TOB - Adultery in the OT Prophets

The prophets, Isaiah, Hosea and Ezekiel liken the Covenant between God and Israel to a nuptial, marriage covenant. God is represented as a husband united in love to Israel, his wife. The infidelities and the betrayals committed by Israel against God are compared by the prophets to the infidelities and betrayals of a wife, and are therefore likened to “adultery.”

In Hosea, Israel is accused of committing great harlotry “by forsaking the Lord” (Hos 1”2), and is likened to a wife who “went after her lovers and forgot” Yahweh (Hos 2:13). But God-Yahweh is likened to a spouse who never ceases to search for her “unfaithful wife-consort” and call her to conversion: “In that day, says the Lord, you will call me, ; ‘My Husband,’ and no longer will you call me, ‘My Ba’al’.... I will betroth you to me forever; I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know the Lord” (Hos 2:16, 19-20).

Ezekiel reminds Israel of how God’s love and mercy have transformed her, and also calls her infidelities in running after pagan idols as adultery. Ezekiel describes Israel as a new-born baby, naked and abandoned in the field on the day of her birth. But the Lord took pity on her, made her live and grow to full maidenhood, covered her nakedness and made a covenant with her and she became the Lord’s. God put a crown upon her head and bedecked her with gold and silver, and her renown spread among all the nations. But Israel trusted in her beauty and became a harlot and an “adulterous wife, who receives strangers instead of her husband” (Ez 16:5-8, 12-15, 30-32).

For the prophets, adultery is the breakdown of the personal covenant between man and woman in marriage. Adultery is sin because it is a betrayal of the exclusive marital love between husband and wife and contradicts the marital covenant itself. Adultery is the “antithesis” of marriage and nuptial love.

If the prophets likened the breaking by Israel of her covenant with God to adultery, then for the prophets, monogamous marriage is the only proper sign of Israel’s fidelity to Yahweh and the covenant between God and the chosen people. Moreover, the bodily sexual union between husband and wife in marriage is “above all…the regular sign” of the love that constitutes communion of persons in marriage. Only such an exclusive love establishes and expresses that union in which man and woman become “one flesh.” Adultery as a “sin of the body” is a radical falsification of the nuptial union of husband and wife and analogously of the covenant of love between Yahweh and the Israel. Here lies the moral evil of adultery.