The legal codes in the culture of the Ancient Fertile Crescent are written and directed, almost exclusively, by men and towards men (or by their respective divinities, also male); See, for example, articles 125, 129, 132, 141–142 of the ‘Code of Hammurabi’ (Matthews & Benjamin 2004:104–105). As part of this culture, in the biblical tradition too, men are primarily the bearers of rights and duties; consequently, the prohibition against adultery is directed chiefly at them. The obligations and requirements imposed on women, who have a subordinate legal status, come under the scope of caring for and protecting a man’s private property and defending his honour. Women’s duties are imposed as a guarantee for the realisation and maintenance of men’s rights: They must maintain and enhance men’s honour and avoid embarrassing them at all costs.

Thus, in the Decalogue, the seventh commandment in Jewish tradition (sixth in some Christian reinterpretations), ‘you shall not commit adultery’ (Ex 20:14; Dt 5:18) is directly related to the last, ‘You shall not covet your neighbor’s house, nor covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s’ (Ex 20:17; see also the version of Dt 5:21). In all cases, it is the man who is forbidden to covet, desire or commit adultery. In the same way, the neighbour, whose property, including his wife, cannot be coveted, is a man. Even Jesus’ reinterpretation of adultery in Matthew 5:27 (along the same lines as Pr 6:23–29) points only to the man as the subject of the fault and to the woman as the cause of it. It is only within the framework of Roman law that the possibility of a woman committing adultery by ‘repudiating her husband’ and marrying another man is considered, according to Mark 10:11.

A man may possess the women he wishes, as long as he has the capacity to provide for them and as long as they are not married, that is, they do not belong to or have been promised to another man (Dt 22:22–27). Indeed, there is no ‘rule in Israeli Law defining as adultery extramarital sexual relations between a husband and a woman when she is not married’ (Granados 2014:135). Likewise, the abuse of a virgin woman who has not yet been betrothed does not have the punishable sanction of adultery, but the broken honour of the girl’s father must be restored with a pecuniary sum, and the abused woman will be considered as a wife, revictimising her (Dt 22:28–29). Sexual relations with prostitutes are neither well regarded (Pr 23:27; Sir 9:3.6) nor classified as adultery (Lacan 2001:51–52). In this way, it becomes evident that the prohibition does not aim to safeguard love, to protect the dignity of women, to maintain the sacredness of the institution of marriage or to seal the fidelity between the parties – these perspectives will correspond to later moralising interpretations – but to protect the property and honourability of the paterfamilias, guaranteeing, in addition, the consanguineous legitimacy of his lineage.

Paradoxically, although the law-prohibition is addressed to men, and indeed the texts speak of men who commit adultery (such as Lv 20:10; Pr 6:32; Jr 5.7; 23:14), no male in the Bible, except the one mentioned in Leviticus 20:10, is described as an adulterer [נֹּאֵ֖ף]. This is an adjective foisted almost exclusively on women, as it is well represented, in a narrative way, in Proverbs 7:1–27, or as Paul expresses it in Romans 7:2–3:

On the one hand, Sirach 23:22–27 condemns the children for their mother’s infidelity, bringing them before the court (vv. 23–24) and cursing them with barrenness (vv. 25–26). Hence, the labelling of a person as a ‘bastard’ is, ultimately, a reinforcement of the social stigma for his mother’s adultery. In fact, ‘female sexual transgression poses a serious threat to the social order, since it is a world in which social and symbolic structures depend on a patrilineal line’ (Rodríguez-Fernández 2017:70). In this sense, the so-called ‘Ordeal of jealousy’, described in Numbers 5:11–31, is only performed against the wife who is suspected of having committed adultery, subjecting her to public humiliation and risk to her health, and there is no analogous ritual towards the husband (Artuso 2021).

As a consequence, men who hold some degree of power, such as David – the messiah par excellence of Israel – will be able to desire and abuse the women of their neighbours without being branded as adulterers or rapists (2 Sm 11). On the other hand, subordinate women, such as Bathsheba, even if they are victims and abused, will be remembered and revictimised by later traditions as seductresses, adulteresses, and sinners (Howell 2024).

In the same sense as above, a good number of prophetic texts represent the monolatric relationship of the God Yahweh with Israel, Judah or Jerusalem through the recourse to the monogamous nuptial metaphor. In these texts, God always shows himself to be the only and always faithful one. His people-wife, because of her idolatrous attitudes and her infidelity to the Covenant, commonly ends up accused of having committed adultery and prostitution and therefore deserving of punishment and public humiliation by her divine and zealous consort (Hs 2:4–7; 4:10; Jr 5:7; 13:27; Ezk 23:43ff; Is 57:3) (Casas-Ramírez 2024:154). Therefore, according to the theology present in the Deuteronomist tradition, the death sentence against a woman who commits adultery and against her lover (Lv 20:10) would be nothing more than the mimetic reflection of the violent action of the God Yahweh scorned and dishonoured against his own infidel people and against the other peoples and their respective tutelary divinities with whom his people committed adultery. The punishment inflicted by the God-husband victimised by the deception assumes five components:

It should be clarified that the last two components are only achievable in the relationship of the people with their god because in the human marriage sphere, the death sentence is inevitable, so there would be no opportunity for vindication for the woman. In this way, it is intended to show that divine compassion is above human justice.

With this panorama, it is not in vain that, as Rodríguez-Fernández (2017) states:

In this regard, the sentence issued in Ezekiel 16:37–41 by the deceived God against Jerusalem, his prostituted consort, is especially pertinent to this study:

The sentence anticipates and reproduces, in a certain way, the violence and abuse to which the woman accused of adultery will be exposed in John 7:53–8:11, in that Jerusalem and the woman are placed and exposed ‘before’ (Ezk 16:37) or ‘in the midst’ of the men (Jn 8:4); and in that the sentence, both for Jerusalem and for the woman, is stoning. The big difference is that, while in Ezekiel those who will execute the sentence against Jerusalem are her own lovers, with whom she committed adultery, in the Fourth Gospel those who would be willing to execute the sentence are those who bring the woman before Jesus, that is, the scribes and Pharisees; there is no mention, however, of with whom she was supposedly caught in adultery.

Classical critical studies on the account of John 7:53–8:11 tend to title the pericope as ‘The adulterous woman’ (Beutler 2016; Brown 1999; Zumstein 2016), loading, from the outset, the guilt on this woman, in the same line as the misogynistic prejudices of the preceding scriptures. For the most part, they lend credence, without any objection, to the accusing testimony of the scribes and Pharisees, ‘this woman has been caught in the act of adultery’, without taking into account that their instrumental use of the woman and the Mosaic Law to test Jesus would admit a certain blanket of doubt over their testimony. Even the narrator’s omniscient perspective reiterates the facts for which she is accused, in v.3. However, the story is clear that she is only accused because a sentence has not yet been issued that blames her.

Unfortunately, this title has conditioned the interpretation and has revictimised women (Guardiola-Sáenz 2002). In this way, the interpreters and their readers can unconsciously assume the position of the accusers, who condemn the woman and label her as an adulteress, without having yet listened to her, as Nicodemus denounced in 7:51. Such studies, to which must be added a good number of patristic commentaries on the Fourth Gospel, among which that of Augustine of Hippo stands out, for its decisive influence on the history of interpretation (Agustín de Hipona 1955:139), have focused their reading on the contrast between the sin and misery of women, which would well make her worthy of the punishment for which she is accused, and the mercy of Jesus, who would free her from condemnation, but not before demanding that she ‘sin no more’ (Jn 8:11) (Francis 2016; O’Day 1992). From these perspectives, even Jesus’ final words to the woman, would continue to reinforce the sexist imaginary about female adultery and sinfulness.

Most studies also insist on the character of interpolation or late insertion of the story in the whole of the Fourth Gospel, as evidenced by textual criticism, so they tend to omit the analysis of the pericope or to treat it as an appendix alien to the Johannine literary and theological project (Bultmann 1971; Dodd 2008; Mateos & Barreto 1971; Schnackenburg 1980). In this sense, although the first manuscripts that testify to the presence of the story in John date from the fourth century, in the Exposition of Papias of Hierapolis (written around 110 C.E.) the knowledge of a similar episode is indicated in the so-called Gospel of the Hebrews, as reported by Eusebius of Caesarea (Maier 2010:1325; Knust & Wasserman 2019:87). Thus, evidence of an early extra-canonical dissemination of the narrative has led some authors to propose that it originated in traditions dating back to the historical Jesus, going so far as to assert that it ‘exhibits criteria of historicity’, is consistent with the characterisation of Jesus in the Synoptics (Kaczorowski 2018), and probably has ‘its roots in the memory of an event that occurred during Jesus’ ministry’ (Moloney 2005:255).

For some authors, such as Augustine himself, who put forward the ‘suppression hypothesis’, the story was indeed part of one of the Gospels, but it was suppressed, perhaps because of some resentment that it could lead to a certain laxity or indulgence with respect to adultery (Culpepper 1998:170). According to this view, Jesus’ attitude of offering unrestricted forgiveness may have contradicted the strict penitential discipline of the early church (Conti 2002:97). It is possible that the episode may have been part of the Lucan tradition, possibly located after Luke 21:37–39. In addition, the bina ‘scribes and Pharisees’ or the mention of the Mount of Olives does not exist in John, but it is frequent in Luke (Reinhartz 2011:174). Similarly, it is possible to identify a certain dramatic parallel with the story of Jesus and the anointing by the woman labelled a sinner in Luke 7:36–50 (Hughes 2013:235).

In its current location, it is possible to set up narrative and theological links between the pericope and the broader dramatic framework in which it was inserted. Thus, in the first place chapters 7 and 8 are framed in the celebration of Sukkot, the feast of lights (Suk 5:1–4), which evokes the presence of God dwelling amid the people through the Tent of meeting. In the postexilic period, the symbol of this tent was materialised in the Temple (Suk 5:4) (Del Valle 2011:267). Well, these chapters present Jesus, the incarnate logos who celebrates Sukkot, ‘pitching his tent’ amid the people (Jn 1:14), teaching and presenting himself as the light of the world (Jn 8:12) in the Temple (8:20). They also emphasise the theme of judgement (7:22–24) and the centrality of testimony (8:13–18), issues that will bring the conflict between Jesus and ‘the Jews’ to its climactic point because chapter 8 ends by indicating that they wanted to put an end to Jesus by stoning him (Thompson 2015). Several of these motifs are also present in the pericope of the woman threatened with stoning: the Temple, the teaching of Jesus, the trial, the testimony, the accusation, the stoning, and the conflict between Jesus and the Jews, represented here by the scribes and the Pharisees.

In fact, in the immediately preceding passage, the Pharisees question the guards for not having arrested Jesus and end by affirming: ‘Those people who do not know the Law are accursed’ (7:49). Paradoxically, as will be indicated later, in the interpretation they will make of the Law in John 7:53–8:11, they will show that they do not know the Law either or, what may be worse, they distort and instrumentalise it (8:5), which entails that their own curse falls on them. Secondly, in response to the affirmation of the Pharisees, Nicodemus, one of them, invoking the Law, which they pride themselves on knowing, asks them: ‘Does our Law judge a man without having first heard him and without knowing what he is doing?’ (7:51). The question is at the same time a prolepsis that links the fatal fate of Jesus with the fatal sentence of the accused woman: Just as at the end of the Gospel the authorities will judge Jesus without ‘having heard him beforehand and without knowing what he is doing’ (as narrated in Jn 11:45–53), in the passage immediately following they will judge and seek to condemn the woman without even listening to her.

Thirdly, the link between Jesus and the woman is reinforced in the Johannine narrative by the motifs of the stones and the stoning: Just as the woman is about to be stoned, in 8:59 it is stated that the Jews ‘took stones to throw at Jesus; but Jesus hid himself and came out of the Temple’. For this reason, the pericope contributes to the unity of chapter 8, which begins with the threat of stoning the woman and ends with the threat of stoning Jesus (Sánchez 2010). Thus, John 7:53–8:11, even though it is a late interpolation, is interwoven with the plot of the Gospel and, in doing so, relates the threat hanging over Jesus to that suffered by the woman, placing both of them in the same vital horizon of danger, injustice and victimisation. In this regard, Caicedo (2021) considers that the pericope develops a ‘parallel narrative’ between the story of Jesus and that of the woman: Both are threatened with stoning and both are saved from it. For the author, the woman would be an ‘alter ego’ of Jesus (also threatened with stoning) and, at the same time, an ‘alter ego’ of the Judeo-Christian communities who, by the end of the first century, would have faced accusations, threats and persecution by the Jewish authorities (such as the expulsion from the synagogue mentioned in Jn 9:22).

For a critical understanding of the tensions present in the plot, Guardiola-Sáenz (2002:143) identifies four ‘zones of contact’ or ‘borders’ that are crossed in the story and whose transgression gradually increases the conflict between Jesus and the authorities: Spatial frontiers, Gender or moral codes, Political-religious factions, and Communication codes. The consideration of these areas for the analysis of the text, in addition to pointing out the tensions, highlights the contradictions of Jesus’ adversaries. The core of the story is not simply the woman’s sin or Jesus’ forgiveness, but the challenge the accusers pose to Jesus by trampling on the woman’s dignity. The woman is merely exploited, publicly dishonoured, and used to trap the one they call master.

Along the same lines, based on the recourse to cultural anthropology, Conti (2002:101) reads the story as a ‘contest of challenge and response’, common in the philosophical, political and legal sphere of the Greco-Roman world. This consisted of a public social interaction where the honour of men, which is the supreme value in the Mediterranean culture of the first century, was at stake. The contest had clear phases: Challenge from the challenger, perception of the challenge, and reaction from the receiver with evaluation of the witnesses. In the pericope, the contest is interpreted as a succession of four parallel scenes or a chiasmus with the pronouncement of Jesus in v.7 as its centre, this being the climactic point of the plot (Culpepper 1998:170; Mela 2020). In the next section, an approach to each scene of the story is proposed, following this pattern and integrating other structuring proposals (Beutler 2016:196; Bruner 2012:384–385; Moloney 2005:252; Zumstein 2016:358–363).

The previous scene (7:40–52) closes by contrasting between dusk and dawn; between the authorities, who march ‘each for his own way’, and Jesus, who ‘went to the Mount of Olives’. The mention of this mountain, being a ‘typical feature of Luke’ (Lk 21:37–38) (Moloney 2005:153), is connected with Zech 14, which announces the arrival of the ‘day of the Lord’ whose sign will be that he will ‘set his feet on the Mount of Olives’ (v.4) to begin the final judgement of the nations.

In the morning, Jesus returns to the temple to teach. However, the teaching environment is transformed into a ‘legal scenario’ (Gonzaga & Torres 2023). The scribes and Pharisees arrive to introduce him to the woman who, according to them, ‘was caught in flagrante adultery’ The fact that the woman is unnamed may be significant for the interpretation of the text because, frequently, many of the symbolic characters in the Fourth Gospel are unnamed, which increases their potential to represent collectivities without losing their particularity (O’Sullivan 2015:2). Next, the accusers question Jesus about his opinion regarding what Moses prescribed in this regard. The narrator, in v.6, makes a comment to the reader to show the real intention of the authorities: ‘They said this to test him, to have something to accuse him of’. Thus, the accusation of the woman was established as the pretext to accuse Jesus. Jesus ‘is not asked, for a forensic sentence (because he is not a judge), but for an opinion on the application of the Mosaic Law to a particular case (…). For this reason, Jesus is called ‘master’ and is asked for a legal interpretation (halakah), while it was believed that the rabbinical stance before the law could bring forth the ‘higher intention of divine revelation’ (Kim 2002:125). Although an actual event of adultery can be assumed, the text lacks elements necessary for a formal process (the adulterer, witnesses, the deceived husband), suggesting that this is not an actual court case, but a legal controversy. A male predominance is observed in the trial where the guilt of the woman is presumed in a similar way to the case of Susanna, in Daniel 13 (Beutler 2016:219). The question of the accusers may amount to: ‘we have caught her in flagrante adultery, do we take her to the competent court? Shall we just execute her?’ (Alonso-Schökel 2002:255). Roman law did not allow execution for adultery, so Jesus’ opponents would be proving their fidelity to the Mosaic law or their sympathy with imperial legislation (Reinhartz 2011:174). In this way, the antagonists challenge Jesus as an equal, trying to trap him: If he absolves, he violates the Law of Moses; if he condemns, he violates the Roman law that forbade Jews to impose the death penalty (Conti 2002).

Moreover, it is paradoxical that the scribes and Pharisees intend to accuse the woman according to the Law, but show their partial interpretation by not bringing the man with whom she had supposedly slept because the Law required the death of both, although stoning is not explicitly mentioned as a form of execution of the sentence (Lv 20:10; Dt 22:22) (Ramos-Rodríguez 2017). This penalty will only be spoken of in Deuteronomy 22:23–24, in the case of rape of a virgin woman. All these contradictions stand out, even more, the set-up of the antagonists against Jesus. From the semiotic point of view, a relationship is perceived between the stone, which is the material with which the Temple was built, the place where the scene takes place, the stone tablets, the material in which God embodied the Law with his finger, and the stones with which they want to kill the woman. In this way, a ‘petrified’ legal and religious reality is perceived, whose harshness is used to subdue and kill instead of liberating and propitiating new life.

Jesus and scribe-pharisees:By bowing down, Jesus seems to physically stand between the victim and the oppressors, renouncing to be on the same level as them, rejecting the challenge and making himself just as vulnerable as the woman, creating a ‘third space’ (Harvey 1989:244) that de-escalates the conflict. At the same time, their reaction increases the dramatic tension by not responding directly and verbally to the challenge (Ambrosino 2024). Jesus does not respond to force with force, showing that violence can be overcome without retaliation, even when a life is at stake. It is striking that the account ‘mentions the woman’s accusation twice, while Jesus bows and writes on the ground also twice’ (Dibelius 1984:100). This double action of Jesus in bending down to write (8:6 and 8:8) functions as an ‘intercalation’ or ‘sandwich’ that ‘wraps’ his (non)interpretation of the Torah centred on the sentence: ‘whoever among you is without sin, let him throw the first stone at him’ (v.7) (Keith 2008).

Although it is not specified what Jesus wrote on the ground with his finger, it is striking that the numerous interpretations—both textual (manuscript glosses) and visual (iconography), as well as patristic commentaries—have speculated so extensively on the content of what he might have written. Some suggested that Jesus wrote down the sins of the accusers [Glossa Ordinaria] and others, relying on the expression ‘terra terram acusat’ (the earth accuses the earth), associated with a sermon by Augustine (Ser 13:4–6), interpreted in Jesus’ action a reflection on the fact that the powerful, as mortals, will also be judged (Knust & Wasserman 2010).

For several authors, starting with Augustine, Jesus’ action of writing on the ground would evoke the origin of the Mosaic law, which, according to Exodus 31:18; 32:15–16; Deuteronomy 9:10, was written by God with his own finger (MacDonald 2017:221). In this regard, Bede the Venerable affirms (Beda 2012 cited by Elowsky 2012):

In this way, it would be shown that Jesus was not only equal to his opponents in the knowledge of the Mosaic Law, but also that he would be above Moses, on a par with God, for whom the Law must be a function of life (Beutler 2016:198).

Other authors interpret Jesus’ symbolic action as an allusion to Jeremiah 17:13, as evidence of the intentions of his opponents: ‘Those who turn away from you will be written on the earth, because they have forsaken Yahweh, the fountain of living waters’ (Reinhartz 2011:174). For his part, Kanagaraj (2013) sees in the action an allusion to Daniel 5:5–9; 24–28, where a finger writes a divine judgement. For this author, Jesus’ writing, although not understood by his opponents, ‘was powerful enough to disturb them’ and, combined with his challenge to ‘sinfulness’, ‘confronted them with their own sins’ (Kanagaraj 2013:514).

For authors such as Keith (2008), the importance of the account lies in the fact that Jesus wrote, not in what he wrote. Speculation about the content of what he wrote is fruitless, and the text itself offers no clues in this regard. For him, the description of Jesus’ writing is the key to understanding the meaning of the story and the reason for its insertion in the Gospel of John, because there the literate character of Jesus would be affirmed as an answer to the questions of the Jews about his origin and training: ‘How does he understand letters without having studied?’ (Jn 7:15) and in the context of pagan criticisms of Christian illiteracy that required the Church to present Jesus as a literate leader and as a paradigm for Christian leaders.

On the other hand, according to Moloney (2005:256), the phrase ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ refers to the legislation of Deuteronomy 17:17 that requires witnesses to cast the first stone, implying that they must be impeccable. With this expression, ‘Jesus makes it clear that there is no double standard between men and women in matters of adultery’ (ed. Elowsky 2012:373). For this reason, his counter-challenge levels the sins, putting the accusers on the same level as the woman and causing them to lose the contest and, with it, their honour (Conti 2002:104).

Thus, the withdrawal of the accusers, ‘beginning with the oldest’, suggests a reflection on their own fault, evoking the elders who accused Susanna in Daniel 13 (Beutler 2016:199). Through this combination of actions and words, Jesus ‘reversed the situation’ against his opponents, transforming the judges into defendants and freeing the woman from condemnation (Kanagaraj 2013).

The story describes a progressive departure from the scene of the characters: It had begun with the presence of ‘all the people’ who came to listen to Jesus’ teaching (v.2), then it focused on the accusers (vv. 3-9a), now, at the end, the people and the accusers have left the scene. The narrator now focuses on Jesus and the woman (Sánchez 2010):

Thus, the denouement allows us to understand that the true aim of the story is not the defeat of the adversaries, but the encounter of Jesus with the woman (Moloney 2005:256). She, who until now had still been silent, goes from being an object of accusation to being a subject of dialogue. Through Jesus’ invitation to constation of the absence of those who condemn her, the woman responds by affirming, ‘No one, Lord’ (v.11). Indeed, no one condemns her anymore, nor can they condemn her; neither the scribes nor the Pharisees; neither the interpreters nor the readers. Nor does Jesus. Moreover, her recognition of Jesus as ‘lord’ [kyrios] would reveal a deeper perception of his divinity than that of his accusers, who see him only as ‘master’ (Gonzaga & Torres 2023).

It is striking that Jesus has a differentiated treatment with respect to the victim, the woman, and with respect to the victimisers, the accusers. He confronts them, he comforts her. But Jesus breaks with the dynamic of victimisation that puts the dignity and life of women at risk, making the stigma of adultery no longer weigh on her, so that she can begin a life freed from evil (Harper 2006:48).

In the end, with Jesus’ command to the woman, ‘Go, and from now on do not sin anymore’ (which recalls Jesus’ words to the sick man at the pool of Bethesda in Jn 5:14), one would be left with the impression that Jesus may have believed that she had indeed acted sinfully, just as her accusers claimed (O’Sullivan 2015:6–7). However, for authors such as Martin and Wright (2015), with these words, Jesus does not express condemnation but rather offers a ‘new beginning’. No human being is free from sin, so all of us (including this woman) are recipients of this exhortation from Jesus. Thus, this final interaction of Jesus with the woman, where he returns to her the responsibility for her future, transforms her from object to subject and grants her honour (Conti 2002). The pericope, thus, shows Jesus taking the Law of Moses to its fullness: Listening to everyone, including women, before judging, as Nicodemus had suggested. Moreover, it disqualifies the erroneous judgement of the scribes and Pharisees, opening the way to reveal themselves as the ‘light of the world’ (8:12) (Mela 2020).

By way of summary, with Jesus’ response in v.7 being the axis that marks the dramatic turn of the story, it is possible to find the various transformations that occurred in the scene, as shown in Table 1.