Last updated: April 30th, 2025 at 12:47 pm · Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
Nature of the Crime
Punishment of theft and adultery is often dealt with together in the earliest codes of law originating in the region of the Middle East. 1 Adultery was a form of theft in the Middle Eastern mindset from the earliest times, albeit more abominable than common theft.
Punishment of adultery in the Middle East
Killing the culprit by different methods was a kind of standard punishment for adultery in the Middle East since ancient times.
Generally speaking, stoning to death can be traced back to the most ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia. The first mention of stoning as a method of execution comes from the very first criminal code known to us – Urukagina’s reforms (c. 2400 B.C) – a Mesopotamian law. It states that if a woman takes more than one husband, she is liable to be stoned.2 Interestingly, the punishment is for a sexual crime. The idea of stoning to death lingered on in the Middle East. An inscription found at Hatra dates from December 151 CE. It reads, “Anyone who will steal inside this store and inside the outer wall, if he is a man of the community he shall be killed by the death of the god, and if he is a foreigner, he shall be stoned.”3 This is the earliest epigraphic evidence of stoning. And it is produced by the Arabs of Hatra.
Probably stoning to death was the punishment for sexual crimes in Judaic traditions early in their history. The Deuteronomic Code is part of ancient Judaic law. Discussing if a husband finds after marriage that his wife is not a virgin, it states in Deut. 22: 20, “If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of the town shall stone her to death”. In Deut. 22: 23 it states, “If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death”.4 Once the Jewish power to pronounce or inflict capital punishment had been lost, the punishment of adultery was modified into divorce of the woman.5
Definition of Adultery in late Antique Arabia
All historic sources are quiet about what constituted adultery. However, survey of different kinds of sexual encounters in pre-Islamic Arabia, which have survived in historical sources gives an impression that consensual sexual engagement of a free married Arab woman, with any man other than her own husband, amounted to adultery. In this sense it was a crime committed by a woman, in which a man was complicit. Man could be of any status, unmarried, married or widowed, free or slave but woman was always a married free Arab woman.
Arab’s Attitude Towards Adultery
Adultery was not an acceptable social norm for the late pre-Islamic Arab society. How nauseous did pre-Islamic Arabs feel about the act of adultery is evident from a Thamudic inscription, noted by Winnett and Reed. This inscription reads “And Z’G and Zufray have committed adultery; and this deed stinks worse than a stinking fart.”6
Punishment of Adultery Among Pre-Islamic Arabs
Exact punishment of adultery among late antique Arabs is not known. Informed guess is that it could be stoning to death.
Arabia was part and parcel of the Middle East, and had never lived in total isolation. The general Middle Eastern concept that adultery was a kind of theft must have reached the Arab ears. They might be practicing adultery secretly, like any other theft. Charging a couple with the crime might be difficult, in this scenario, unless they were caught red handed.
As the Middle East had a long standing tradition of stoning to death for adultery and as Pre-Islamic Arabs considered adultery a serious crime, it is quiet possible that stoning to death was the punishment for adultery in late pre-Islamic Arabs. Al-‘Askari (d. 1005 CE) notes in his Awā’il, “The first to stone for zinā was Rabī’a bin Ḥiḍar al-Asadi: this is to say that a woman from among them [i.e. from the Bani Asad] fell in love with a man and employed – in order to elope with him – the deceptive delusion that she had died. Then some of her tribe ran into her, and, recognizing her, put the issue [of her deception] before Rabī’a bin Ḥiḍar al-Asadi who ordered her lapidation; thus was she stoned. It is [furthermore] mentioned that she had feigned illness, then death, and thus was she carried to her tomb and buried. Then when the people dispersed, her paramour took pity on her, so unburied her and carried her off, but God only knows.”7
Delivery of Justice
The Tribal Zone of Pre-Islamic Arabia did not have a flawless mechanism in place to impose penalties on the convicts. Even if they had a notion about legal punishment of adultery, they would have been unable to punish a complicit man belonging to other tribe. As in this example, the tribe carried out stoning of woman belonging to its own tribe. It is highly possible that it was only woman who was sentenced. The scenario might be different if the man and the woman belonged to the same tribe. In this instance, the case might have been judged by a tribal assembly, which had jurisdiction of all members of the tribe.
Additional Reading
History of Islam, Social Structure of Pre-Islamic Arabs, https://historyofislam.org/social-structure-of-pre-islamic-arabs/
Footnotes
- Walter Young, “Stoning and Hand-amputation: the pre-Islamic Origins of the Hadd penalties for Zina and Sariqa,” Master’s thesis, Institute of Islamic Studies (Montreal: McGill University, September 2005): 7.
- Russ VerSteeg, Early Mesopotamian Law, (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 2000), 18.
- Jabir Khalil Ibrahim, Pre-Islamic Settlement in Jazirah, (Baghdad: Ministry of Culture & Information, 1986), 195.
- The Holy Bible: New International Version, (New York: American Bible Society, 1984), 146.
- I Abrahams, in “adultery (Jewish), Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Vol. I, ed. James Hastings, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908), 130. See also: Grubbs, Judith Evans. Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 243.
- Frederick V. Winnett and W. L. Reed, Ancient Records from North Arabia, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 110.
- Abu Hilal al-Ḥasan ibn ‘Abd Allāh Al-‘Askari, Kitāb al-Awāil, ed. Muḥammad al-Sayyid al-Wakīl (Medina: 1385/1966), 49.