exodus, p. 422
Durham, J. Exodus, p. 293