عقوبة الزنى في قوانين الشرق الأدنى القديم

Abstract

    All societies agreed that one of the most important tasks assigned to morality is the regulation of sexual relations, and cuneiform sources reveal a common legal tradition in the treatment of adultery. At the same time, adultery was a sin that could lead to divine punishment, and marital infidelity before marriage was subject to similar rules. And the Hittite kingdom, and in Egypt, and in the Torah, the penalty for treason was considered the death penalty in the biblical law (Deuteronomy), and the adultery of the wife is considered a sin against God, and the Babylonian text refers to adultery as (a great and deadly crime).

   Laws, decrees, and royal reforms have been legislated since the third millennium BC. The codified laws preceded a long period in which society relied on customs and traditions in resolving adultery issues and establishing the rights of the husband and sometimes the wife. The ancient Near East societies were dominated by a common and recognized concept of the need to take a hard stance. Of the unfaithful wife, and the man turned a blind eye in the event of his betrayal of his wife, and even the conditions of marriage were the most likely rights for the man, he has the right to divorce, and polygamy, and the majority of marriage contracts that we have received include the husband’s request to separate from his wife, and it is noted in the legitimate reasons for divorce that they adhere to the side of the man on The woman’s account, except in rare cases as stated in the Sumerian judicial texts that the woman has the right to ask for a divorce from her husband if the husband actually performs acts that harm her and her right as a wife. That is modesty, the maintenance of chastity, good behavior, conduct, not having unlawful relations with other men, and full compliance with the desires of a man, when the wife of a man is arrested in an indecent position (lying down). With another man, this matter is sufficient from a legal point of view to annul the marital bond, but at the expense of the woman only and to sentence her to death, and the strange thing in the whole matter is that the punishment for the unfaithful woman in Mesopotamia is the same in the Levant, Anatolia, and even in Egypt, and the punishment was The punishment imposed by the societies of the ancient Near East is the death penalty and the end of the life of the unfaithful wife, as well as the adulterer as well. But if the husband pardons his wife, the exemption includes the adulterer as well.