Strange Story: John 8 Jesus and the Woman Caught in Adultery

Why Did They Ask His Opinion?

The fact that they asked Jesus this question seems (at first sight) to indicate a high level of respect. They would only ask Him this if He were a judge, or a leader in the community who could act as a judge over such cases and thus give a ruling that would authorize the death penalty (which Roman law did not allow them to carry out). The only other reason to ask this question would be to trick Him into saying something they could use against Him.

Where Does the law Prescribe Stoning for a Sexual Sin?

Several sexual offenses received the death penalty according to the Mosaic law, but the only case which would apply to this situation and for which stoning was specifically mentioned was that of a who was woman betrothed to a man but violated that pledge by having sex with another man before the wedding day. Both of them were to be stoned (Dt 22:23-24). The man was stoned for taking another man’s “wife” and she was stoned for being in a populated area and not crying out for help, thus it was assumed she was a willing participant.

Was stoning the normal form of enforcing the death penalty?  I believe it was, although Bible scholars are divided on this point.

Because Deuteronomy 22:24 is specific and other references to the death penalty for various sexual crimes are general, many think this woman was betrothed to be married. While I see their point, I don’t think we can make that case conclusively. The main idea is that she was caught in the act of committing a crime and they saw this as an opportunity to trap Jesus.

How Did Stoning Work?

According to Ray Vanderlaan, stoning was a very regulated event. Someone who was accused of a crime was caught, bound and brought to one of the leaders of the city who could act as a judge. The witnesses made their cases and there had to be two or more witnesses in order for the perpetrator to be convicted. If the judge determined the person was worthy of death, he would give the word and then the group would proceed, to a cliff or steep ravine outside the city, or to the top of the city wall. The perpetrator was thrown over the edge, still bound, and the key witnesses were the first to throw a stone. Each person got one stone. It could be as big or small as they wished, but only one. If they missed, they missed; they did not get another chance. After the key witnesses had each thrown one stone, then any secondary witnessed would also throw one stone, and finally the entire male population of the community that was convinced by the evidence participated by throwing a stone.

I said earlier that Roman law did not let them carry out stonings. But we do not know how strictly they enforced that law. It is possible that in places far away from the capital city of Jerusalem, the people had occasionally gotten away with stoning someone and the Romans in that area had looked the other way. In Jn 8:59 and Jn 10:31 we see how quickly the Jews had decided that they wanted to stone Jesus and were in the process of trying to make that happen. Their actions show one of two things: either they were so intent on doing this that they did not care if they got in trouble from the Romans, or that far away from the capital city the Romans let them get away with killing each other. However, in the capital city, the Romans would have enforced the restriction and not allowed this woman to be stoned according to Jewish law.

Was This a Lose-Lose Situation?

The fact that the Scribes and Pharisees brought Jesus the guilty woman but not the guilty man shouts for the attention of everyone who reads this account, regardless of the culture or era in which they live. However, for a Jew of Jesus’ time, it would indicate that the religious leaders were not really trying to follow the Law themselves because the Law calls for both of them to be stoned if it were a woman who was betrothed. The onlookers that day knew this was intended as a trap and the way the religious leaders were going about it made them look desperate. And most readers would know it too without John stating it, but in vs. 6 he clearly states that it was a trap so there would be no question in anyone’s mind. The religious leaders had a situation presented to them that they could not pass up because they thought it was sure to give them ammunition against Jesus, regardless of what He did or said. They thought they had found something that would present Jesus with a lose-lose situation. It did not matter to them that they themselves had not taken a hard stand against such sexual sin but were known to be lax on this issue. And it did not matter to them that the Romans would not allow them to carry out the death penalty for anything at all, making this a mute question. All that mattered to them was the opportunity to make Jesus look bad and gain ammunition they could use in their attacks against Him.

It would be considered a loss if Jesus came down on the side of severe punishment, and that for a couple reasons. Only Rome had the power to put someone to death, so for Jesus to say that she deserved the death penalty would be an act of usurpation against the power of Rome. Also the culture had become very lax about matters of sexual sin, being influenced by the lifestyle of foreigners such as the Romans. Thus Jesus would have lost popular support if he said the woman deserved the death penalty.

It would have been considered a loss for Jesus to go against Moses. It would have given His opponents opportunity to “prove” He was not the Messiah because the Messiah was prophesied to be a prophet like Moses (Dt 18:18). Never mind that they were not following the Law completely either, but, since none of them were claiming to be the Messiah, their hypocrisy was considered justified. The Pharisees would never choose the kindness of God over His holiness, so they saw the compassionate side of Jesus as a weakness. And the kindness of Jesus was the crux of the matter. They wondered if He might be so kindhearted as to go against the Law of Moses in order to show kindness.

The Act of Writing in the Dust Was a Rebuke

Instead of giving them an answer of one kind or another, as they had hoped, Jesus simply bent over from His seated position and started writing something on the ground with His finger.

This should have reminded them of three things from the Old Testament.

God wrote the summary of the Former Covenant with His finger on tablets of stone.

God used the dust of the tabernacle to prove the innocence or guilt of a woman caught in adultery.

Jeremiah wrote something about people being written in the dust. It is found in our Bibles at Jeremiah 17:13 and reads like this: “All who forsake you will be put to shame; those who turn away will be written on the ground.” The passage does not specifically say people’s names will be written in the dust, but names are implied because how else do you write someone in the dust apart from writing their name?

What Jesus wrote in the dust is not really the point. It could have been anything. The simple act of writing something on the ground was fulfillment of the words of Jeremiah and thus a rebuke to those who were trying to trick Jesus. However, the word used in this verse and translated “writing” is specific to writing words in contrast to drawing pictures or doodling. Therefore, because Jesus was writing words, and because the passage in Jeremiah talks about people who will be written in the dust (meaning their names), I think there is a good possibility that He was writing their names.

The symbolism of writing in the dust, rather than on another surface, was also powerful. It meant that they would suffer such complete destruction that there would be nothing left of them except dust. This symbolism was present despite the fact that none of them carried sticky notes or a small notebook in their robes nor a ballpoint pen, a mechanical pencil or a sharpie in their wide belts. The only things the general public had to write with were sticks, shards or pottery and their fingers. The only things they could write upon were shards of pottery, pieces of wood or the ground, but since one’s finger is not a good way to write on pottery or wood, it is logical that Jesus would write in the dust of the ground/floor. Yes, He could have done a miracle and used His finger to burn something into wood, but pieces of flat wood were not randomly lying around the temple courts and Jesus used His miracles with purpose, not just to show off. What I am saying is that the symbolism was still real and powerful even though, if Jesus wanted to write something, He did not have any other good option than to write with His finger in the dust of the ground/floor.

When Jesus bent over from his seated position and started writing something in the dust, I believe the people who had been listening to Him gathered around to see what He was doing. Thus they formed a ring around the religious leaders, who themselves had formed a ring around Jesus and this woman.

But the religious leaders were so intent on catching Jesus in their trap that they missed the meaning of His action. They did not follow their own practices of interpreting things in light of the Old Testament. It is likely that they thought Jesus was trying to avoid answering their question, so they pressed him for an answer, not realizing that Jesus was not making it about the woman, but about them and was actually giving them a strong rebuke by writing things in the dust.

Jesus’ Words

When Jesus spoke the words about whoever was without sin, His antagonizers should have realized He had turned the spotlight away from the woman and onto them.

Here Jesus was saying something akin to this: “You ask if I am willing to serve as judge in this case. If I render judgement against her, I will also do so against you. If any of you have done something worthy of the death penalty, you will also suffer the same fate, for just as you are unwilling to show this woman mercy, I will not show you any mercy.” By saying this He was turning the attention away from the woman and placing it on those making the accusation. Jesus is indeed the one who will judge all men, but that was not His purpose during His life on earth in a human body.

He acknowledged here that He saw the game they were playing and did not consider it a proper thing to do. It was trickery, and therefore wrong. Also they were not following the Law fully because they did not bring the man, even though some of them had caught the offenders in the act.

Jesus did not set aside the law, but He pointed out that if the law were applied equally to all, they would also deserve the death penalty. In His statement He acknowledged that the Former Covenant gave no means to atone for willful acts of sin done in full knowledge of their sinfulness. That was a huge gap in the sacrificial system of the law. If someone committed a defiant sin rather than an unintentional sin, there was no sacrifice for that sin; all he could do was throw himself on the mercies of God. Link to OT Study lesson. Mercy was at the heart of their question. They had seen how kind and merciful Jesus was and they wondered if He would put mercy above the high standard of God’s holiness. They thought those two things pulled in opposite directions, but Jesus showed a perfect balance between holiness and compassion. They saw compassion as a weakness; Jesus showed that it is one of God’s greatest strengths. Jesus was also saying, “I won’t stop you from stoning her, but in God’s eyes, if you were to follow through with this (which the Romans would not let them do), you would be shining a spotlight on the many other sins you yourselves have committed which also deserve God’s punishment of death.”

Jesus’ words did not mean that someone had to be faultless to serve as a judge, for no man would ever qualify. However, when someone acts as a properly appointed judge, he is acting on God’s behalf to enforce God’s law. The focus is on God’s law, which those making these accusations could not say they had fulfilled without error. In fact, no one could fulfill the law without error because it was not designed to save but to show the need for a savior.

This Time They Got it

They should have seen the connection to Jeremiah 17:13 the first time He wrote in the dust, but since they did not catch it, He gave them a second chance to feel His rebuke. I think this time He started writing the actual words of Jeremiah, but did not finish them. In typical rabbinic style, he required their memorization of large amounts of the Old Testament to fill in what was missing and thus they would come to the answer on their own.

I think He wrote: “All who forsake you will be put to shame” and then paused, watching nothing more than their feet to see if any of them were leaving yet.

Those religious leaders (as well as many of the common people present that day) should have been able to finish the quote and provide the second half, in which was found the rebuke. But maybe Jesus had to give them even more, so He continued writing, this time more slowly – “Those who turn away (pause) will be written” but He did not finish.

The clear intent of Jesus’ actions was to say that they had forsaken the Lord and turned away from God because they were unwilling to show mercy and grace. The very things that they interpreted as a weakness in Jesus were the things they should have been offering to those around them. We cannot disrupt the balance between God’s holiness and His compassion; we need to focus on both of them. By focusing only on the rules they were misrepresenting God.

We likewise are intended to be small reflections of who God is and what He is like, but we can get off balance and focus too much on the rules, or too much on being nice to people. The more out of balance we are regarding those two things, the less we reflect the character of God.

Why Did They Leave in Order?

I believe the reason they walked away in order of oldest to youngest was that, as a matter of respect, the oldest one there was the one responsible to speak on behalf of the group. When the oldest one could not defend his life and his actions he walked away, leaving the second oldest in charge and faced with the same dilemma. The second one also came to the conclusion that there was no way to respond to the rebuke of Jesus without digging himself into a hole, so he also left. This repeated itself until all of them were gone and the woman, who had been standing there the whole time, was the only one left.

As I envision it, the people who had been listening to Jesus had formed a ring around the religious leaders so they could see what Jesus was doing. Now, in order to leave, the religious leaders had to turn and walk right past some of those people who had gathered around them. Did the people open up a path for them or did they force these hypocritical religious leaders to push their way through the crowd? We don’t know. What would you have done? Because human nature is the same the world over, unless there were some cultural norms that are different than ours, it is likely that those people would have done the same thing you think you would have done. This act of having to make their way through a crowd in order to make their escape from the conviction and rebuke delivered by Jesus made the situation even more humiliating for those religious leaders.

Has No One Played the Role of Judge?

We would expect Jesus’ question to be. “Has no one stepped forward to be the first witness, the one who throws the first stone?” But Jesus did not ask His question that way. He gave them permission to stone her but on one condition, that they allow Him to judge their lives as well and see if they were also guilty of a sin of equal gravity. In a way, Jesus rendered a judgement on her and it was a guilty verdict (there were two or more witnesses and that is what the law required). But, at the same time, He had not served as judge in the normal sense, and He had definitely not given them what they had sought. Had the religious leaders condemned her to death, they would have been designating one of their own group as a judge to fulfill the process as they had hoped – without any conditions.

Neither Do I Condemn You As Guilty

They had wanted to use the mercy and grace which Jesus showed to most people as evidence that He did not properly apply the Law of Moses. Instead Jesus showed that they had not lived according to the Law of Moses and, like everyone else, had to throw themselves on the mercies of God to not be punished with death. He agreed that she was probably guilty, yet He chose to offer her mercy and forgiveness instead of choosing to punish her. Maybe He saw that she was repentant, or maybe He was communicating that the time for judging all mankind had not yet arrived. Most of all He was making the point that we cannot set aside God’s grace in order to emphasize God’s holiness.

Showing Mercy Is a Strength, Not a Weakness

The religious leaders were confident Jesus would do what He always did and show mercy; He proved them right.

They were convinced that mercy was a weakness; He proved them wrong.

They looked at one sin committed by this woman and determined she deserved the punishment of death; God sees all the sins of all mankind and knows that we all deserve the death penalty.

If given the opportunity, these religious leaders were eager to deliver the death penalty; God has the opportunity and the power, but He is eager to offer forgiveness (He will punish one day because He must, but His desire is to forgive).

These unrighteous people wanted to make themselves look righteous on the outside; our righteous God is focused on making us righteous on the inside.