Breaking the marriage bond

"Thou shalt not commit adultery," read the words on the tablet. Leviticus 20:10 pronounced the penalty: "If a man commits adultery with the wife of a neighbor, both the adulterer and adulteress shall be put to death."

But what did "wife" mean? Did it mean property? Or beloved?

When Moses presented this commandment to the people, what was their idea of marriage? Did they already believe it to be somehow sacred? Were they being reminded or was this a revelation — that having sex with another's spouse was a bad idea?

We do know that in 1215, more than 2,000 years after the Ten Commandments were written, the Roman Catholic Church made marriage a sacrament, a source of special grace. Before then, the marriage bond was not necessarily considered permanent — though women usually were not allowed to remarry after a divorce and men were. In the years between Moses and the sacrament, the Quran had been transcribed, and it also prohibited adultery and recommended stoning for both of the erring parties.

Reading the history of the sexiest sin, you can't help noticing that adultery used to carry greater penalties than it does today.

Today the catechism of the Catholic Church says marriage cannot be dissolved and "by its very nature conjugal love requires the inviolable fidelity of the spouses." And a 1994 survey, published by the University of Chicago Press, found that 90 percent of Americans believe sexual infidelity is "always" or "almost always" wrong.

In reality, though, half of all marriages in the United States end in divorce, and adultery is cited as the leading cause of divorce. Cited in surveys, that is — adultery is not cited in divorce courts, not anymore.

There is a Utah statute that allows a judge to take adultery into account when distributing marital property. But a local divorce attorney says he has only seen one adulterer lose property for the offense. In that case the adulterer lied in court, denying to the judge that he had fathered a child by his mistress. "Judges don't like to be lied to," noted the attorney.

Of course, spouses don't either. An article in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2004 reported that the discovery of adultery often results in a trauma to the spouse equal to the trauma experienced in a natural disaster, war or other catastrophe.

Painful, but common, that's adultery today. So when modern Americans say adultery is "wrong," do they mean it is a biblical "sin" or that it is messy on a secular level?