Traces of a similar ancient custom may be produced from other quarters. Hesiod (Theogon. 755-95) re- ports that when a falsehood had been told by any of the gods, Jupiter was wont to send Iris to bring some water out of the river St}-x in a golden vessel ; upon this an oath was taken, and if the god swore falsely, he remained for a whole year without life or motion. There was an ancient temple in Sicily, in which were two very deep basins, called Delli, always full of hot and sulphurous water, but never running over. Here the more solemn oaths were taken ; and perjuries I were immediately punished most severely (Diod. Sic. i xi, 67). This is also mentioned by Aristotle, Silius Italicus, Virgil, and Macrobius ; and from the first it | would seem that the oath was written upon a ticket | and cast into the water. The ticket floated if the oath was true, and sunk if it was false. In the latter case the punishment which followed was considered j as an act of divine vengeance (q. v.). See Oath.
The trial for suspected adultery by the bitter water I amounted to this, that a woman suspected of adultery by her husband was allowed to repel the charge by a \ public oath of purgation, which oath was designedly i made so solemn in itself, and was attended by such awful circumstances, that it was in the highest degree I
; ADULTERY
unlikely that it would be dared by any woman not supported bjr the consciousness of innocence. And the fact that no instance of the actual application of the ordeal occurs in Scripture affords some counte- nance to the assertion of the Jewish writers, that the trial was so much dreaded by the women that those who were really guilty generally avoided it by con- fession ; and that thus the trial itself early fell into disuse. And if this mode of trial was only tolerated by Moses, the ultimate neglect of it must have been desired and intended by him. In later times, indeed, it was disputed in the Jewish schools, whether the husband was bound to prosecute his wife to this ex- tremity, or whether it was not lawful for him to con- nive at and pardon her act, if he were so inclined. There were some who held that he was bound by his duty to prosecute, while others maintained that it was left to his pleasure (Sotah, xvi, 2). From the same source we learn that this form of trial was finally ab- rogated about forty years before the destruction of Jerusalem (see Wagenseil's Sota, containing a copious commentary, with full illustrations of this subject, from rabbinical sources, Altdorf, 1674). The reason assigned is, that the men themselves were at that time generally adulterous, and that God would not fulfil the imprecations of the ordeal oath upon the wife while the husband was guilty of the same crime (John viii, 1-8). See Ordeal.
III. Penalties of Adultery. — 1. Jewish. — By exclud- ing from the name and punishment of adultery the offence which did not involve the enormous wrong of imposing upon a man a supposititious offspring, in a nation where the succession to landed property went entirely by birth, so that a father could not by his testament alienate it from any one who was regarded as his son, the law was enabled, with less severity than if the inferior offence had been included, to pun- ish the crime with death. It is still so punished wherever the practice of polygamy has similarly op- erated in limiting the crime — not, perhaps, that the law expressly assigns that punishment, but it recog- nises the right of the injured party to inflict it, and, in fact, leaves it, in a great degree, in his hands. Now death was the punishment of adultery before the time of Moses ; and, if he had assigned a less punish- ment, his law would have been inoperative, for pri- vate vengeance, sanctioned by usage, would still have inflicted death. But by adopting it into the law, those restrictions were imposed upon its operation which necessarily arise when the calm inquiry of pub- lic justice is substituted for the impulsive action of excited hands. Thus death would be less frequently inflicted ; and that this effect followed seems to be im- plied in the fact that the whole Biblical history offers no example of capital punishment for the crime. In- deed, Lightfoot goes farther, and remarks, " I do not remember that I have anywhere, in the Jewish Pan- dect, met with an example of a wife punished for adul- tery with death. There is mention (in the Talmud, Sanhed. 242) of the daughter of a certain priest burned for committing fornication in her father's house ; but she was not married" {//or. llebr. ad Matt, xix, 8). Eventually, divorce superseded all other punishment. There are, indeed, some grounds for thinking that this had happened before the time of Christ, and we throw it out as a matter of inquiry, whether the Scribes and Pharisees, in attempting to entrap Christ in the mat- ter of the woman taken in adultery (see infra), did not intend to put him between the alternatives of either declaring for the revival of a practice which had already become obsolete, but which the law was supposed to command, or of giving his sanction to the apparent infraction of the law, which the substitution of divorce involved (John viii, 1-11). In Matt, v, 32, Christ seems to assume that the practice of divorce for adultery already existed. In later times it cer- tainly did; and Jews who were averse to part with