Read Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire for Free Online Page A

committing adultery. Virtually nothing consumed ancient lawmakers more than female infidelity, and few crimes were so severely punished. With the exception of the Hebrews, men who had sex outside of marriage were never at risk of punishment, but even Jewish law skewed hard against women. Married Jewish men were technically discouraged from having sex with other women, but were never punished to the same degree as their wives, and prostitution flourished in ancient Hebrew society. The men were also permitted to take multiple wives and concubines.
    As a rule, women in the ancient Near East who had extramarital affairs and were caught suffered, died, or suffered and then died. That this should be the case was never questioned. The main legal issues concerned just when the punishments would be inflicted, and by whom. Could a husband go on a killing spree when he learned his wife had been unfaithful, or was the state to perform the executions? Was he allowed to forgive his wife or (less likely) her paramour? Was his decision final? As far back as the Sumerian kingdom of Eshnunna, in about 1770 BC, no forgiveness was permitted. “The day [a wife] is seized in the lap of another man, she shall die, she will not live.” Later Mesopotamian cultures allowed husbands to pardon their wayward wives and not kill them, so long as they also gave a pass to the wives’ lovers. In other cases, kings had the power to trump the husband’s decision, either by pardoning the sinning couple despite the husband’s desire to kill them or vice versa.
    Assuming that punishments for adultery went forward, as they must have in most cases, they were nasty indeed—at least for the women. We have already seen how the unfortunate Nin-Dada was condemned and most likely impaled on the mere suspicion that she had committed adultery with her husband’s killers. In another case from the same period, a man named Irra-malik came home to find his wife, Ishtar-ummi, making love with another man. Rather than commit violence on the spot, Irra-malik kept his head: He tied Ishtar-ummi and her lover to the bed with rope and dragged them to the assembly for trial.
    Although the case record is short on detail, it appears that the assembly took the evidence in front of them—the two lovers tied and wriggling on the bed—as proof that adultery had taken place. This would have been sufficient to seal Ishtar-ummi’s fate. Irra-malik, however, decided to pile more charges upon her. He accused her of stealing from his grain storehouse (perhaps to give a gift to her lover) and opening his jar of sesame seed oil, covering it again with a cloth to hide her theft. While these additional charges seem piddling next to adultery, they were framed as part and parcel of female wrongdoing: Bad wives not only took lovers, they also wasted their husbands’ resources.
    Ishtar-ummi’s life was headed for a cruel end, but death appeared to be too much for her to hope for. The assembly first ruled that her pubic hair be shaven—whether this was merely to humiliate her or to prepare her for a lifetime of slavery, we do not know. It is probable that she was to be downgraded from wife to slave in Irra-malik’s house, to be abused daily by him and his new wives. Before that happened, however, the assembly also ruled that she was to have her nose bored through with an arrow before being led around the city in disgrace, like a mule. The fate of her lover is not recorded, although it is likely that if she was not killed, neither was he. 7
    Wives never had any right to complain when their husbands took lovers, except when they were refused sex altogether or belittled in public. In that case, at least in Babylon, they could attempt to divorce their husbands—but that was a risky step, for the trials inevitably covered the wives’ sexual behavior as well, and if they were found to have been promiscuous themselves they were thrown into a river to die. Given the risks involved, it was a far