SEPARATING THE ADULT FROM ADULTERY
in them.* Indeed, the Talmud alludes to adultery as“Ha-Aveirah,’ conveying the sense of it being“The Sin” par excellence,” and the rabbis warned that“all who descend into Gehenna subsequently reascend, excepting three who do not reascend: He who commits adultery with a married woman, publicly shames his neighbor, or fastens an evil epithet upon his neighbor.”** Plainly, the aggadic responses of the rabbis reveal that they viewed adultery as a matter of the utmost gravity.
Their halakhic enactments, moreover, were in keeping with this outlook, even though they took steps to circumvent the harshest potential sanction of capital punishment. The rabbis created regulatory fences around the death penalty concerning eidut, hatra’ah, and other matters that—in the case of adultery—made it virtually unthinkable that capital punishment could ever have been
implemented.>* As one scholar wrote, it is evident from their actions that“capital punishment for adultery was meant by the rabbis to be and remain a theoretical teaching, but was not favored
as a practical penal guide for the courts.”
Despite this, the rabbis were not about to let adultery g0 unpunished. Their approach was to enhance the biblical“defile: ment” provisions,’ according to which a married woman that had sexual relations with a man other than her husband was considered defiled and, hence, prohibited to her husband. The rabbis supplemented this prohibition with their interpretation that the Torah’s dual use of the word“defiled” was meant to demand a permanen! separation not only from the paramour, but from the husband# well: