Bible Synapse
Does the Bible ever permit adultery or sex outside marriage?
Hard question · The law of Moses · raised by 3 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
The seventh commandment: ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’.
Thou shalt not commit adultery.
Marriage is honourable; God will judge whoremongers and adulterers.
Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.
God tells Hosea to take ‘a wife of whoredoms’; he marries Gomer as a sign of Israel’s unfaithfulness to the Lord.
The beginning of the word of the Lord by Hosea. And the Lord said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord. So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son.
Hosea buys back an adulterous woman and requires her to be faithful to him alone.
Then said the Lord unto me, Go yet, love a woman beloved of her friend, yet an adulteress, according to the love of the Lord toward the children of Israel, who look to other gods, and love flagons of wine. So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver, and for an homer of barley, and an half homer of barley: And I said unto her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee.
Moses orders that the Midianite girls who are virgins be kept alive for the Israelites.
Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.
A captive woman may be taken as a wife only after a month of mourning; if sent away she goes free and may not be sold.
When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.
The objection
The seventh commandment forbids adultery, and Hebrews says God will judge adulterers. Yet God told the prophet Hosea to take “a wife of whoredoms” and later to love an adulteress, and Moses told his soldiers to keep the Midianite virgins “for yourselves”. Does the Bible sometimes allow sex outside marriage after all?
The answer
Neither passage permits adultery or sex outside marriage. Hosea was told to marry: Gomer became his lawful wife and bore him a son (1:3). The scandal is not that the prophet committed adultery but that his wife was, or would become, unfaithful, and her unfaithfulness is condemned, not approved (2:2). The marriage was an acted parable, as the verse itself explains: “for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the Lord” (1:2). In chapter 3 Hosea takes back an adulterous wife, most likely Gomer herself, pays for her and requires faithfulness: “thou shalt not be for another man: so will I also be for thee” (3:3). The whole story assumes the seventh commandment and pictures God’s faithful love for an unfaithful people.
In Numbers 31:18, ‘keep alive for yourselves’ means that the girls’ lives were to be spared and that they would belong to Israelite households, as servants or, later, as wives. The law’s provision for a man who desired a captive woman was marriage. She was given a month to mourn her parents, then married with the standing of a wife, and if her husband later dismissed her he had to let her go free and could not sell her (Deuteronomy 21:10-14). Modern readers rightly find the treatment of war captives in the ancient world hard, and Numbers 31 raises real questions; but it does not set aside the command against adultery.
Other answers Christians give
A symbolic act
Keil and Delitzsch, with some older interpreters, held that Hosea’s marriage was a symbolic representation given to the prophet, not an outward event. Most modern commentators take it as a real marriage.
Unfaithful later
Many read ‘a wife of whoredoms’ as describing what Gomer would become, so that Hosea married a woman who was faithful at first, as Israel was when God took her as his bride.
Still open
Whether Gomer was already unfaithful when Hosea married her, and whether the woman in chapter 3 is Gomer, are debated. On Numbers 31 itself, see the entry on Moses and the Midianite captives.
From the classic commentators
the divine command did not contemplate an actual and outward marriage, but simply a symbolical representation of the relation in which the idolatrous Israelites were then standing to the Lord their God.C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Hosea 1, at Bible Hub
Sources
- Keil and Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Hosea 1, at Bible Hub
- John Gill, Exposition of the Bible: Hosea 1, at Bible Hub
- Keil and Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: Numbers 31, at Bible Hub